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.”1
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.2
	 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
Heins_NaziFilm_text.indd 13 5/3/13 11:43 AM
14	 chapter one
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 nonconflicted.
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.”3
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
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 15
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.4
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.5
	 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.”6
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.7
	 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.8
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.9
) 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
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16	 chapter one
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.10
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.11
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.12
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.13
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.”14
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
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 17
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.15
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.16
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.17
	 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.18
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.19
Likewise, Third Reich film reviewers sometimes praised films
by calling them “distressing” (erschütternd),20
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
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18	 chapter one
film is not a debased “surrogate of theater,” and he proposed the Hollywood
production as a model for Third Reich filmmakers to copy.21
	 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.22
Correspondingly, Astrid
Pohl’s study on melodrama in the Third Reich has identified a whole subgenre
of “men’s melodramas.”23
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).24
	 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.”25
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
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 19
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.”26
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.27
	 Consequently, few reliable statistics exist on the percentage of female
spectators in Third Reich cinema audiences, and information about their
preferences is sparse. One survey was conducted in 1944 in an attempt to
discover which films were preferred by young German audiences, and included
responses by 1,260 girls and 686 boys who were members of the BDM
and HJ. The survey’s author, A. U. [Anneliese Ursula] Sander, listed the film
titles most popular among the youth in aggregate and did not distinguish
between titles preferred by girls and those favored by boys. She did, however,
find that girls under eighteen went to the cinema far less frequently
than boys: while only 14 percent of girls went to the cinema regularly (fifty
times per year or more), 38 percent of boys went an average of once per
week.28
After age eighteen, Sander added, girls began to go to the cinema
more frequently. Sander’s study says little about female viewing preferences
in general, but it does suggest that the notion of a widespread feminine
Kinosucht (cinema addiction), which had given high culture proponents so
much concern during the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras, was largely fiction.
Sander’s study coincides with the findings of Emilie Altenloh’s 1914 survey
of German cinema spectators, which stated that women overall went to the
cinema less frequently than men.29
Against Siegfried Kracauer’s conception
of the “little shopgirls” who made up the cinema masses, Altenloh’s statistics
showed that it was primarily the little shop and office boys, the young men of
the petit bourgeois class, who were addicted to film and who also went to see
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20	 chapter one
melodramas.30
Supporting these conclusions were a few studies conducted
during the Third Reich that, although limited in scope, showed that women
were often too overburdened with their double duties of paid work and
housework to attend films frequently; rural women and middle-age women
in particular went to the cinema less often than their male counterparts.31
Thus, the notion of cinema audiences as being predominantly female, a claim
that was often made by American commentators in the 1930s and 1940s and
repeated by a few Nazi journalists, was not entirely correct.
	 Journalists and academics in the Third Reich shared some views of female
spectatorship with American researchers, though their ideas of gendered
spectatorship were less clearly defined. In a 1938 article in the Film-Kurier,
Walter Panofsky, a professor at the Institute for Film Studies at the University
of Munich, referenced both American surveys of film audiences and a small
survey of German female spectators and concluded: “Generally, it could
be said that female viewers demand the dream world of film much more
often than men. Particularly the comments gathered in medium and small
theaters proved that the episodic representation of a housewife cleaning her
apartment—thus a representation of her daily work—was often rejected by
means of appropriate statements (‘But I see that every day!’).”32
Panofsky
contrasted this female rejection of representations of quotidian realities
with the enthusiastic reactions of male railway employees to a film set in
their own work world, the crime film Gleisdreieck (Rail Triangle, 1937). He
therefore suggested that men were more open to realism, but women primarily
sought escapism through a mise-en-scène of artifice. This was also
the dominant opinion of the time among American producers and critics,
though the American commentators tended to stress the consumerist motivations
behind female spectator pleasure more heavily. In a 1939 book, for
example, American critic Margaret F. Thorp wrote about female spectators
in a characteristically contemptuous tone:
What the adult American female chiefly asks of the movies is the opportunity
to escape by reverie from an existence which she finds insufficiently interesting.
Better ways of enriching her life, society has not yet taught her . . . The adult
female goes to the movies as she reads luxury advertising, so that she may be
familiar with the ultimate in Fisher bodies and sable coats . . . Beauty, luxury,
and love, those are to her the desirata of life and, being either overworked or
indolent, her idea of bliss is to attain them practically without effort.33
While similarly condescending opinions could no doubt be found among
German film producers, the view of female spectatorship was less consistent
in the Third Reich. As Sabine Hake has shown, the Nazis generally dismissed
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 21
women, but at the same time they were often seen as ideal spectators: “Identified
with an unhealthy emotionalism and a lack of critical detachment, they
personified the failures in the balancing act between fantasy and reality. On
the other hand, women were often chosen to embody the audience in its
purest, most desirable form.”34
	 Critical detachment was not what was desired from spectators in the Third
Reich, and emotionalism was by no means considered entirely unwelcome.
Five months after Hitler took power, the ideologically conformist film journal
Der Film ran an article on the question of female spectatorship and emotional
response titled “She Cries in the Cinema.” The article cited letters to the
editor about the concerns of a man whose wife appeared to have excessive
reactions to films (though the wording suggests that the letters may have
been written by the editorial staff themselves, who in any case supported
the opinions presented in them). A typical letter, from a Dr. K. in Rostock,
read: “If you look at it completely objectively, you should be happy that you
have such a strongly emotional, and therefore truly feminine wife. The ability
to experience film and theater action in a lively, concentrated manner is
absolutely commendable . . . Men have and need feelings too, and the manly
man is even superior to the feminine woman when it comes to the depth and
persistence of his emotional life . . . In some circumstances, tears are in no
way shameful, even for the male hero.”35
In this characteristic example, tears
and intense identification were valued as appropriate spectator responses.
The Nazi leadership also viewed emotionalism as advantageous. Hitler, as
is well known, thought of the masses as essentially feminine and thus easily
manipulable, as did Mussolini.36
However, not only the masses but also “the
people”—a much more positively connoted category for the Nazis—were
described by Hitler as feminized: “The people [das Volk] is in its vast majority
so feminine in its inclinations and opinions that it is emotional sensation
rather than sober reflection that determines its thoughts and actions,” as he
wrote in Mein Kampf.37
Since the German populace was considered to be
constituted by men and women of essentially irrational natures, melodrama
appeared to be a particularly appropriate form for popular film art (Volkskunst).
Melodramas, the Nazis believed, would address the people through
their most common desires rather than through sober and abstract rhetoric.
	 Correspondingly, Pierre Cadars has suggested that melodrama’s manipulation
of desire and its emphasis on sacrifice and passive suffering make it
uniquely suited for use by totalitarian systems, that melodrama and fascism
share an intimate relationship: “the melodrama diffuses a moral of
resignation to superior forces that is not so different from the politics of
submission which every dictatorship assumes.”38
This suggests, however,
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22	 chapter one
that melodrama’s emphasis on pathos over action works to neutralize critical
energies rather than to manufacture active support for moral, or ideological,
systems: passive resignation follows, but not necessarily a passionate attachment
to “superior forces.”
	 Thomas Schatz has also emphasized the tone of resignation inherent in
melodrama. Melodrama, he says, is comedy’s inverse: whereas comedy deals
with the transgression of social conventions, melodrama shows resignation
to them.39
Yet melodrama is also heavily concerned with transgression, even
if its protagonists almost always fail in their attempts to achieve personal
freedom. Ultimately, comedy’s transgressions may also be more controlled
and its effects generally more reliable than that of melodrama. In terms of
production numbers, the Third Reich did invest more heavily in comedy
than in melodrama. Karsten Witte has described comedy’s function in the
Third Reich as the neutralization of critique: “The comedy’s methods follow
a double strategy: to first mobilize a departure from propaganda policy
(by ironizing current events, for example), in order to then immobilize the
critical energies created by the comic effects.”40
The Third Reich comedy,
Witte added, also functioned to mobilize desirable emotions: “Through its
double function of exclusion and integration, it conditions the audience for
an emotional consensus with the propaganda line.”41
	 This suggests that comedy serves fascist goals just as well as, or even better
than, melodrama; laughter can be as tyrannical as tears, perhaps more. Both
comedy and melodrama concern themselves with violations of social norms
and the reestablishment of order, and both may address ideological questions.
However, melodrama sides with the victim, while comedy chooses victims for
ridicule. Somewhat paradoxically, comedy’s absurdities and implausibilities
also serve to naturalize ideologies rather than undermine them. The viewer of
the comedy accepts the film as an unlikely proposition, an opposing image to
the world of the real, which remains untouched by the comedy’s temporary
transgressions. Melodrama, on the other hand, concerns itself with dualistic
structures that are posited as genuinely existing, and therefore it may open
fissures for doubt that reference the world of the real.
	 Furthermore, the conditioning of spectator emotion is by many accounts
more difficult with melodrama than with comedy, since melodrama primarily
mobilizes sexual desires. This is especially true of melodramas that feature
female main protagonists. As Pam Cook asserts, the ideological effects of the
woman’s picture are difficult to control completely: “It has to stimulate desire,
then channel it through identification into the required paths. It negotiates
this contradiction between female desire and its containment with difficulty,
often producing an excess which threatens to deviate from the intended
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 23
route.”42
Melodrama constantly borders on the excessive, and this risk is
a multiple one. This can be a stylistic problem, a use of signs that is either
overfamiliar or destabilizingly unfamiliar: both the cliché and the strange are
forms of excess that threaten to undermine spectator identifications and send
them outside of the text. Or their identifications may become too intense,
producing excess emotion. Once spectator desires are mobilized, they may
also attach themselves to the wrong objects. Filmmakers of the Third Reich
had to be constantly concerned with negotiating these risks, and as we will see
in the next section and in upcoming chapters, melodramas posed particular
stylistic and ideological challenges for which there was no obvious solution
in the form of a clearly defined “fascist aesthetic.”
The Aesthetics of Nazi Melodrama
Third Reich films were intended to have a strong emotional effect upon
spectators of both sexes, but this effect was never supposed to appear so
carefully calculated that audiences would become aware of the workings of
ideology. The propaganda minister, as Sabine Hake has pointed out, watched
carefully over film projects to make sure that they did not have a boomerang
effect: “any excess of representation might threaten the precarious balance
between aesthetic and political intentions and give rise to dangerous forms
of ‘reading against the grain.’”43
Melodramas proved to be particularly problematic
for Goebbels, because their emotional effects sometimes led in the
wrong direction. After previewing the Zarah Leander melodrama Das Herz
der Königin (Heart of a Queen, 1940), Goebbels wrote that the film “should
be anti-English and anti-Church and has become pro for both. Still has to be
changed a lot. And that will cost us a lot of effort. I could work forever just
eliminating the psychological mistakes in my area.”44
Goebbels’s comments
suggest that the risk of “psychological mistakes” may have been greater for
melodramas than films of other genres, since subtle directorial choices in
camera work, editing, and acting could turn a film in entirely the opposite
direction from the script. Comedy, on the other hand, was particularly based
upon dialogue in the Third Reich, and thus was presumably easier to control
at the script stage.
	 Goebbels had particular difficulties with explicitly political films, since
their melodramatic attempts to engage spectators’ emotions quite often fell
on the side of excess. Overbearing patriotic pathos was a recurring problem.
Goebbels noted regarding Luis Trenker’s Feuerteufel (Fire Devil, 1940), for
example: “Horrendous patriotic rubbish. I have to cut it drastically.”45
Über
alles in der Welt (Above All in the World), a film of the same year, received a
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24	 chapter one
similar critique: “Too naïve and primitive . . . Ritter says nationalistic things
with a lack of inhibition that would make another man blush.”46
Similarly, he
noted in March 1940 about the more female-oriented Heimkehr (Homecoming):
“Still too consciously pathetic. Has to be substantially changed.”47
Later
that year, Goebbels worked particularly hard to achieve the right psychological
effect with the propaganda film Wunschkonzert (Request Concert) and
wrote some of its scenes himself. Melodramatic moods were enlisted for
emotional effect, but Goebbels tried to ensure that pathos would be balanced
with opposing moods. Therefore, a brief, pathetic scene in which a mother
mourns the death of her soldier son was balanced by longer scenes featuring
buffoonish Bavarians chasing a pig. The mixed mode evidently succeeded,
since Wunschkonzert became the most popular film of 1940.48
	 Despite Goebbels’s vigilance, spectators still sometimes rejected a film
as excessive after it had been approved and released.49
Italian films created
particular problems in this regard. For political reasons, productions from the
Italian Cinecittà studios were shown in the Reich, and Italian directors were
invited to make films in Germany as coproductions with German studios.
Goebbels had disdain for most of the Italian Fascist cinema, however. He repeatedly
complained that Italian films were not up to his aesthetic standards,
but he could not prohibit their release or make the kind of cuts he could with
German productions. About Guido Brignone’s 1941 film Vertigine (released in
Germany as Tragödie einer Liebe), he wrote, for example: “Then I examine an
Italian film . . . that falls so far below normal artistic standards that I actually
would like to ban it.”50
About Rote Orchideen (Red Orchids, 1938), Goebbels
wrote: “a completely awful and pushy affair. [Nunzio] Malasomma as director.
Good for nothing.”51
The description “pushy” (aufdringlich) indicates
that this Italian film failed its negotiation between aesthetic and political
intentions by presenting what were for Goebbels excessive stylistic markers
or a too-blatant message.
	 The reception of Italian films in the Reich, both by the leadership and mass
audiences, belies the notion of a “fascist aesthetic” common to the Nazi and
the Italian Fascist cinemas. Based upon the available evidence, it is clear that
the German public’s reaction to Italian Fascist films was overwhelmingly
negative. The SD reported in 1942, for example, on spectator responses to
an Italian film released in Germany under the title Vorbestraft (With Previous
Conviction): “Part of the audience also described this film narrative as
too naïve, the dialogue too full of pathos, and the whole thing as bordering
on kitsch.”52
Italian films were repeatedly described as kitsch, which suggests
that their stylistic and narrative conventions differed significantly from
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 25
those of German cinema of the same time, since they exceeded the types of
filmic signs that Germans accepted as “realistic.” The SD added: “New Italian
films are often approached from the very beginning with particularly critical
eyes and a certain ingrained contempt. There is a widely held opinion
that the average Italian film is far inferior to the average German film . . .
In the available reports, Italian film is generally described as too ‘theatrical,’
and the German spectator has a different concept of ‘faithfulness to reality.’
Again and again, a certain depth of mood and feeling is lacking, and in its
place is only a ‘flat sentimentality.’”53
The Italian Fascist cinema, it seems
from this report, was understood by German audiences to be more theatrical
because it was more rooted in silent-era expressiveness than the cinema
of the Nazi period, with a higher emphasis on gesture and facial expression
in Italian films. Also crucial was that the Italian Fascist melodrama made
more recourse to maternal pathos and to Catholic iconography than did the
Nazi melodrama, differences that may have contributed to their rejection by
Third Reich spectators as “flatly sentimental.”
	 While Italian films were found to be excessive, threatening boomerang effects
with German audiences, American films were admired for their ability to
skillfully negotiate between emotional and ideological effects. Goebbels was
particularly impressed with Hollywood melodramas and repeatedly noted
that they were to serve as models for German filmmakers. About Gone with
the Wind, he wrote: “Magnificent color and moving in its effect. One becomes
completely sentimental while watching it. Leigh and Clark Gable act wonderfully.
The mass scenes are captivatingly well done. A huge achievement of
the Americans . . . We will follow this example.”54
The Americans, it seemed,
were even better at directing the masses and moving them to tears than the
Germans. American melodramas even induced covert feelings of inadequacy
in Nazi culture producers. When Gone with the Wind was shown in a closed
screening to a group of film journalists in 1940, some damage control was
deemed necessary. The journalists were supposed to be impressed with the
film, but Goebbels also feared that they would be so completely moved that
an inferiority complex might result, one that would show up in the pages
of the Nazi film press. This fear was expressed in the minutes of Goebbels’s
conference in the Propaganda Ministry on November 21, 1940:
The Minister gives head of ministerial section Fritzsche, who will screen Gone
with the Wind with a small number of chief editors this weekend, the following
guidelines for an introductory speech. It should be said that the film is based
on a book with worldwide success, that it was worked on for three years, that
the costs of the film production have run up to 15 million dollars. It should
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26	 chapter one
also be mentioned that the climate conditions in America facilitate the production
of color films, and that the style of representation in American films
is fundamentally different from the German style. The latter concentrates on
deepening the narrative, while the Americans portray the milieu and present
numerous “gags” on the margins of the narrative. Additionally, it should be
said that Czech cameramen shot the film, while the German film [industry] is
fundamentally constrained to working with German personnel.55
The strength of American capital, the superiority of its émigré film technicians,
the popular appeal of scripts based upon American best-selling novels,
and the Californian weather were all given as excuses for the Hollywood
melodrama’s finer visual quality and emotional effects. Meanwhile, Nazi
film scholars and journal editors were encouraged to assert the superiority
of German cinema, a superiority based primarily on its quality of being German.
Quite often the reference to “German film art” in Nazi writing takes
on the character of incantation, as if by repeatedly speaking of it, it might
suddenly appear.
	 Peter von Werder was one such writer, a fervent Nazi who also fervently
wanted Nazi cinema to be exceptional. In his 1941 book Trugbild und
Wirklichkeit im Film (Illusion and Reality in Film), von Werder claimed that
a specifically German film aesthetics was in the process of being formed.
Characteristically, however, he simply listed films that he found to be exemplary
but evaded any attempt to describe their specifically German or
specifically Nazi character. Instead, he invoked only a general subjective
feeling about German film’s difference:
Recent film production has finally shown that German cinema is in the midst
of a fundamental transformation. One only has to think of films such as Unternehmen
Michael [The Private’s Job/Operation Michael, 1937] or Urlaub auf
Ehrenwort [Furlough on Word of Honor, 1938], as well as Bismarck [1940], Schiller
[1940] or Ohm Krüger [1941], Der Postmeister [The Postmaster, 1940] or
Operetta [1940], or Heimkehr [Homecoming, 1941] or Ich klage an [I Accuse,
1941], to realize that a new film style is announcing itself here, one that we can
feel, more and more, is our own. Such a feeling, which still cannot be captured
in rules or principles, comes from the fact that we sense in these and similar
films strong tendencies toward a conception of reality consistent with our era.56
Von Werder’s claim that Nazi film had a specific “conception of reality” suggests
a confusion or collapsing of film style into ideology, and most of the
films on his list are explicit propaganda features that directly satisfied his Nazi
sensibilities. As Sabine Hake has shown, Nazi film writing often transforms
the concept of realism from a formal principle to a mode of reception; acHeins_NaziFilm_text.indd
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 27
cording to Nazi thinking, realism is not a particular aesthetic but, rather,
whatever the receiver feels to be realistic.57
However, von Werder’s feeling
about stylistic specificity was perhaps not completely incorrect. Although
Nazi films by and large follow classical Hollywood models, the spectator of
Nazi films is often left with the sense of an elusive but nonetheless palpable
difference in cinematic style, independently even of ideological differences.
	 Among contemporary film scholars, Eric Rentschler has offered the most
concise summary of primary differences in the style of Third Reich films from
their Hollywood counterparts. While much of his description is accurate,
some points require reevaluation. He writes:
In an attempt to control the articulation of fictional worlds, only a small proportion
of films was shot outdoors or on location . . . Features of the Third
Reich favored carefully crafted artificial realms and showed a predilection for
studio spaces, costume design, and script logic . . . Film narratives of the Nazi
era generally privileged space over time, composition over editing, design over
movement, sets over human shapes. Compared to Hollywood movies, most
features of the Third Reich appeared slow and static. They were more prone to
panoramas and tableaus than to close-ups, decidedly sparing in their physical
displays (very little nudity, few stunts and action scenes). Nazi film theorists
stressed the importance of kinetic images as well as galvanizing sound tracks.
Music worked together with visuals to make the spectator lose touch with
conceptual logic and discursive frameworks.58
Let us now look at each of these points more closely before moving on to a
comparative close analysis of a Nazi melodrama with its classical Hollywood
counterpart.
	 Rentschler notes that there was a greater frequency of location shooting
and more movement in Hollywood than in Nazi films, and suggests that this
can be attributed to a unique obsession with control over mise-en-scène in
the Third Reich. Yet location shooting or the lack thereof, I would like to
suggest, was more a function of genre and financial constraints. Melodrama,
in both Hollywood and the Third Reich, offered few location shots, and the
proportion of exterior sequences in melodramas was about the same in Nazi
Germany as in Hollywood. The “predilection for studio spaces” is actually a
feature of the classical style as such, a style that demands harmony, closure,
and the extraction of ambiguities.59
However, the studio spaces were larger
and the sets more elaborate in Hollywood than they were in the Third Reich,
with higher budgets that allowed for more camera movement and more
range of camera angles. Camera movements were rarely used in films of the
Third Reich for expressive effect on their own and were generally limited
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28	 chapter one
to small and unobtrusive pans and slight tracking shots. This was partly
because producers in the Third Reich were concerned with reducing costs,
especially during the war. For the 1940 melodrama Das Herz der Königin
(The Heart of a Queen), for example, a low-cost trompe l’oeil set was built in
which an essentially flat wall was painted to mimic the three dimensional
space of a grand hall. Since the space was not actually three-dimensional,
camera movements had to be avoided. The film journal Der deutsche Film
praised German set-building ingenuity when it reported that Das Herz der
Königin was made cheaply and entirely without camera pans.60
According to
Goebbels’s plan, such technical limitations were eventually to be remedied
through the conquest of new filming space beyond the borders of the Reich.
	 Rentschler points out that the impression of stasis in Third Reich films
is also due to less dynamic editing and the favoring of fixed compositions,
which may also be attributable to a differing aesthetic. Instead of the shot/
countershot constructions preferred by Hollywood, Third Reich films often
make use of a two-shot construction, a more theatrical staging in which the
actors move to and from the camera, alternately facing it and turning away
or presenting themselves in profile during a dialogue. As a result, the camera
work of Third Reich films privileges the face of the actor less than Hollywood
films do but includes the body more. As Erica Carter has argued, the actor’s
body in Nazi cinema was called upon to carry a different ideological weight
by functioning as the representative of a national “soul” and the conduit
of a neo-Kantian aesthetics. Film writing of the Nazi period distinguished
between German cinema’s treatment of the body and Hollywood’s, as Carter
explains, by favoring “the performing body over the cinematic apparatus as
a source of ‘soul’ . . . [and] regularly extoll[ing] the specific national qualities
of cinematic practices that masked the medium’s technological nature.”61
In an effort to disguise the apparatus, Nazi films tended to avoid shots that
emphasize editing and reference offscreen space. Correspondingly, bodies are
framed so that they are visible in Third Reich films, while faces are treated
with fewer and shorter close-ups than in Hollywood films. The result is
that the spectator often cannot observe the fine reactions of actors, and this
lessens the sensation of intimacy and the melodramatic effect of Nazi films.
Emotion was primarily conveyed through actors’ voices rather than through
their facial expressions or gestures; therefore “script logic” or dialogue was
indeed privileged over editing and movement.
	 If melodrama is a “text of muteness” in which gesture and mise-en-scène
speak for the inarticulate protagonist,62
then the spoken texts of Third Reich
melodramas are louder than usual. The voice has a more important role than
gesture in German sound cinema. In general, actors usually say what they
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 29
mean rather than having the mise-en-scène speak for them—or against them,
as it does in the most interesting of Hollywood melodramas. Set design and
costuming are certainly very important sign systems in Nazi melodrama, but
the camera is generally not allowed to make use of the languages of décor
and dress to their full expressive extent; objects, like actors, generally do not
receive many close-ups. Rentschler’s conclusion about the primacy of sets in
Nazi cinema, therefore, is only valid for genres in which sets are by nature
primary and in which the body itself is transformed into décor: the musical
comedy and the revue film.
	 Rentschler suggests that Hollywood films of the 1930s and ’40s offered more
to the voyeuristic eye than films of the Third Reich, yet this point must also be
qualified. Nazi cinema did have fewer stunts than Hollywood, but it had far
more nudity. Actresses were filmed either partially or fully nude in numerous
Nazi films, while the common mise-en-scène of dressing rooms allowed for
voyeuristic looks at women removing clothing.63
Bedroom scenes were not
banned in Third Reich films, and couples were not required to sleep in separate
twin beds as were Hollywood’s married men and women. Likewise, Third
Reich cinema had few scruples about premarital seductions, as we will see in
later chapters. More sexual situations and physical displays were allowed by
German censors than by Hollywood’s Production Code standards, following
a conscious attempt by the Nazis to assert cultural superiority through fascist
body culture. As film writer Rudolf Oertel claimed in a 1941 book, Nazi cinema’s
“healthy” attitude toward nudity distinguished it from the hypocritical
morality of “bourgeois” cinema: “The concept of nudity has lost for us that
sinful overtone of a false, bourgeois world, which was sometimes full of virtue
on the outside and full of corruption on the inside . . . Body culture, sports and
a natural relationship of the sexes to one another have prepared the way for our
healthy view of the world. We also know that a beautiful naked body seems less
erotic than a refined décolleté.”64
Despite their repeated claims that German
film was inherently “clean,” the Nazis made extensive use of both naked and
erotically costumed bodies, as the female body in particular was exploited as
one of the central attractions of Third Reich cinema. Indeed, Laura Mulvey’s
critique of the misuse of woman’s image in classical Hollywood cinema might
be considered even more applicable to Nazi cinema, especially since, as we
will see later in this chapter, an aggressive form of voyeurism predominated
over more scopophilic displays in Nazi films.65
	 When Rentschler writes that Nazi theorists emphasized the importance
of music, he suggests that the Nazis were even better at manipulating the
emotions of viewers through sound tracks than were Hollywood filmmakers.
However, it is not clear that this was true in practice. Nazi melodramas
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30	 chapter one
and musicals certainly had some effective music, as the popularity of Zarah
Leander’s hit songs proves. Song sequences differ from sound tracks, though,
since they break the flow of the narrative and the texts of songs are often
contrapuntal to the plot rather than adding up to a complete, overwhelming
synthesis. And there is some evidence that Nazi melodramas actually made
less effective use of sound tracks than Hollywood melodramas. Ever wary of
excess, film critics in the Third Reich often wrote disapprovingly of the use
of music to punctuate emotional moments in films. Das Mädchen Irene (The
Girl Irene, 1936), for example, is an exceptional Third Reich melodrama, one
that attempted to give music and camera work a higher degree of expressive
power, and in which gesture is sometimes allowed to replace speech. The reviewer
for the Film-Kurier commented on the film’s music as follows: “the use
of the orchestra in crucial scenes is occasionally a bit overbearing.”66
Goebbels’s
reaction to Das Mädchen Irene was even more damning, and he was
so disgusted by the film that he cut short his private screening.67
In contrast,
many films of which he did approve had comparatively sparse sound tracks.
Der Herrscher (The Ruler), Veit Harlan’s propagandistic melodrama and the
winner of the 1937 Nationaler Filmpreis (national film prize), included long
sections in which there was no musical accompaniment, even between the
many long pauses in dialogue—hardly an effective use of the sound track for
emotional intoxication. The Security Service also repeatedly reported that
spectators preferred more sparing sound tracks and that film music was not
entirely successful in galvanizing audiences.68
	 Lighting was generally also not used to the same expressive effects in the
Third Reich as in Hollywood, usually remaining comparatively inconspicuous.
Nazi crime films and melodramas did make use of low-key lighting,
but the lighting in Third Reich films rarely became as artistically expressive
as in Hollywood film noir, following the Nazis’ general disapproval of
ambiguity and filmic style for style’s sake. As Erica Carter has shown, there
is also a crucial difference in Third Reich filmmakers’ lighting of actors in
that they avoided the “halo effects” of Hollywood-style lighting and placed
more emphasis on the ensemble of performers than on illuminating the
individual star.69
	 Indeed, the image of the small ensemble was more common than both the
individual and the mass in Third Reich melodrama, despite the privileged
place that the geometrically ordered mass holds in film scholars’ understanding
of Nazi film style. Fascist aesthetics are most commonly described as the
abstracted composition of “human shapes,” as the ornamental massing of
bodies. According to Karsten Witte, fascist film aesthetics are characterized
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 31
by the “rigorous over-designing, standardization and ultimately the corrosion
of topical patterns, which all lead to a hypertrophy of the mass ornament.”70
Witte’s account corresponds to Susan Sontag’s description of Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will as typical of fascist aesthetics, characterized by “overpopulated
wide shots of massed figures alternating with close-ups that isolate
a single passion, a single perfect submission . . . [and] the rendering of movement
in grandiose and rigid patterns.”71
However, these descriptions of fascist
aesthetics apply primarily to the dramaturgy of party meetings, parades, and
other street spectacles, but such aesthetics are rarely to be found in Nazi feature
films. Mass scenes are not common in the cinema of the Third Reich, since
few filmmakers were accorded the budget to organize large groups of extras
(Veit Harlan with his literal armies of extras for the filming of Kolberg being
the most obvious exception). Yet overall the spaces of the Nazi narrative film
are tight rather than monumental, characterized more by a mediocre rigidity
of style than by a grandiose rigidity of ornamental movement, and bodies are
much more commonly grouped in couples than in masses.
	 In the following section I will extend some of these general comments on
film style by comparing a characteristic melodrama from the Third Reich to
a Hollywood model. Of the films that Peter von Werder listed as representatives
of a specifically German film style, Der Postmeister presents perhaps the
most opportune example for close study. Contemporary audiences reportedly
felt that it was one of the best German films ever made, and it was repeatedly
described in the press and among spectators as a great work of art. However,
there were apparently many criticisms of the film’s narrative and setting, so
the film’s “art” was seen by contemporary audiences as being independent
of its subject matter. Der Postmeister seems therefore a particularly good test
case in the effort to isolate a characteristic Third Reich melodramatic film
style. As a Nazi recycling of the classic “fallen woman” theme, this melodrama
also allows for close comparisons with Hollywood films of the same genre.
	 Der Postmeister was one of the most popular melodramas of the Third
Reich,72
though this may seem barely conceivable today. The film is grim
in mood, claustrophobic in its scenic construction, and overbearing in its
acting style. These, however, were perhaps precisely the elements that struck
contemporary viewers as artistic and as characteristically German. The journal
Der Film, in a typical review of Der Postmeister, called it “shining proof
of German cinematic creativity.”73
Goebbels noted in his diary that the film
was a “a great work of art,” and he particularly praised the “outstanding
portrayal of milieu.”74
As with most films designated as examples of German
cinematic high art, however, there is little in the film that can be singled out
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32	 chapter one
as a specifically German invention. The film is set in Russia and borrowed
from a foreign literary source, Alexander Pushkin’s short story “The Stationmaster.”
The film also owes much to classical Hollywood models, which
was openly admitted at the time; Der Postmeister was positively compared in
the Nazi press to George Cukor’s Camille (1936).75
It is likely that the film’s
director, Gustav Ucicky, also looked very closely at another Greta Garbo
vehicle, Anna Karenina (1935), following Goebbels’s citation of Garbo’s 1927
silent version as a model for German filmmakers to copy.76
Der Postmeister
particularly invites comparison to Anna Karenina because both are set in
nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, share Russian literary sources, and are
narratives of a woman’s downfall through illicit sexuality into suicide.
	 Der Postmeister’s narrative concerns a young woman who is seduced by
an aristocrat, lives for a time as his mistress, and begins to suffer the social
consequences of this role. The girl, Dunya (Hilde Krahl), leaves her father
(Heinrich George), the postmaster of an isolated provincial outpost, and
moves to St. Petersburg with her seducer, Count Minskij, on the pretense
that she will marry him. Once in St. Petersburg, she attempts to separate
herself from Minskij, takes a job as a seamstress, and becomes engaged to the
naval officer Mitja (the conventional “worthy and innocent young man”77
).
Meanwhile, Dunya’s father hears that his daughter has become a prostitute
and comes to St. Petersburg in a drunken rage with the intention of murdering
her. Dunya escapes, but is then filled with such tenderness for her father
that she returns to Minskij and asks him to stage a fake wedding so that
her father will be deceived into thinking her relationship with Minskij was
legitimate. Dunya’s actual fiancé, Mitja, who knows nothing about her past
relationship with Minskij, happens to arrive at the fake wedding and, realizing
that Dunya is not the woman he imagined her to be, calls off the engagement
and loudly humiliates her. Dunya takes her father to the train station after
the wedding, they have a melodramatic parting, and the postmaster returns
to the provinces, still under the illusion that his daughter has married an
aristocrat. Dunya then shoots herself in Minskij’s apartment, but just before
dying, she asks him to write to her father that she died of an illness.
	 A close comparison of Der Postmeister to Anna Karenina reveals some
differences in film style, direction, plot, scenic construction, and, finally,
in ideology. Overall, Der Postmeister is darker in tone than Anna Karenina.
Whereas most scenes in Anna Karenina are brightly lit with halo effects
around the star Garbo, much of Der Postmeister is filmed with low-key lighting.
Differences in lighting point to differences in the imaginary of the Russian
milieu in the two films: whereas Anna Karenina offers nostalgic, glamorous,
though at times also farcical visions of the St. Petersburg upper class, the
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 33
low-key German version of Russia suggests a primitive and somewhat sordid
environment. Camera work in the respective films underlines this difference
in the vision of Russia, and as we will see, the differing mise-en-scène had
further political implications. The first sequence of Anna Karenina serves to
characterize the milieu: men in extravagant white and gold military uniforms
engage in gluttonous feasting and excessive drinking in a large and luxurious
ballroom. The sequence opens with a close-up of a bowl of caviar and
features an extended movement down a long table filled with candelabras
and food, a background-to-foreground sweep that is a virtuoso display of
camera technique. This movement, staged in the space of a two-story-high
studio set, adds to the impression of lightness and luxury that pervades most
of the film (even as Garbo begins suffering, she does so with dazzling lighting
and the full luxury of costly costuming and décor). The large spaces of Anna
Karenina allow for large movements of the main characters and the many
extras, all of which add a lively quality to the overall impression of the film.
By contrast, the initial sequences of Der Postmeister are shot in the cramped
space of a comparatively cheap-looking studio set, the limited number of
characters confined in two shots or medium close-ups. This pattern continues
even after Dunya has departed her village to live in luxury in St. Petersburg.
Again, this tight framing and lack of large movements not only indicates
a distinct, peculiarly fascist aesthetic but also points primarily to material
constraints.78
Der Postmeister, which indirectly supported Hitler’s campaign
to conquer new “living space” in the east, testified to the lack of studio space
in the Reich.
	 There were some similarities in the imagination of milieu, however. Naturally,
neither film was shot on location, and both films imagine St. Petersburg
mostly as a series of interiors. In both films, scenes are played out in the spaces
of a men’s sauna and in a music hall, and a comparison of these sequences
shows some interesting variations. The sauna scenes of both films have similar
narrative functions, though the effects of their staging are quite different. In
both films, two male characters discuss the heroine while taking a steam bath.
In Anna Karenina the discussion takes place as the two main male characters
are being awkwardly flogged with branches by other corpulent men in towels.
There is a brief suggestion of homoeroticism, but this impression is quickly
neutralized through physical comedy, as a bucket of cold water is abruptly
poured over the head of one of the characters at the end of the scene. The
military men in Anna Karenina’s sauna are treated farcically, an effect that is
heightened by the placement of the sauna sequence directly after the opening
feast sequence’s parody of Russian military life as elaborate, ritualized
drinking and gluttony. The differing staging of the two sauna scenes, it may
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34	 chapter one
be noted, is actually consistent with Goebbels’s claim that American films
tend to retard narrative progression by means of “gags,” whereas the Nazi
melodrama is concerned with intensifying the forward drive of the narrative.
Der Postmeister, unlike Anna Karenina, does not attempt to reroute the
sexual undertones of its sauna sequence and even attempts to deepen them
through dialogue while simultaneously foreshadowing upcoming plot events.
Perhaps referencing Riefenstahl’s sauna scene in Olympia, the athletic bodies
of Der Postmeister’s military men are allowed to retain their erotic appeal;
there is no effort to undercut voyeurism through comedy. The tone remains
serious even when the man on the top bench of the sauna turns over to look
at Mitja on the bottom and asks, in reference to Dunya, “You’ve fallen head
over heels in love, haven’t you? . . . Tell me, have you done it with her yet?”
	 Similar distinctions are evident in the music hall sequences of each film.
In both films the ballroom party sequences serve to signify a decadent side
to Russian life, and in both the presence of “gypsy” musicians and dancers
connotes a milieu of loose morality. In Anna Karenina, however, their costuming
remains firmly within Production Code standards. Their lascivious
lifestyles are connoted with oversized jewelry, but their chests and shoulders
are fully covered. The framing of the dancers does not in any way emphasize
their bodies; one of the women is placed with her back to the camera
so that little of her is visible, and the view of the other woman is blocked
by the table. Rather than visual pleasure, therefore, this music hall scene is
played for comic effect: while Anna’s very drunk brother speaks lovingly of
his wife and ineptly flirts with the dancers, a clownish violin player hangs
over their heads.
	 The corresponding sequence in Der Postmeister, on the other hand, appeals
to an aggressive voyeurism. The first scene set in St. Petersburg, it begins
with a traveling shot along a staircase adorned with sculptures of nude
female torsos, and ends on a shot of a woman sitting on a man’s lap, framed
with another sculpture of a naked torso just above her head. (By contrast,
the sculptural décor in Anna Karenina’s music hall is of a geometric, nonrepresentational
pattern.) Soon this woman, Mascha, is shown unbuttoning
her shirt, jumping down from the balcony, and throwing off her blouse for a
vigorous topless dance. Reaction shots of male audience members underline
their pleasure and approval, modeling the expected response of the nondiegetic
audience. The camera then moves in to offer the spectator a better
view of the dancer, alternating between shots of her chest and close-ups of
her exposed legs as her skirt spins open. The cutting between these alternating
body fragments is quick, and the editing is synchronized with the music,
creating a rhythmic and rousing effect. Curiously, the pacing of the editing
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 35
of the dance in Der Postmeister only has its parallel in the rapid editing of
Anna Karenina’s death scene, the alternating shots of legs and breasts in
Der Postmeister corresponding to the alternating shots of train wheels and
Garbo’s horrified face in Anna Karenina. The editing rhythm of both of these
sequences connotes a sense of intensification before release. (The death scene
in Der Postmeister, by contrast, is performed in a rather perfunctory manner.)
These differing points of intensification suggest what was most important to
each respective film: stimulation of an aggressive eroticism on the one hand,
and the stimulation of a melancholy mood of loss on the other. Indeed, this
relatively heavier emphasis on sexualized violence than on mourning may
be considered paradigmatic for Nazi melodrama in general.
	 Most spectators of Anna Karenina certainly came to the cinema primarily
to look at Garbo and watch her suffer beautifully. Its melancholy sentiment is
supported by camera work and framing. There are abundant, relatively long
close-ups of Garbo’s face in the film as the camera lingers lovingly on her
in hazy soft focus. In contrast, there is little glamorous treatment of Hilde
Krahl in Der Postmeister; the camera work instead supports an undertone
of brutality throughout the film. Although there are a significant number
Nazi cinema’s sadistic voyeurism: the dance sequence of Der Postmeister (1940).
Copyright Studiocanal Video
Heins_NaziFilm_text.indd 35 5/3/13 11:43 AM
36	 chapter one
of medium close-ups of Krahl in the film, the camera rests on her only long
enough to register reactions necessary for the progression of the narrative
but not long enough for the audience to develop a strong sense of intimacy
with and sympathy for her character. Lingering on Krahl would hardly have
been productive, since she was in no way as auratic as Garbo and there was
little subtlety of feeling to be read on her face. In the scenes in which she
must mimic separation trauma from her father on a train platform, shouting
is substituted for tender camera work and more subtle acting registers,
which is consistent with the Nazi melodrama’s tendency to place greater
emphasis on the voice than on gesture, framing, or editing. Krahl, who was
born in Croatia, had a hard, dialect-tinged delivery and a voice that actually
suggested an inability to suffer.
	 Hence, acting style is perhaps one of the most noticeable differences between
films of the Third Reich and their Hollywood counterparts, and the
variations in actor types likewise suggests variations in audience identification
patterns. Except for the two Swedish stars Zarah Leander and Kristina
Söderbaum, most of the actresses of the Third Reich were not particularly
good at portraying melodramatic suffering. Other actresses often used in
Third Reich woman’s films—Hilde Krahl, Marianne Hoppe, Brigitte Horney,
and Ilse Werner—were better at interpreting hardworking and optimistic
characters with boyish allure, and this is generally the preferred type in cinema
of the Third Reich. Their appeal is quite comprehensible; identifying
with such characters provided women in the Third Reich with “illusions of
female autonomy” and the illusion that fascism was modern in a liberating
sense.79
Male actor types of the Third Reich, on the other hand, are less
comprehensible in their appeal. The star of Der Postmeister, Heinrich George,
was, along with Emil Jannings, one of the most influential actors of the Third
Reich. It is a peculiarity of Nazi cinema that these two could elicit audience
admiration, since they do not have parallels in Hollywood films of the same
time period. Hollywood cinema had little use for excessively corpulent men
who sweated profusely, panted, growled, and screamed, except perhaps as
parodic figures. In their Third Reich films, both Heinrich George and Emil
Jannings specialized in portraying fathers and husbands, their violent rages
alternating with sentimentality. A postwar star study describes Heinrich
George’s style thus: “So this colossal giant with the booming voice that demanded
obedience stomped through his great roles. Even when his face
turned red and clouds of rage gathered around his powerful forehead, one
still sensed that there was a soft core in this stocky primal phenomenon. His
vital feelings simply had to pass through him and out of him.”80
Many Third
Reich spectators presumably identified in some fundamental way with this
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 37
release of violent feelings. Whereas the patriarchal figure in Anna Karenina,
Anna’s husband, Karenin, plays his role with cool, soft-voiced detachment,
Der Postmeister offers a characteristically German despot who screams and
demands obedience. The spectator was apparently supposed to take pleasure
in searching for the soft center among his powerful rage.
	 Characteristically also, it is to this figure that the spectator is asked to attach
his or her sympathies. Whereas the central identificatory figure in Anna
Karenina is clearly Garbo’s Anna, the main protagonist of Der Postmeister
is actually George’s father figure, with the titles of the two films announcing
these respective orientations. The identification patterns are set up mainly
through dialogue, but also through camera cues. The scene in which the
postmaster comes to kill his daughter is an example of how Der Postmeister
attempts to position the spectator on his side and manages to justify his
murderous anger. The murder-planning scene is staged in Dunya’s tenement
room, which she shares with her friend and coworker in the dress factory,
Elisawetha. The postmaster waits for Dunya while she is on a date with the
soldier Mitja (and thus is in effect made innocent through association with
the military, though we are asked to sympathize with the father’s intentions
nonetheless). The postmaster is sitting on Dunya’s bed as Elisawetha enters
the room, and as she sees him, she shrinks away from him in fear. He forces
her down on the bed next to him, and the emphasis on his strength suggests
the potential of rape. At the end of the sequence, there is a shot of Elisawetha,
who, despite the threat of physical violence to which she has just been subjected,
watches the tyrannical patriarch tenderly as he exits the tenement,
adding, “I think he is an unhappy man. I think one should pray for him.”
Later in the film, another character observes the postmaster and remarks,
“He is really a magnificent man!” The father is thus framed by dialogue that
suggests to us the correct interpretation of his character: a splendid dictator.
Most importantly, however, the spectator is asked to identify primarily with
his suffering, and not with that of the suicidal woman.
	 Two train station sequences further underline the difference in identification
structures in Der Postmeister and Anna Karenina. In the German film,
a final parting between Dunya and her father takes place on the nighttime
train platform, and the scene is supposed to express the pathos of separation.
There is a conventional shot: the train pulls away, wrenching the two
lovers apart (the father being Dunya’s most significant lover in this film).
Somewhat contrary to expectation, however, the camera is placed inside
the train so that we see Dunya on the platform in disappearing perspective.
There is no corresponding reverse shot of the father pulling away in
the train. The camera is thus placed in the physical position of the father,
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38	 chapter one
and the spectator watches the woman disappear from the male point of
view. In Anna Karenina the nighttime train station platform sequence is
Anna’s suicide scene. Here she is alone, without diegetic male spectators.
The camera takes her position, alternating between the shots of her face and
the wheels of the train, so these close-ups of the wheels are presented as her
vision, with which the spectator is invited to identify. In Der Postmeister, on
the other hand, there are no point-of-view shots from Dunya’s perspective
in the suicide sequence. Rather, the sound of the pistol shot is edited over
a shot of Minskij, thus the spectator is asked to react to Dunya’s surprise
death as he does.
	 Notably, although both Der Postmeister and Anna Karenina are generically
woman’s films, the plotting in both cases allows the main female protagonist
to be framed by male speech. In both films the protagonist’s fiancé/lover
(Mitja/Vronsky) is presented on screen first, and the dialogue in these scenes
introduces the woman before she appears. In both films also, the man has
the final word. The final scenes of both Der Postmeister and Anna Karenina
are constructed as epilogues and follow the suicide sequences. In both cases
the woman’s lover expresses his regret at her suicide and asks whether he
might have been somehow responsible for her death. (Thus, both serve the
melodramatic convention of the final recognition of virtue, in the tear-jerking
tense of the “too late.”) Both films also costume the lover in military uniform
and direct him to deliver this recognition speech to a comrade who is also in
uniform. In Anna Karenina, however, a close-up of the lover Vronsky gives
way to a camera movement screen right to a close-up of a portrait of Anna.
The camera rests on this image before fading out, the final shot returning us to
female subjectivity. Somewhat inappropriately for the historical setting, this
portrait is a contemporary photograph rather than a painting, which would
have placed her image in the past rather than the present. The photograph
comforts the spectator with the sense of the ever present and suggests that
Anna’s vision persists, that she still has lively eyes that can witness her vindication
and can still look back, even though the narrative has required her
to die. No such final image of Dunya is offered in Der Postmeister: the final
shot in this film is of Mitja’s carriage disappearing into a snowy landscape
that is empty except for a few dead trees, an image that marks the extinction
of the woman’s vision. This differing final vision is a further indication of the
way in which identification structures in Der Postmeister side with the male
protagonist, whereas they are clearly on the side of the female protagonist in
Anna Karenina. Although Der Postmeister has been classified generically as a
Frauen- und Sittendrama (women’s and moral drama) in a postwar lexicon,81
it is a woman’s film hijacked by male subjectivity.
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 39
	 This apparently did not go unnoticed by female spectators at the time. For
example, an SD report from April 1940, when the film was released, noted:
“The members of the Frauenschaft in Augsburg regret that, in this hit film,
the woman is once again represented from the negative side.”82
This wording
suggests that the NS-Frauenschaft (National Socialist Women’s League)
primarily objected to the “negative” representations of Masha and Dunya
as sexual and somewhat calculating individuals. If this is true, then the discomfort
caused by the film’s construction of point of view and spectator
identification was almost certainly expressed in the more localizable terms
of character representation. In any case, women realized that the film was
not on their side, at least not on a side with which they identified themselves.
Interestingly, the public reportedly also responded negatively to the film’s
narrative, particularly its resolution in suicide. The SD commented:
The film is generally being praised as a great artistic achievement and is considered
one of the best German films ever. But reports about the public reception
of the film also express a much more critical view in regard to the film’s
content . . . [Viewers] feel that it is pointless now that we are at war to allow
Slavic material into German films again, especially since this film narrative
ends in a passive and suffering inactivity that stands in crass opposition to the
heroic contemporary experience of the German people.83
Thus, audiences felt that melodramatic suffering did not conform to the historical
moment, to the thrills of the Blitzkrieg. The public apparently wanted
less self-sacrifice and more celebratory optimism. The other hit of 1940,
Wunschkonzert, apparently better fulfilled the public’s momentary generic
needs by mixing battle with musical comedy.84
	 Most spectators could not foresee how Der Postmeister corresponded to
historical circumstances, and they could not anticipate the film’s propagandistic
value. Eight months after the conclusion of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and
fourteen months before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the film served
to draw (or redraw) Russia onto the mental maps of German spectators.
Der Postmeister was presented as a quasi-documentary vision of the Russian
landscape and an explanation of the Russian soul. The reviewer for the
Film-Kurier, for example, wrote that the film was such a “realistic” portrait
of Russia because it was a Viennese production: “Here they know the Slavic
mentality better than anywhere else. So what first makes a strong impression
in the new film is the authentic-looking atmosphere of the Russian milieu
and its convincing Slavic essence . . . When the screen fades in on the troika
as it drives through the godforsaken, snowy solitude and stops in front of
a deserted straw-covered postal cottage, then there is Russian atmosphere.
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40	 chapter one
Then one feels the endless expanses of the landscape in which souls become
melancholy and humble.”85
Heinrich George, acting out this Nazi notion of
the “Slavic essence,” played his postmaster as a semi-illiterate, childish, but
touchingly violent character. The extras in the film, representatives of the
Russian proletariat and peasantry, were costumed in rags and unruly wigs and
directed by Ucicky to play their characters as hunched-over, shuffling idiots.
The Russians would be easy to conquer, the film suggested, since they were
all essentially melancholic and full of humility. (Mitja and his fellow army
officers were somewhat problematically presented as having stiff-standing
Prussian natures, but the film was set, of course, under the Czarist monarchy.
In the arrogant German imagination, the contemporary Bolsheviks no longer
possessed such attractive uniforms or evidenced any militarist discipline that
could compete with their own.)
	 As for the German aesthetic imagination, the artistry of the film was defined
in reviews mainly as a series of great and realistic performances by the
actors. Der Film commented that it was the acting in particular that proved
Ucicky’s directorial talent and added: “The postmaster Heinrich George was a
grandiose example of highest acting perfection with his portrayal of farmer’s
humility and boundless fatherly love, with his touching humanity, in anger,
rage, desperation and happiness, in boasting vanity and naïve anxiety . . .
The artistically perfect film, masterful and brilliant in its acting and staging,
deeply impressed the audience.”86
It is doubtful, however, that all of the
spectators of Der Postmeister went to the film primarily to experience great
German art, or were simply lured to the cinema by the star allure of Heinrich
George. Certainly, no small percentage of cinemagoers were tempted
by suggestions of mastery of another kind.
	 The topless dance sequence follows shortly after scenes in the postmaster’s
dark house, in which he pulls Dunya onto his lap and expresses his love
for his daughter, whom he calls his “feast for the eyes” (Augenweide). This
“boundless fatherly love” is clearly incestuous; the kisses and other physical
contact between the two step over the boundary of what is usual between
father and adult daughter. Anna Karenina, for its part, offers us a very tender
scene of a mother putting her son to bed and certainly does not lack appeals
to incestuous desire. But the German equivalent of this family romance is
much more suspect. As is typical for Nazi melodramas, the mother is missing
from Der Postmeister; Dunya’s other parent has been killed off before the film
plot even begins. Thus, whereas the Hollywood melodrama engages oedipal
or even pre-oedipal desire for the maternal, the Nazi melodrama supports
the father’s aggressive phallic power by extinguishing the maternal entirely.
Gaylyn Studlar has argued that the “masochistic aesthetic” characteristic of
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 41
the Hollywood melodramas of Josef von Sternberg appeals to the spectator’s
desire for the pre-oedipal mother, and thus for a union with a femininity
imagined as all-powerful and lacking nothing.87
In contrast, Der Postmeister
appeals more to sadistic voyeurism and the pleasures of masculine mastery.
	 Shortly after the father-daughter scene in Der Postmeister, the paternalistic
aristocrat Minskij enters the house, fixes Dunya with a desirous look, praises
her figure, and then grabs her from behind, forcing a kiss as she struggles
against him. Since they are framed next to a smoldering fire and an overboiling
pot of water, the spectator is invited to accept such rape fantasies as
naturally ignited passion. Much of the film was composed of rather dubious
erotic attractions, and this was clearly a conscious strategy. Posters for Der
Postmeister show that the topless dance sequence was advertised as a main
attraction of the film. The advertisement in the May 1940 issue of Der deutsche
Film shows photos of Heinrich George and Hilde Krahl in the foreground
and the topless dancer in the background, just above their heads. The breasts
of the dancer are airbrushed into hazy indistinctness; spectators had to buy a
ticket to see the rest of the striptease. Reviewers understood that the topless
Hollywood’s masochistic maternalism: Anna Karenina (1935). Courtesy the Kobal
Collection at Art Resource, New York
Heins_NaziFilm_text.indd 41 5/3/13 11:43 AM
42	 chapter one
dance sequence was an essential part of Der Postmeister’s appeal, and, accordingly,
they did not neglect it in their praise of the film’s art. The reviewer for
Der Film praised the “brilliantly masterful scene,” which showed “Mascha in
Petersburg, suddenly and wildly flying with her bare chest in whirling dance
lust.”88
The official Nazi Party film journal, Der deutsche Film, also praised the
topless sequence, while adding an ideological justification for it: the dancer
Margit Symo presented the audience with a “bursting dance from far-off
Asia,” as the reviewer wrote.89
	 Thus, in a characteristically duplicitous manner, the exposing of Symo’s
body was explained as a supposedly realistic document of cultural difference,
described in terms of the “Asian” nature of Russian culture, and the voyeuristic
gaze was employed for propagandistic purposes. Der Postmeister put St.
Petersburg on the mental map of viewers as a place where women tear off
their clothes and dance wildly, an image that no doubt served the upcoming
military campaign against the Soviet Union. The dance scene is also a typical
example of Nazi cinema’s strategic use of eroticism. As we well know, Hollywood
cinema—and classical narrative cinema as such—also relies on the
spectacle of the female body to create the sensation of pleasure in the (male)
spectator.90
However, the spectacles of Der Postmeister are intensified beyond
that which is conventional for comparative American films of the same era,
and its very palpable sense of sexual violence exceeds the boundaries of what
was allowed—or desired—of Hollywood melodramas.
	 Of course, sexual violence, as David Rodowick has noted, is central to the
melodrama as a narrative form. But in Hollywood melodramas this violence
is usually suppressed, “regulated only by an economy of masochism which
often gives the narratives a suicidal thrust.”91
In Der Postmeister this conventional
violence is more released than suppressed; although the film, like
Anna Karenina, ends in suicide, its economy is ultimately more sadistic than
masochistic. This distinction, I propose, holds true for most Nazi melodramas
in comparison to their Hollywood counterparts. Both Anna Karenina and
Der Postmeister, on a manifest level, offer similar ideological messages. Both
films provide images of Russian “decadence” (i.e., the propensity to drunkenness
or “indecent” behavior) and thereby in some fashion serve the anticommunist
politics of both the United States and Nazi Germany. Following
the convention of “fallen woman” melodramas, they are also warnings about
what could happen to women who choose to step outside the boundaries of
accepted behavior and seek their own experiences independently of male
authority. But Anna Karenina and Der Postmeister address different spectatorial
subjects and engage different desires, inviting female identifications
on the one hand and male pleasures on the other. Both films make use of
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	 Fascist Melodrama	 43
melodrama’s traditional sympathy for the victim. Der Postmeister, however,
manages to reroute this conventional sympathy and convince its spectator
that it is not the dead woman but rather the man with murderous intentions
who is actually the victim. In this way it is truly a great example of Nazi style.
Conclusion
The goal of this chapter has been to delineate the generic and aesthetic differences
between film melodrama in Third Reich and classical Hollywood
cinema, and to a lesser extent, between German and Italian Fascist film.
These subtle distinctions, as will be elaborated further in upcoming chapters,
corresponded to the distinct political goals and the practical constraints
of German fascism. Melodrama was as central to Nazi cinema as it was to
American cinema of the same era, though there were variances in the types of
subgenres produced: maternal and family melodrama were less significant for
Nazi cinema than for classical Hollywood, as were Hollywood melodramatic
subgenres that specialized in the exploration of psychic instability. Despite
the centrality of melodrama (and comedy) in the popular cinema of the Third
Reich and the regime’s keen concern with the reception of films by audiences,
the Nazis lacked clearly articulated genre and spectatorship theories and a
strong concept of genres as gendered. Because emotional response was expected
of all viewers in the Third Reich, melodrama was privileged as a highly
effective mode and was not considered to be exclusively or even primarily
for female spectators. The Nazi view of female spectatorship was similar to
the American view in the common belief that women sought escapism more
often than men, though American critics stressed the consumerist element
in female spectator pleasure more openly than the Nazis. As we will see in
chapter 4, this difference had important implications for spectator address
in wartime home front films. In comparison to American critics and film
producers, Nazi officials had a less systematic understanding of film spectatorship,
particularly of gender differences in film-viewing preferences. Even
melodramas were primarily designed with male spectator pleasures in mind.
	 Despite being a privileged mode, melodrama posed problems for the Nazi
minister of propaganda, as it proved difficult to control spectator responses to
the pathos and hyperbolic style of melodramatic films. This was particularly
true of imported Italian films, which reportedly were received skeptically by
Third Reich audiences because of their excessively melodramatic style, and
which therefore shed doubt on the existence of a transnational fascist film
aesthetic. Although Goebbels dismissed most Italian Fascist films, he recommended
that Nazi filmmakers study Hollywood melodramas for lessons
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44	 chapter one
on how to blend ideological effectiveness with aesthetic quality. Nazi filmmakers
derivatively emulated Hollywood films, but there did remain some
slight stylistic differences between Nazi melodramas and their American
counterparts, including a more theatrical acting style, less dynamic camera
movements and editing, a greater emphasis on voice and dialogue than on
facial expression and mise-en-scène, a more restrained use of music to punctuate
emotional moments, and more overtly voyeuristic physical displays. Of
these differences, only the last one was likely a consciously calculated formal
strategy rather than the effect of limited material resources, limited skill on
the part of Third Reich filmmakers, and apprehension regarding stylistic
excess on the part of the propaganda minister. As my comparative analysis
between Der Postmeister and its American model, Anna Karenina, has aimed
to demonstrate, Nazi melodrama was structured to appeal to a more intense
form of sadistic voyeurism than classical Hollywood melodrama. The next
chapter examines in greater detail how romance melodramas elicited erotic
investment in the aggressive, expansionist designs of the Reich.
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	 2.	 The Nazi Modernization of Sex:
Romance Melodrama
According to a statistical analysis of the titles of films produced during the
Third Reich, Frau(en) and Liebe were the most common nouns used in
naming products of the Nazi cinema.1
“Women” and “love” were the terms
deemed most effective for drawing audiences to the theaters, and presumably
they were also considered the most effective for the drawing out of
nationalist energies and the erasing of internal conflicts. The erotic drive
can be considered the main motor of German fascist cinema, the very basis
of spectator pleasure, narrative construction, and the creation of meaning.
In this it was entirely consistent with the interests of classical Hollywood.
As Mary Ann Doane has pointed out, film narrative and film meaning in
American cinema also depend on romance: “the couple is a constant figure
of Hollywood’s rhetoric and some kind of heterosexual pact constitutes its
privileged mode of closure.”2
The cinema of the Third Reich, following Hollywood,
placed the heterosexual couple at the rhetorical and narrative center
of almost all of its films.
	 Romance, one could say, formed the very basis of Third Reich cinema,
the scaffolding onto which all other genres built their specific architecture;
comedies, musicals, and even war and crime films were built upon the core of
coupling, their generic patterns inserted over the basic structure of romantic
relations. Not all romance was melodramatic, of course. Romance was more
often taken lightly in Nazi cinema than seriously; in fact, the majority of films
with “Frau” (woman) or “Liebe” (love) in their titles were comedies.3
But the
focus and ideological task of each romantic mode varied. Whereas romantic
relations in comedy were most often the vehicle for elaborating problems
of the social order, such as class conflicts, the romance melodrama took
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46	 chapter two
coupling seriously and privileged it over other thematic concerns, investing
its energies into the production and management of sexual desire.
	 The romance melodrama, although somewhat less extensive than the romantic
comedy in terms of production numbers, was nonetheless a privileged
genre in the Third Reich, receiving far more screen time than war films. The
Nazis’ cinematic obsession with the mechanics of desire was surprisingly
central for a society that specialized in technologies of death. Far more feature
film footage was used for defining sex roles and suggesting sex acts than
for defining concepts of national character, generating hatred of enemies,
or fabricating notions of race—ideological tasks that were more commonly
left to the press and cinema’s paratextual discourses.4
Whereas the Nazis
needed little internal negotiation to carry out their genocidal “final solution”
to racist paranoia, gender and sexuality were issues that film melodrama had
to continually readdress. As Goebbels stated in 1937, “The issue of women’s
rights [die Frauenfrage] is our most difficult problem.”5
	 For the fascist man the problem lay in the question of how to maximize
women’s productivity and reproductivity while minimizing the costs arising
from her own demands for fulfillment and recognition. Evidently, even
if the vast majority of Nazi film narratives circled around sexual concerns,
romance films still had military implications. Women were to be made serviceable
for the Nazi regime’s massive project of imperial expansion, and
the cinema helped to articulate what role they would play in an expanding
Reich and ultimately in colonial territories abroad. The shifting borders of
the regime’s dominion over both foreign and domestic populations necessitated
recalibrations in its gender ideology. One of the most problematic
issues concerned women’s participation in paid labor, which was considered
undesirable at the beginning of the regime due to high unemployment rates
but ultimately became indispensable as the Reich moved closer to war. Love
stories in Nazi cinema often took up the issue of women’s place in the public
sphere and addressed the issue of the relative values of professional and private
life. Contrary to common assumption, most Nazi romance films did not
advocate a return to traditional feminine roles or oppose the Weimar era’s
advances into sexual modernity. Instead, Nazi romance melodramas often
supported a turn away from domesticity while arguing for the maintenance
of hierarchical structures and self-sacrificial positions in the workplace. This
was true of prewar as well as wartime films.
	 Nazi romance melodramas also spoke to men and aimed to condition
male desire as well. As noted in the last chapter, melodramatic spectatorship
in the Third Reich was not assumed to be primarily female. The melodraHeins_NaziFilm_text.indd
46 5/3/13 11:43 AM
	 Romance Melodrama	 47
matic love story appealed to male viewers via lead actresses and supporting
dancers who were explicitly selected for their erotic charms. As the present
chapter shows, the choice of male romantic heroes followed a primarily
racial-eugenic logic, while the choice of romantic heroines supported Nazi
cinema’s imperial ambitions. These ambitions included the annexation of
new audiences abroad. The sexual content of Nazi films was calculated to
exceed that of Hollywood in an attempt to make Nazi rule appear more
attractive to German, occupied, and neutral audiences. The romance melodrama
supported an image of Nazi culture as revolutionary; rather than
forcing a return to tradition, Nazi love stories often promised to liberate
spectators from the constraints of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
sexual mores, which were denounced in Nazi media under the heading of
“bourgeois morality.” Contrary to the assumptions of scholars who have
argued that the Nazis attempted to desexualize the cinema, historical evidence
shows that Goebbels and his subordinates explicitly recruited the
erotic attractions of female performers in order to suppress political cri-
tique.6
Yet the “woman question” continually threatened to interfere with
the propaganda minister’s instrumentalization of the female body. Nazi
cinema’s deployment of the erotic sometimes backfired, resulting in excessive
film texts and resistant spectators. There is evidence that some female
spectators declined to embrace the Nazi vision of romance—a fascist love
that was, at its heart, the romance of war.
The Functions of Romance: Gender Coding
and Imperialism
In the classic melodramatic structure elaborated by nineteenth-century theater
and early twentieth-century silent cinema, conflicts are simplified in
dualistic forms and embodied as a clash of characters who represent either
preferred forms of identification or prohibited desires. In the most simplified
melodramatic form, excessive desire is located in the villain, and it threatens
a heroine who is innocent and thus without illegitimate desire. Film
melodrama of the 1930s and 1940s, however, alters this model; instead of a
struggle of innocents against villains, conflicts of desire are generally internal,
based in an overabundance within the heroine herself. Her desires are
multiple and mutually exclusive and thus impossible within the economy of
the classical film narrative, or they are forbidden by some generally accepted
moral code. The melodramatic narrative thus attempts either to limit her
desire and focus it on one object or to purge her of illicit desires. In this way
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48	 chapter two
such narratives may serve a pedagogical or ideological function by warning
of the consequences of illicit acts or by training desire to attach itself to the
“correct” object.
	 Romance can thus be recruited for political service; even if it does not
name an external enemy, as does the most original form of the melodrama,
it can form desire in ideologically useful ways. On the most primary level,
romance melodrama serves to define erotic objects. Usually it does so by
a process of elimination of excess desire—of desire for what is politically
or socially undesirable, usually embodied in personal or sexual terms by
conflicting characters. Alternatively, the elimination of excess desire follows
a pedagogical process of surrender and self-correction. In Molly Haskell’s
taxonomy of the classical Hollywood woman’s film, love stories are generally
either “choice” films, in which the female protagonist must choose between
potential lovers, or “competition” narratives, in which she must struggle
against a rival. Or they are “sacrifice” films, in which a choice has to be made
between love and another life goal, usually work.7
	 Nazi romance melodramas largely conform to this scheme as well. The
triangle was one of the most common shapes for romance narratives in the
Third Reich. In innumerable melodramas and comedies, a woman finds
herself in competition with another for the affections of a man, or she must
choose between potential mates. The choice of mates was often also a choice
between marital fidelity or infidelity. The ideological advantages of such
a narrative pattern are clear: through the eventual elimination of one of
the participants in the triangle, romance films could demonstrate preferred
forms of identification while reinforcing the traits and values connoted by
the “successful” partners. Likewise, “sacrifice” narratives provided lessons
in accommodation to social norms. However, the forms of identification
promoted by Nazi melodramas and the desires they elicited did not always
conform to the most familiar fascist pronouncements about the restoration
of woman to her “natural” position as housewife and mother.
	 Romances instruct audiences in partner choice, an issue that was of no
small concern to a state obsessed with eugenics. As Reichsfilmintendant
(Reich General Director of Film) Fritz Hippler asserted, the Nazis were
very aware of how cinema conditioned male desire in particular: “the right
woman, chosen for her external appearance as well as her internal qualities
and characteristics, if used repeatedly and successfully in the cinema, can
unconsciously but significantly influence the general level of taste and the
ideal of beauty in a great number of men to very advantageous results.”8
It
may not be immediately clear how the actresses who were cast the most often
in Third Reich films were advantageous to the racist Nazi state. As has often
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	 Romance Melodrama	 49
been noted before, the feminine beauty ideal offered by stars of Third Reich
films was not always consistent with the racial ideal promoted elsewhere in
Nazi media.9
While the press repeatedly insisted on the inbred superiority
of blondes and asserted that German-ness itself was synonymous with
beauty, some of the most privileged stars of the Third Reich were dark-haired
foreign-born women, such as Hitler’s favorite actress, Lil Dagover, and Goebbels’s
favorite mistress, Lida Baarova. Blood-and-soil ideologues praised the
purity of the farm woman and railed against the urban, androgynous styling
of both genders in the Weimar cinema, yet most Nazi female film stars were
clearly cosmopolitan in origin as well.10
And although other forms of visual
culture in the Third Reich sometimes idealized maternal and hyper-feminine
figures in retrograde imitations of nineteenth-century styles, in the cinema
such thoroughly domestic types were generally considered unappealing.
	 Indeed, the chaste, housewifely model of femininity was rarely romanticized
in Nazi cinema, a fact that was long overlooked by film scholars
who took the blood-and-soil Nazis at their word.11
Romantic heroines were
generally energetic and boyish in the manner of Marianne Hoppe, Brigitte
Horney, and Ilse Werner, the latter of whom a postwar star study described
as “the German pin-up girl” and who influenced the tastes of the World War
II generation by being “energetic, quick-witted and independent.”12
Other
lead actresses of romance melodramas, such as Zarah Leander and Olga
Tschechowa, exuded an air of worldly sophistication that made them unsuitable
for roles as contented, provincial German wives. However, the choice of
actresses in the Third Reich was not made primarily according to the values
of middle-class domesticity or the perverse logic of racial engineering. The
cinema supported an image of Nazism as a modern, revolutionary movement,
and its star system had psychological occupation in mind. The foreign and
masculinized female faces of Nazi cinema promoted the imperialistic aims
of both the militarist state and of the film industry itself. Goebbels justified
the continuing reliance on foreign-born stars by pointing to the coming
extension of the German film industry’s empire: “We have to expand our
[actress] types, since we will have to provide films to many more peoples
after the war,” he wrote in 1941.13
	 Likewise, the Nazi trade press was often concerned with the international
success of German cinema and asserted that film actresses had to give a new
face to the new state. In a 1937 article titled “Stop ‘Gretchen’!” the editors
of the Film-Kurier suggested that romance films had long given German
femininity a bad reputation abroad and had failed to correct the enduring
image of women in Germany as passive, suffering housewives. However, the
Film-Kurier suggested that Nazi culture had actually begun to change this
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50	 chapter two
image. The German actresses and dancers who had taken part in the 1937
“German Art Week” in Paris had given the French another impression, the
editors claimed, citing the commentary of French journalists who “realized,
with no small amount of surprise, that these German girls were anything but
‘Gretchen-like,’ but rather appeared as slender, athletic Amazons and as beautiful,
lively, attractive beings.”14
German cinema, the editors of Film-Kurier
insisted, should export an image of German women as erotic and dynamic
rather than prudish and homebound: “In this respect, German film, which
constantly travels beyond the German borders into foreign countries, can
clear up misunderstandings . . . German cinema must also help to overcome
the stereotypes with which the German woman and the German girl are still
frequently viewed abroad. Our young femininity no longer represents the
Gretchen of yesteryear, who was marked by a ‘sour respectability,’ a ‘conceited
humorlessness’ and domestic skills that suffocated all life.”15
And in fact the
classic melodrama of feminine innocence threatened by male Faustian drives
rarely played on Third Reich screens. The typical heroine of Nazi romances
was neither domestic nor entirely chaste; instead, she advertised the joys of
international border crossings and the pleasures of seduction. The romantic
heroine of Nazi cinema was often a privileged adventuress who did not have
to possess household skills, since she had servants to perform the suffocating
duties for her. Fixated on upper-class fantasies, German film romances
most often narrated the love lives of star stage performers or members of the
international moneyed elite, regardless of Nazi ideology’s claim to represent
the Germanic masses. Yet the cultivation of this type of gender imagery had
a logic. The heroine of the Nazi romance melodrama was a prototype suited
to the conquest of new territories, imaginable either as an imperious German
mistress of newly seized Lebensraum, or as the attractive foreign territory
itself, as the spoils of war.
	 The film Man spricht über Jacqueline (Talking about Jacqueline, 1937) is
one such high-society romance and is about the training of an Amazon of
sorts. Premiering the same year as the Film-Kurier’s call to end representations
of passive German femininity, this mediocre melodrama was a classic
competition narrative, pitting a sexually assertive tomboy heiress against
her more demure and Gretchen-like younger sister. The Jacqueline of the
film’s title is masculine and adventurous enough to be called Jack or Jacky
for short and is referred to by her male best friend as “the best guy [Kerl]
in the world.” She is described both in the dialogue and in the visual iconography
of the film as untamed and even impossibly wild. Played by the
dark-haired Wera Engels, she is predictably coded as more decadent than
her sister, played by the blonde Sabine Peters. While Jacky jets between
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	 Romance Melodrama	 51
luxury hotels in London, Rome, and Biarritz, her sister, June, stays in one
place (Paris), dutifully studying music. Despite the fact that the younger
sister does show some career ambitions and leads a metropolitan existence,
the design of the two characters opposes one sister as a representative of
modern, independent femininity and the other of more traditional, cloistered
womanhood. Jacky is costumed in manly riding boots and hunting
suits and is shown eternally in motion, either on trains or on horses, while
her more static sister appears in monastic black dresses with white trim
around high necks. Accordingly, the primary distinction between the two
characters is one of sexual knowledge. Jacky smokes lots of cigarettes and
has multiple erotic adventures, but June remains a model of self-denial
and sexual innocence. At the beginning of the film, Jacky also flatly rejects
marriage, preferring instead to engage in short affairs of her own choosing.
Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the film’s sympathies clearly lie with her;
she not only wins the romantic competition but also gets far more screen
time than her less erotically appealing sister.
	 In this regard Man spricht über Jacqueline participated in a common convention
of romance melodramas, which often favor initially transgressive
female roles. The narrative and iconography of Man spricht über Jacqueline
could be compared to the later Bette Davis romance Dark Victory (1939),
which features a similarly willful horse-riding heiress. Not surprisingly,
in both romance melodramas the heroines eventually fall from their high
horses. The riding iconography that appears in so many Nazi and Hollywood
romance melodramas makes for an appealingly gender-bending visual design,
though it also suggests that unfettered female desire is akin to a wild
bestiality and requires eventual reining in by a dominant trainer-lover. The
romance film in virtually all classical cinema evidences a hypocritical morality
in that the narrative trajectory ends in the punishment or retraining
of the liberated woman, even while it simultaneously makes her freedom
appear enviable.
	 However, unlike in Dark Victory and other Hollywood “medical discourse”
melodramas, female sexuality is the explicitly articulated problem at the
center of Man spricht über Jacqueline, not an invisible illness that requires
diagnosis and sympathetic treatment by a paternalistic doctor husband. In
many Third Reich romances it is the woman who is lusty by nature, while her
male partner is restrained. Jacky’s primary love interest, Michael, is a rigid
middle-age divorcé taking a break from his position as an overseer of unspecified
British colonies. As he soon makes clear, he tolerates no insurrection on
the “dark continent” of female desire, just as he tolerates no political resistance
by colonized peoples. He refuses to play along with Jacky’s flirtation and is
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52	 chapter two
overtly disgusted when she takes the sexual initiative. Women, he says, are
all as unreliable as his unfaithful ex-wife: “They are all the same: unbridled
and uninhibited,” he proclaims, later taking a horse whip into his hands and
threatening to use it on Jacky to retrain her. Still, the uninhibited and somewhat
masculine girl is considered more desirable than her virtuous sister. At
the end of the film, Jacky has been tamed via Michael’s brutal masculinity
and has repented her promiscuous past (but still wears transparent lingerie
in postmarital hotel beds, thus transferring ownership of her stimulating
sexuality to her husband). Her more properly dressed sister, briefly in the
running for Michael’s attentions, fails in the end to attract a mate. Evidently,
the high-spirited object of sadistic discipline was considered a better match
for the colonial master, since in her new position as mistress of a foreign
estate, she would be more likely to turn the whip against colonized others
than would a more cloistered type.
	 Man spricht über Jacqueline’s “taming of the shrew” format was reproduced
in many other Third Reich romances. Curiously, this structure can be seen
as opposite to the conventional form of Anglo-American literary romances,
Suggestions of sexual modernity: Man spricht über Jacqueline (1937). Source:
Deutsche Kinemathek
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	 Romance Melodrama	 53
which tend toward the domestication of the male partner through a recognition
of the woman’s virtue. As Tania Modleski has observed in regard to
American romance novels of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries: “Like the
Harlequins of the present day, the novels repeatedly insisted on the importance
of the heroine’s virginity . . . in novel after novel, the man is brought to
acknowledge the preeminence of love and the attractions of domesticity at
which he has, as a rule, previously scoffed.”16
Unlike such American literary
romances or the classic American film melodramas of D. W. Griffith, Nazi
film romances usually do not insist on the chastity or the domesticity of the
heroine, even if they do warn against female sexual excesses.
	 Indeed, women in Third Reich romances are granted enough signs of
autonomy and androgyny to make them appear modern and occasionally almost
liberated, though ultimately they may still be subject to the authority of
conventional narrative closure. Third Reich romances often end their battles
of the sexes in vicious forms of capitulation of the female partner (sometimes
signaled by an at least partial surrender of masculine traits). However, these
films do offer female roles that were considered somewhat transgressive at
the time the films were screened, since their thematization of sexuality was
more than what Hays Code–era Hollywood melodramas were able to risk.
The forceful reining in of such transgressions was certainly viewed by much
of the audience as necessary to prevent sexual chaos, but at the same time,
such liberties were what sold Nazi films in the Reich and abroad.
	 Clearly, what was at work in Nazi film romances such as Man spricht über
Jacqueline was not a reestablishment of traditional roles and representations
in complete opposition to the gender imagery of the Weimar Republic,
but rather an extension of Weimar’s sexual modernization—though
with a sadistic fascist edge. Historian Dagmar Herzog has stressed that
Nazism promoted an intensified liberalization of sexuality, at least for the
heterosexual, non-Jewish segment of the Reich’s population: “Although in
countless instances, above all in its thorough racialization of sex and in its
heightened homophobia, the Third Reich represented a brutal backlash
against the progressivism of Weimar, Nazism brought with it not only a
redefinition but also an expansion of preexisting liberalizing trends.”17
One
aspect of these liberalizing tendencies was the maintenance of fluidity in
gender styling.
	 Despite the Nazis’ rabid homophobia and their mass murder of gays, female
androgyny of the sort found in Man spricht über Jacqueline remained
very much a staple of Third Reich visual culture. The ambiguous gender
identity of Nazi cinema’s highest-paid star, Zarah Leander, has often been
noted by postwar film critics and was even acknowledged during Third Reich
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54	 chapter two
as well. In the advertising materials for the 1937 Leander melodrama Zu
neuen Ufern (To New Shores), there was a suggestion of the star’s bisexual
appeal: “The secret of Zarah Leander’s effect is that she touches equally on
masculine, as well as feminine feelings.”18
In an effort to cultivate masculine
feelings, Nazi cinema often presented women in drag costuming. Marlene
Dietrich–style cross-dressing in top hat, trousers, and tailcoat was common
for both film and stage revue numbers in the Third Reich, as was the manly,
aristocratic horse-riding ensemble.19
Some film narratives go even further
than mannish fashion and allow women in drag to pass as men, thus blurring
the borders of “essential” sex differences.20
Such gender ambiguity, however,
was not intended as covert support for lesbianism or female emancipation.
Rather, manly costuming corresponded to the general masculinization and
militarization of German society and to German cinema’s efforts to remain
at the forefront of industrial modernity.
	 As a result of such imagery, many contemporary viewers of Third Reich
films certainly considered the gender roles presented in them to be highly
modern rather than regressive.21
The Nazis cultivated a falsified self-image
as a revolutionary movement, and many contemporaries correspondingly
believed that Nazi culture offered the potential for sexual revolution, both
in terms of style and in sexual behavior. In 1934 Wilhelm Reich cited the
following report that he had received from a former colleague in Germany,
who believed that he had seen a clear change in sexual morality under the
Nazis: “‘The boys and girls of the Hitler Youth (H.J.) and of the League of German
Girls (B.d.M.) enjoy unheard-of freedom at school and at home, which
naturally manifests itself, inter alia, in sexual activity and friendships. In the
past, no girl of school grade would have dared to be seen with a boyfriend
picking her up after classes. Today, boys (especially H.J. boys) wait outside the
school in a crowd, and everybody accepts this as a matter of course. Everybody
says that B.d.M. stands for Bubi-drück-mich (I-wanna-be-hugged).’”22
Wilhelm Reich insisted that such examples were not actually proof of a new
degree of sexual freedom under the Nazis, and he emphasized that Nazism
was in fact deeply reactionary in its sexual ideology. But the popular sense
that Nazi culture promoted a liberation of sexual morality was widespread
at the time, regardless of how repressive the rhetoric of the more extreme
Nazi ideologues and the reality of gender relations in the Third Reich actually
were. Many observers, both in the Reich and abroad, felt that there had
been an eroticization of public life under Hitler and that morals of the masses
were loosening according to a master plan. In 1942 Herbert Marcuse wrote
in regard to Nazism and its self-representation in art:
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	 Romance Melodrama	 55
Sexual life has become a matter of political training and manipulation . . . Official
encouragement is expressed in the deliberate herding of boys and girls in and
near the labor camps, and in the stimulating distinctness with which National
Socialist artists expose the erogenous zones of the human body . . . This new
National Socialist realism fulfills its political function as an instrument for sexual
education and inducement. The political utilization of sex has transformed it
from a sphere of protective privacy in which a recalcitrant freedom could endure
to a sphere of acquiescent license.23
In fact, the Propaganda Ministry did view the intensified eroticization of
Nazi culture as an effective political strategy. In 1937 Goebbels noted approvingly
in his diary that liberalization was already taking effect: “Sex life in this
gigantic city somewhat loosened. It has to be that way.”24
	 The cinema of the Third Reich attempted to create and capitalize on such
illusions of sexual liberation. Just like the Film-Kurier’s article about modern
German femininity, Third Reich media often compared past moments of
repressive bourgeois morality to the Hitler era’s more “enlightened” sexual
morals and gender roles. Goebbels, at least, felt that the Third Reich was at
the forefront of a cultural revolution that showed itself in its feminine beauty
ideals. Nazi women were more modern than their repressed Wilhelmine
grandmothers, he noted in his diary in 1939: “We chat at the Führer’s about
the variability of the concept of female beauty. What was considered beautiful
40 years ago is now chunky, fat, flabby. Sports, permissiveness, gymnastics,
and the battle against hypocrisy have changed humanity . . . We are racing at
full speed toward a new antiquity. And in all fields, we are the pioneers of this
revolution.”25
Film, of course, was Goebbels’s preferred medium for beauty
revolutions. Continuing the fight against nineteenth-century styles of living,
Nazi cinema consciously cultivated the erotic attractions of its female stars.
	 Documents that remain from a state-sponsored program of training camps
for future Nazi film stars (Nachwuchsforderung) show that actresses with a
strong sex appeal were actively recruited. Prospective candidates were given
screen tests and evaluated according to their physical features and their general
attractiveness. The candidates’ body and facial shapes were analyzed in
detail, though what was sought was less an impression of ideal beauty or even
racial purity than of erotic appeal. This appeal was generally synonymous
with a sense of the exotic, not necessarily of the Volk (people). Candidates
who had what the Nazis considered to be ideal facial and racial features
were nonetheless rejected if they failed to excite male fantasy, as the following
memo from Reichsfilmdramaturg (Chief Script Editor) Frank Maraun
regarding the screen test of one candidate showed: “The shots show that
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56	 chapter two
[she] has a pretty figure, nice legs and an appealing naturalness in her manner
and acting. But her face seems a bit boring and expressionless. It reveals
a nice but rather unimaginative ordinary person without the attractions of
an individual personality. Therefore it does not appear justified to make a
further attempt with [her].”26
Nice legs were not enough for the Nazi cinema
if they suggested only the banal beauty of the average German girl; what
was desired on the screen were not female representations of “the people”
but rather of less common and more individual, even willful, types. Despite
the often-repeated rhetoric of the Nazi press and other forms of printed
propaganda insisting that the form of femininity desired in the Nazi state
was based on völkisch, racialized aesthetics and rural values, the femininity
cultivated on the screen was of a distinctly wealthier and worldlier class.27
	 The Nazi leadership’s rejection of what they viewed as bourgeois morality
did not necessarily extend to bourgeois or aristocratic style; there was
a clear discrimination against rural, proletarian, and petit bourgeois types
in the Nazis’ cultivation of stars. In 1941 Goebbels wrote that the selection
of trainee actors and actresses who make a “petit bourgeois impression”
should be avoided, because “in almost no case do they have the possibility
of gaining international clout.”28
One candidate, whom Frank Maraun described
as an exceptionally talented actress with an already successful stage
career, was nonetheless rejected for film roles because she had a “pronounced
poor-person-characteristic in her face.”29
By way of contrast, another female
candidate, who was given a screen test in 1942 and whose last name indicated
aristocratic origins, was chosen for star training even though she had no
acting experience, because she could “probably be developed into a sophisticated
type of young socialite [Salondame].”30
What was worth developing
in the socialite type—besides the attractions of wealth and glamour—was
the image of self-aware female sexuality; the upper-class mistress of the salon
consciously applied erotic charm, the appeal of which was international.
	 In general, Third Reich actresses who showed an ability to portray characters
that clearly possessed sexual knowledge were preferred over more wholesome
types, particularly for use as the heroines of romance melodramas.
Sometimes eroticism could even take precedence over ideal physiognomy,
and occasionally an actress was chosen specifically for her less sophisticated,
rawer form of sex appeal. Maraun’s assessment of the facial features of another
female candidate in May 1942 is surprising in this regard: “As a result of her
low hairline and her noticeably small forehead, her face has a pronounced
animalistic quality. The expression around the mouth intensifies the impression
of a whore. But this tendency toward whorishness in the candidate is
not unappealing. One could imagine that the candidate could develop into
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	 Romance Melodrama	 57
a striking and useful type.”31
The fact that Maraun considered this actress
to have a usefully “whorish” look indicates the extent to which eroticism
was consciously instrumentalized by Nazi culture producers. His use of the
terms “prägnant” (striking, or fertile) and “einsatzfähig” (useful, or capable
of being deployed) in describing the desirability of this type of actress reveals
that the female body was considered a key weapon on both domestic and
international fronts. Nazi cinema, like Nazi society in general, clearly had
a continuing need for prostitutes.32
Usually they appeared as minor background
figures rather than romantic leads, lending harbor bars and colonial
nightclubs their fascinatingly exotic atmospheres (as in Helmut Käutner’s
melodrama Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 [Great Freedom Nr. 7], 1944). In lead roles
the prostitute was generally promoted to the level of wealthy courtesan and
given the tragic higher art status of a fallen woman, as in Der Postmeister.
	 Another of Hilde Krahl’s lead roles, however, offered the reversed logic by
rescuing a woman from a brothel and integrating her into Hanseatic high
society. At the beginning of the 1939 romance/adventure film Die barmherzige
Lüge (The Merciful Lie), Krahl’s heroine Anja is coded as a prostitute, and,
more remarkably, her national and ethnic origins remain somewhat uncertain
throughout the film. The initial sequences are set somewhere along the
Manchurian-Mongolian border, in a town that, as the introductory titles
proclaim, is the starting point of dangerous expeditions into frontier regions.
At the center of the mise-en-scène of this wild East outpost is a female-owned
tavern and brothel (offering, as a sign indicates, “Equipment of All Kinds”).
Anja, the niece of the brothel owner, is shown in her first scene on horseback,
winning a race against a group of male riders. When she returns to the tavern
from her riding expedition, she is propositioned by a French man who offers
her furs in exchange for favors, and she brushes him off with a bored “maybe,”
after which a wandering camera explores the other Eurasian prostitutes’ legs
and chest regions. This eastern wilderness is represented as a space where
everything can be either purchased or taken by force, and where individual
Europeans have the right to explore unmapped territories and to colonize
what they find useful.
	 The hidden potential of this fertile ground and its main character is revealed
in the next sequence, when the viewer discovers that the wild rider
Anja is also the single mother of a half-German baby. Within a few cuts the
unwitting father of the child (the “explorer” Dr. Thomas Clausen) unexpectedly
returns in colonial khaki, ready for another expedition into the Sovietcontrolled
borderlands. Determined to unite with the father, Anja watches
in disappointment as he helps another woman out of his tank-like truck.
This rival is the explorer’s German wife, and her character is constructed
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The “eroticism-filled air of colonial surroundings”: Die barmherzige Lüge (1939).
Rights: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung; Distributor: Transit Film GmbH
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	 Romance Melodrama	 59
to provide an obvious contrast to the vampish Anja. Unlike Anja, the legal
wife is sexually naïve and unexciting, a young blonde with the virginal name
Maria, who takes care of her husband with complete devotion. In one scene
she explains their marriage thus: “He needs someone to sew on his buttons,
and I also transcribe his journal,” to which her husband sarcastically answers,
“What would I do without you?” She also inquires what the male fur
hunters are doing in the tavern, failing to understand the sexual economy of
this world. The contrast between the sexual knowledge of the two women is
also connoted through dress: while Maria covers herself in respectable wool
suits, Anja appears in a low-cut dress with a feather boa and a coquettish fan.
Significantly, though, the chastely dutiful Maria is also childless, and here
the viewer is perhaps supposed to infer a connection between her ignorance
about the facts of prostitution and her own lack of fruitful sexuality. At this
point in the narrative, we might expect the competition structure to be resolved
according to the standard international convention for melodrama,
whereby women of ambiguous sexual morals are punished and eliminated
in order to make room for “pure” heroines and to reaffirm the status quo of
marriage. However, in Die barmherzige Lüge it is the sexually innocent legal
wife who is given a quick offscreen death, while the prostitute and premarital
mother is finally recognized as the legitimate romantic partner. After Maria
dies of food poisoning and Thomas disappears on an expedition, Anja
travels to Germany and integrates herself into his wealthy Bremen family,
masquerading as the dead Maria.
	 The vision of German family life portrayed in the rest of the film is typical
for Nazi romances, and also typically at odds with the official Nazi ideology
of large families comprised of classless members of a national community.
The Germany of Third Reich romance films is populated by corporate directors,
abundant servants, and few children. When Anja brings her son into
the family mansion, there is a flurry of dynastic excitement, since she has
succeeded in finally rescuing the imperiled family corporation by means of
a male heir and future director. The supposedly valuable child, it should be
noted, does not receive more screen time than is necessary to simply state
its existence, since the interests of the film lie more with adult situations.
This, as we will see in the next chapter, is fully consistent with Nazi cinema’s
ambivalent attitude toward children.
	 Although she is not eliminated, the sexualized heroine in Die barmherzige
Lüge does go through a retraining process before her final integration into
the couple, but this process is less brutal than in the earlier Man spricht über
Jacqueline. While in Bremen, Anja smokes, unpacks and fondles her sequined
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60	 chapter two
dress nostalgically, and offers herself for casual sex to a friend of the family,
but she soon surrenders these markers of her past life in order to assimilate
into upper-class society for the sake of her child. The final shot of the film
has Anja complacently sitting in the springtime backyard in a flowered dress,
surrounded by her son and his father (presumably now her legitimate husband,
though no wedding is ever shown). The transformation from fur to
floral prints, from horse riding in the steppe to a chair under an oak, marks
a classic taming-of-the-shrew narrative. It should be noted, however, that
while a retraining process occurs here—as in most romance films that feature
somewhat transgressive heroines—there is no explicit punishment. Rather,
the formation of the family and the heroine’s rise in class status at the end of
the film is presented as a final recognition of the inherent legitimacy of the
premarital mother.
	 Thus, although the ending of Die barmherzige Lüge is entirely conventional,
this film is another example of how the sexual morality of Nazi melodramas
often differed significantly from that of Hays Code–era Hollywood. This
difference can perhaps be explained by the same political intent evident in
Hilde Krahl’s later starring role in Der Postmeister. Like the later film, Die
barmherzige Lüge does double duty by picturing the spaces of war and suggesting
the sexual possibilities of wartime conquest while setting standards
for gender roles at home. The Manchurian setting of the beginning sequences
of the film clearly locate it in an area of conflict related to the upcoming
military campaign. If Der Postmeister promised erotic adventure as a main
attraction awaiting the soldier/colonizer in the Soviet East, Die barmherzige
Lüge paved the same road by providing a similar spectacle of foreign bodies
that could be either taken by force or purchased with goods acquired by
guns. The eastern territories pictured in Die barmherzige Lüge seem to offer
something to female military-entrepreneurial spirit as well. Anja’s aunt Vera
is not only a madam but also a merchant of materiél for European expeditions,
and she is described in the film’s dialogue as making a highly profitable
Bombengeschäft (literally, a “bombing business”) in doing so. She is also the
most powerful person in town, commanding an army of subordinates. There
was thus a subtle lure written into this script, a promise of new economic
possibilities in the East for Nazi women. In the German Reich, it also made
clear, making large sums of money remained a hereditary male trade.
	 While suggesting the attractions to be found in the business of war, the film’s
voyages across the two spaces of foreign and domestic, East and West, also
created a hybrid model of femininity that was typical for Nazi melodramas.
Romances required their female leads to display both erotic appeal and public
restraint, fertility and masculine energy, self-sacrifice and individualized
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	 Romance Melodrama	 61
character. Though the previously wild heroine becomes partially domesticated
through insertion into urbane society, she is still clearly in possession of the
skills that allowed her to survive at the borders of civilization—and is ready
to unpack them again for German wartime use. The western movement of the
heroine in Die barmherzige Lüge conformed to the Heim-ins-Reich (return-tothe-Reich)
structure of many Nazi melodramas that featured women abroad.
By first locating the heroine in foreign territory and then repatriating her into
the Reich, such films fabricated an integrated national body whose aggressive
arms reached across many continents. Curiously, though, the heroine of Die
barmherzige Lüge is never explicitly identified as being of German ethnicity;
thus, nationalization occurs here with a woman of ambiguous origins.
	 This ambiguity of origins was not at all atypical for Nazi romantic heroines,
since Nazi cinema as a whole relied heavily upon the allure of the foreign
in terms of both casting and setting. The contradiction between the Third
Reich’s racial policies and its cinematic imaginary was a thorn in the eyes
of some Nazis who insisted on ideological consistency. In his 1941 treatise
on the ideals and failings of Nazi film, Peter von Werder criticized what he
saw as a still rampant preference for exotic types and suggested that German
cinema’s eroticization of foreigners and even non-Europeans was being
carried out at the expense of German women. This had to be changed,
von Werder insisted: “the colored woman is still not represented in film in
a way which reflects our actual views. A corresponding correction of the
female image as it appears in the foreign and therefore particularly pungent
eroticism-filled air of colonial surroundings is practically and theoretically
important: practically with regard to the colonial expectations of the Germans
and theoretically with regard to the overall attitude toward the German
woman.”33
Erotic fantasies of dark-skinned women, von Werder implied, were
threatening the ability of German men to be both efficient administrators of
colonial territories and pure breeders with German women. Films should
be structured according to racial motives, he asserted: “A romantic admiration
for the foreigner, especially in his most private area, is not appropriate
. . . The dramaturgical objection that foreign eroticism creates a first-class
attraction for the cinematic form takes second place to ideological-political
considerations, as well as to the racial law of breeding.”34
Even in the Third
Reich, as von Werder implies here, film producers depended upon eroticism
as the main foundation of cinematic effectiveness, and fantasies of the foreign
remained a primary source of spectator pleasure. Von Werder, however,
clearly neglected to understand just how central such fantasies were to the
Nazi imperialist (and even racist) project.35
As we have seen in Der Postmeister
and Die barmherzige Lüge, the erotic gaze onto foreign territories and bodies
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62	 chapter two
indeed supported the “ideological-political” aims of militaristic expansion,
as did Nazi cinema’s visions of femininity in general.
	 However, I would suggest that the standards set by actors in romance
melodramas were actually more crucial for the Nazi racist logic than those of
actresses. Representations of femininity were perhaps not always consistent,
because they were less central to the fascist project than rigid conceptions of
masculinity. The eroticized or romanticized foreigner, as von Werder suggested,
was therefore primarily a female role. With the exceptions of the
Dutch actors Johannes Heesters and Frits van Dongen, almost all the male
stars of Third Reich romance films were German or Austrian. This fact did
have a basis in the divided attitudes towards inter-ethnic reproduction: Nazi
leaders often accounted for the fact that German soldiers would produce children
with foreign women, particularly through prostitution or rape, which
they considered natural effects of war and colonization. According to their
perverse logic, this could only further the ultimate goal of the Germanization
of the world. Since German men would not be expected to take responsibility
for children fathered with women abroad, their foreign affairs would
have no effect on the ethnic constitution of the Reich. On the other hand,
German women’s romances with foreign men would lead to a disastrous
degeneration of “the blood” and the contamination of the “national body,”
according to Nazi thinking.36
The fact that Nazi propaganda did not manage
to entirely eradicate German women’s attraction to foreigners, especially to
non-“Aryans,” was a constant source of anxiety for the authorities.37
	 Thus, Nazi cinema allowed for some foreign attractions when it came to
the choice of actresses, but its choice of male romantic leads was less adventurous.
Classical cinema’s conventional gender divisions also influenced the
choice of actors. In Germany, as in Hollywood, the actresses were the primary
spectacle. The male leads of Nazi romances were so similar in their physical
type that for today’s viewers they may be virtually indistinguishable from each
other, and their character types were also standardized. They were uncomplicated
winners, as this contemporary description of the popular actor Hans
Söhnker demonstrates: “He has always been given victorious roles, men who
not only always get their due and attain their goal, thus remaining the hero
in the sense of the old cinematic norm, but who also stand on the sunny side
of life, and who, above all, must never go through any tragic transformation
themselves, or make any steps toward devilish temptation.”38
The typical Nazi
romantic hero was always right and was never asked to undergo character
developments.39
Male actors were often chosen according to their ability to
create an impression of “manliness,” which, as we have seen in Man spricht
über Jacqueline, was often synonymous with sexual restraint. An actor who
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	 Romance Melodrama	 63
seemed too arrogantly aware of his seductive powers could be rejected as
being too feminine, as proved by another of Frank Maraun’s memos regarding
the screen test of a male candidate for actor’s training. Maraun wrote:
“All in all, an unmanly appearance. Is unpleasantly self-satisfied and has the
presumptuous superiority of a young hairdresser who gets girls easily, for my
tastes altogether too soft . . . In sum: training does not appear worthwhile.”40
Male seducers did not often appear on Nazi screens, since sexual awareness
and gender flexibility were considered female properties.
	 Indeed, the Nazi image of masculinity and the gender roles of German
men were more determinate than that of women. Male androgyny was
much less common in Third Reich media than images of female androgyny,
and intimations of male homosexuality were rare in Third Reich cinema.
An important reason for the greater flexibility in female representations
lies in the fact that lesbianism was considered less threatening to the Nazi
system than male homosexuality. Whereas gay men appeared to undermine
the reproduction goals of the Third Reich, lesbians theoretically could still
produce future soldiers. Furthermore, in the Weimar era there had been
a greater degree of institutionalized homophobia directed toward men
than toward women. While male homosexuality had been punishable by
law since 1919 under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, no law
officially existed on the books during the Weimar Republic or the Third
Reich to punish female homosexuality. Weimar-era opponents of Nazism,
we should remember, also made use of homophobia in their anti-Nazi
rhetoric.41
Nazism’s association with male homosexuality in the popular
imaginary had become a political liability by the early 1930s, and Nazi
leaders sought to limit such associations through the murder of gay members
of the paramilitary SA (Sturmabteilung), and by controlling images
of masculinity in Third Reich media.
	 As a result, male leads in Nazi films were generally strict and efficient,
lacking in the sort of character development that arose from the conflicting
desires of female protagonists. The romance film’s triangular choice structures
confined male subjectivity into the isolation cells of either winner or
loser. Much stress was placed upon the class status of male protagonists,
with the winning romantic hero in Nazi melodramas almost always a man
of means; there was nothing socialist about the National Socialist romantic
imaginary. A favorite lead figure for Nazi melodramas before 1939 was the
British aristocrat or high-level colonial administrator (as in Man spricht über
Jacqueline, Eine Frau ohne Bedeutung (A Woman of No Importance, 1936), and
Das Mädchen Irene). After the start of the war he was replaced by the figure
of the haut bourgeois shipping executive from Bremen or Hamburg (as in
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64	 chapter two
the romance melodramas Frauenliebe–Frauenleid [Women’s Loves–Women’s
Sorrows, 1937] and Opfergang [Sacrifice, 1944]). Other romance films feature
business leaders with colonial connections, such as Willy Birgel’s Berlin industrialist
moonlighting as a pilot/adventurer in North Africa in Verklungene
Melodie (Dead Melody, 1939).
	 Male romantic leads were commonly also medical doctors or Herr Doktors;
in most instances romantic heroes represented some kind of authority
figure. Although many women in Third Reich melodramas had professions,
their matches were almost always higher on the professional ladder, and quite
often their matches were their supervisors both at work and at home. Men
in Third Reich romances were usually many years older than their female
counterparts, which, as we will see in the next chapter, often gave rise to suggestions
of incestuous attractions. Heroines of Nazi love stories were often
barely even of legal age, and any objection to such intergenerational romances
was often portrayed as outmoded bourgeois prudery. Most notably in this
regard, the romances Reifende Jugend (Ripening Youth, 1933), Arme kleine
Inge (Poor Little Inge, 1936), Liebe kann lügen (Love Can Lie, 1937), and Ihr
erstes Erlebnis (Her First Experience, 1939) all pair teenage schoolgirls with
their teachers.
	 Reifende Jugend was one of the first productions of the Third Reich to be
highly praised in the Nazi press, and it was one of the first to address the
place of girls and women in the new regime. It is particularly conflicted in
its reinforcement of patriarchal structures, since it also critiques educational
discrimination and pretends to present a modern and progressive perspective
on gender. The film concerns a trio of girls who transfer into an elite,
all-male high school in the patrician city of Lübeck so that they can study for
their university entrance exams, a course of study not available to them in
their gender-segregated school. Many of the all-male teachers of the school
see the presence of the girls as an attack on traditional values and academic
quality, a position that the film initially sets out to correct. The Latin teacher,
the most sexist of the group, is caricatured as hopelessly out of date, his ideas
on gender as outmoded as his Wilhelmine-style middle part and fencing scar.
The boys in the school initially treat the girls with macho disdain, until the
girls succeed in proving themselves against all expectations by excelling in
math and science, while the hormone-driven boys begin to write love poetry
and neglect their schoolwork.
	 Reifende Jugend stars Hertha Thiele as the main protagonist, Elfriede, and
she lends a lot of the independent, intelligent vigor that she displayed in
her roles in Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform, 1931) and Kuhle Wampe,
oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World? 1932) to
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	 Romance Melodrama	 65
this role as well. Though the earlier film has often been cited as a classic of
lesbian cinema, it was also openly admired by film journalists in the Third
Reich, and consequently it was clearly a model for Reifende Jugend and other
youth films after 1933.42
In fact, Reifende Jugend replays many of the same
elements as Mädchen in Uniform, but substitutes a heterosexual choice narrative
for the Weimar film’s homosexual crush. The film ultimately performs
a switch by shifting the focus from the issue of girls and science education
to the question of which romantic partner Elfriede will choose—either her
adoring classmate Knud or her authoritarian physics teacher, Dr. Kerner.
Naturally, the much older man wins the competition, becoming both the
final examiner and the fiancé of the schoolgirl. Although all the girls pass
their final exams with high marks, in the end it remains unclear whether
they will go on to careers in medicine or simply marry. The initially progressive
impulse of the film toward gender equality is thus partially defused and
rerouted into romance, which is configured as a hierarchical rather than an
egalitarian structure.
	 It was not only in schoolgirl romances that this occurred but also in many
other choice narratives of Nazi cinema. In the standard choice scheme, a
young and comparatively sensitive man competes for the heroine against
Confronting sexism in the schoolgirl romance film: Reifende Jugend (1933).
Source: Deutsche Kinemathek
Heins_NaziFilm_text.indd 65 5/3/13 11:43 AM
66	 chapter two
an older authority figure who, in most cases, shows contempt for or disapproval
of her. The older man almost always prevails, as if film producers
feared that women might be tempted to flee the hierarchical fascist order
with a young male comrade and set up a democratic community of two. A
subsidiary plotline in Man spricht über Jacqueline provided another example
of just such a training in partner choice. The young, male best friend who
calls Jacky “the best guy in the world” and clearly desires her in her original
form is rejected in favor of the older man who, as the heroine says, can “make
what he wants out of a woman.” At the end of the film, the winner, Michael,
proclaims in relation to the chastised Jacky, “I tortured her because I love her.”
As is usual in Third Reich films, the cruel, authoritarian male is presented as
the preferable choice, and brutality is presented as the very proof of love. In
Nazi romances the lovers are adversaries rather than virtuous allies besieged
by a villainous foe, in contrast to earlier conventions of romance.43
	 Despite their seemingly autonomous, willful characteristics, romantic
heroines often proclaim in Nazi scripts that they want men who can dominate
them, who are stubborn Dickschädel (thick heads), not tender lovers. This
is perfectly consistent with international generic conventions for classical
cinema, since melodramatic heroines, in both Germany and America, usually
prefer men who show contempt for them. As Pam Cook stated in regard
to the Hollywood romance: “the problematization of female desire in the
women’s picture means that her choice of the romantic hero as love object
is usually masochistic, against her own best interests, and she suffers for her
desire.”44
For Cook, Hollywood’s problem lies in the very irreconcilability
of femininity and desire, in the essential impossibility of conceptualizing
feminine subjectivity within the classical representational system. Even if
the heroine’s choice is painful, in essence there is really no choice at all.
Labors of Love: Work Romances
In many romance films, of Hollywood as well as the Third Reich, the central
conflict of interest is a woman’s irreconcilable attachment to both love
and work. The conventional solution to this form of triangular desire in all
classical cinemas is the surrender of the latter for the former. In most Hollywood
films of the 1930s and ’40s, as in the majority of Third Reich films,
women ended their careers in marriage. As Molly Haskell commented, female
autonomy was merely a narrative ploy in American films of the era: “their
mythic destiny, like that of all women, was to find love and cast off the ‘veneer’
of independence.”45
Casting off independence was generally equivalent
to discarding the illusion of subjectivity, the claim to desire.
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	 Romance Melodrama	 67
	 However, in some instances work actually appeared stronger than love.
It is clear from many romance films of the Third Reich that the veneer of
autonomy was still quite appealing, and the desire for recognition in the
workplace remained strong among many female spectators. In the 1938 romance
Die vier Gesellen (The Four Companions), the process of surrendering
to a conventional female destiny appears particularly painful. The film
argues that female claims to financial independence are doomed due to the
ever present double standard in the economic sphere, yet it simultaneously
evokes utopian desires for an egalitarian world where talent would be rewarded
regardless of gender. Love, on the other hand, appears somewhat
unattractive in comparison.
	 DievierGesellenstarsHansSöhnkerasaprofessorofadvertisingandgraphic
design, and the beautifully brooding Ingrid Bergman (in her only appearance
in a Third Reich film) as his art school student. At the beginning of the film,
Söhnker’s character lectures his soon-to-graduate class about the difficulty of
making money with drawing and painting and then addresses his four female
students directly, warning them about the particular futility of their career
efforts. Bergman’s character, Marianne, he says, suffers from “misguided feminine
ambitions,” so he offers her a job as his housewife instead. A subsequent
scene begins to express the frustrations of a woman with ambition in an unequal
world. Söhnker as the chauvinistic professor surprises her in the school
kitchen as she is preparing food for the graduation party, and tells her that an
apron is really the most flattering work wear for her and that cooking is the
most advanced “feminine science.” Bergman/Marianne responds with a furious
look, leans into a loaf of bread with an enormous knife, and then drops
a greasy sausage into a boiling pot of water. Not taking much notice of her
castrating gesture or of her legitimate resentment, the professor details her
other future job duties, such as sewing on his buttons and darning the holes
in his socks, before complaining that the sandwich she has just prepared was
obviously not “smeared with love.” He adds that she will still have plenty of
time to learn how to butter bread correctly, and then slaps her on the back and
growls “Wiedersehen!” before exiting the room. The camera work in this scene
serves to align the viewer with the female protagonist’s perspective, since it
revealstheratherdisgustingmaterialityofthefoodthatMarianneispreparing,
and creates a very palpable sense of dread with regard to the daily work of a
housewife. But this film does not intend to offer an escape. It is already clear at
thisearly point in the film that thisman is indeed her future husband, although
the film barely maintains a discourse of love. Instead, marriage is presented
in dreary economic terms, as a form of cheap labor like many others, but the
rest of the narrative works on breaking down the woman’s resistance to this
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Foregrounding the romance of work: Die vier Gesellen (1938). Courtesy bpk,
Berlin/Art Resource, New York
Heins_NaziFilm_text.indd 68 5/3/13 11:43 AM
	 Romance Melodrama	 69
position. The film thus reflects what Marcuse referred to as Nazism’s “cynical
matter-of-factness,” according to which all private need was subordinated to
the demands of industrial efficiency.46
	 Die vier Gesellen directly addresses gender discrimination and sexual harassment
in the work world, presenting both of these as unavoidable facts
of life and the result of a strained economy. After the heroine’s demeaning
encounter with her professor and future fiancé, she becomes determined to
prove him wrong by launching her own career in advertising. A montage
sequence follows with shots of Marianne searching for a job, cutting out
newspaper announcements, traveling through the city, and experiencing one
rejection after another—a montage that is clearly indebted to Weimar-era
proletarian films like Kuhle Wampe. A close-up of her shoes reveals holes
in their soles, directly visualizing the physical costs of feminine ambition.
During one interview a lecherous company director says he might consider
trying her out, with the editing of the sequence suggesting in what capacity
she would be expected to work. His voice track is added to a visual montage
of fragmented shots of the legs and breasts of wooden mannequins modeling
lingerie, as if to suggest by analogy that female bodies are still the main
unit of exchange in the business world and that they are as interchangeable
as the limbs on a mannequin.
	 The central section of the film does manage to briefly awaken hope of escape
from this oppressive sexual economy. When Marianne joins forces with
the other underemployed female graduates of her design program and they
launch their own advertising firm, the all-female company appears almost
as a viable—though militaristically disciplined—alternative to marital life.
They receive one short-lived design contract, and an ecstatic scene follows
as the young women see their advertising poster hanging in the Friedrichstrasse,
Berlin’s main commercial street, and view the results of their work
as publicly visible and validated. But once it becomes known that the firm is
female-owned, the contracts do not continue, and soon they can no longer
find money for food and rent. When Marianne’s former professor comes to
visit and renews his offer of marriage, she is already swooning from hunger,
her entrepreneurial will broken. Marianne’s capitulation to housewifery at the
end of the film suggests the necessary failure of women’s business ambitions.
The only escape for the ambitious, exceptional woman, the film suggests, was
in the higher sphere of fascist “fine art.” Three of the four business partners
end up with unplanned pregnancies or in unappealing marriages, while the
fourth, the woman coded as the most masculine, remains single and finds
her calling in the painting of massive, propagandistic canvases; consistent
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70	 chapter two
with Nazi cinema’s frequent equation of the artist with the soldier, she is effectively
recruited to serve the state in a warlike fashion.
	In Die vier Gesellen paid work and marriage are considered mutually exclusive,
and the film’s denouement does give priority to the latter. The rest
of the film, however, manages to awaken the desire for both gender equality
and for same-sex community much more effectively than the desire for heterosexual
love. The battle of the sexes is not resolved in a joyful embrace of
romance in this film; Bergman’s character agrees to marry Söhnker’s because
she is literally starving, and because it is the most conventional form of narrative
closure. The mystique of marriage is barely maintained here, and as
in so many Nazi romance melodramas, only a sense of resignation remains.
As we will see in the next chapter, this is not the only Third Reich film that
evidences ambivalence toward the institution of marriage.
	 Die vier Gesellen is also not the only film of the Third Reich that speaks to
female desires for public recognition of accomplishments, even if Nazi cinema
had no genuine intention of advancing an autonomous female subjectivity.
Reifende Jugend, as we have seen, thematizes male prejudice in regard to female
talents in the sciences and creates a vision of a potential world of equal
access, though it derails this possibility through romance with a dominant
mate. There are a few notable exceptions to the “taming of the shrew” mold.
In the 1939 romance Illusion, a stubborn rural aristocrat demands that his
successful actress fiancée give up her career to marry him, and she suffers
many melodramatic torments until she finally breaks off the engagement at
the end of the film and decides in favor of her audiences, a choice validated
by the Nazi overvaluation of the political function of art. In several films,
the work/love triangle is actually resolved in a more balanced manner. In the
1943 romantic comedy Unser Fräulein Doktor (Our Miss PhD), the heroine
marries and maintains her professorial position. In Die Großstadtmelodie
(Melody of a Great City), a woman’s film from the same year, a photojournalist
perseveres in the face of her industry’s chauvinism until she finally couples
with a famous photographer who encourages her work.
	 Most Nazi romances that address the problem of a love relationship in
conflict with work do end in a surrender of career ambitions for the sake of
marriage. But this can be considered as much a concession to international
generic and gender standards as to specifically fascist ideologies. Most romance
films in all the classical cinemas of the 1930s and 1940s ended in an
implicit marital pact and a broken work contract. Molly Haskell has even
proposed that this was due to market concerns in accordance with spectator
preference, that the conventional endings of Hollywood films were the
ones desired by female audiences themselves: “After all, most women were
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	 Romance Melodrama	 71
housewives and they didn’t want to be made to feel that there was a whole
world of possibilities they had forsaken through marriage or inertia; rather,
they wanted confirmation of the choice they had made.”47
In an insecure
world of limited options and male resistance, progressive images of successful
female professionals certainly provoked more anxiety than pleasure for
some female spectators.48
	 The seemingly ambiguous attitude toward women’s careers in Nazi romances
may point less to ideological inconsistencies in Nazi film policy and
more to calculated tactics when it comes to addressing female spectators.
As Claudia Koonz has asserted, the appeal of Nazism for some women was
actually the promise that they would be able to return to traditional gender
roles. Many German women, particularly from the lower classes, did not
romanticize the work world: “While American feminists were demanding
entry into paid work, poorly paid German women dreamed of escaping from
it.”49
Many women voted for the Nazis in the hope that they could become
housewives, but this promise for the most part went unfulfilled: “German
wives and mothers who had rallied to a revival of domesticity felt cheated
when Nazi policy threatened them with ‘modernization’ worse than the threat
of New Womanhood in the Weimar Republic.”50
Both Nazi policy and Nazi
imagery offered mixed messages to women, in the face of which they could
easily be misled, or to which they could choose their own preferred interpretation.
The Third Reich created conditions for which it pretended to be
the solution, creating anxiety while promising to alleviate it in return for
allegiance. Nazi propaganda promised to “restore womanhood” to a former
place of esteem, a promise that appealed to women who felt maltreated by
Weimar-era commodification. Nazi cinema, on the other hand, offered illusions
of continuity with Weimar culture that certainly soothed those who
were concerned about Nazi ideology’s regressive tendencies.
	 For women who wished to work, Nazi cinema did offer some encouragement,
since films in which a single female main protagonist does not have an
identifiable occupation are in the minority.51
Images of married professional
women were less common in Nazi cinema, and in films that did feature a
married woman, her main occupation was usually extramarital romance (as
we will see in the next chapter). When proper housewives appeared on screen,
they often did so as minor characters and negative examples. Housewives
were sometimes even figures of ridicule, and working women were often
contrasted favorably to women with no profession.52
	 A scene in the 1938 melodrama Heimat (Homeland), for example, actually
argues for the moral superiority of the woman who can earn her own living.
Although generically more a family melodrama than a romance film, it is
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72	 chapter two
worth considering here. Zarah Leander stars in the role of Magda, a woman
who has made a highly successful career as a singer in America and returns
to her Prussian hometown to both pay a visit to her stern father and settle
the score with the man who many years ago made her a single mother.
Upon arrival in her otherwise stifling and hostile Heimat, she is invited by
an enlightened young prince to give a public performance of her music at a
royal ball. The ball guests and members of the local gentry are caricatured in
the scene as representatives of an outdated puritanical morality—a morality
that, as the film implies, had been overcome by the new morals of National
Socialism. As the review of the film in the popular magazine Filmwelt emphasized,
Magda was to be understood as a proto-fascist fighter against the
prudish standards of Wilhelmine high society:
In the seclusion of the upper class there were iron rules that were supposed to
be civilized, but were often inhumane. This film, Heimat, freely adapted from
Sudermann’s play, tells us how a strong heart overcame such obstacles, in order
to correct a moral code that was suffocating in ruffles and whale bones . . . In
this way, this female fighter in the best sense of the word comes to the great
sentence: “I believe, ladies, that every person has the right to live his own life
as he, within the context of society, sees fit.”53
	 Both this review and the film suggested that the traditionalist Wilhelmine
women in whalebone corsets were the main enforcers of a hypocritical
morality that reigned until fascism cleared the way for the more liberated
lifestyle of the working woman. All plump, older housewives, they are costumed
in the Third Reich’s usual way of indicating an unsympathetic and
outmoded style of femininity: with high-necked black lace gowns, Victorian
brooches, and bonnets or oversized feathered hats. Magda, on the other
hand, is costumed in a gold-trimmed, low-cut ball gown and has uncovered
hair. She is repeatedly framed in shots with groups of admiring men,
while the ladies are separated in their own shots or are visible in the background
of the mise-en-scène, nosily inspecting Magda’s provocative dress
through lorgnettes. This use of eyeglasses indicates that they have control
over vision and that women determine social manners in this supposedly
skewed society. Directing her critical look to Magda, one woman whispers
disapprovingly, “Morals are certainly loosening to an alarming degree!”
Even more, the unsightly matrons are disgusted by Magda’s mobile lifestyle
and her refusal to settle into a more traditional domestic role. When one
protests that a respectable woman should have a “cozy home” (trauliches
Heim), Magda responds, “In my life, I have learned that it is more important
to have work, a profession.”
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	 Romance Melodrama	 73
	 The heroine invites audience identification through her consciously sexual
provocations, and by the approving glances of the men, including the young
prince who accompanies Magda on the piano as she sings a cabaret song.
The matrons are so horrified by the lascivious text of her chanson that they
gasp and send away their daughters and then complain indignantly to a
Protestant minister who is also in attendance. But even the minister, like
most of the men at the party, who are clearly impressed by Magda’s talents
and décolleté, defends her and sanctifies her combative will, as did the propaganda
minister himself. Rather than viewing the film as a celebration of
love for the provincial German homeland, Goebbels primarily embraced the
film’s anti-prudery message: “Milieu of the prewar era is brilliantly captured
. . . The mask is pulled down on a false and hypocritical morality of honor,”
Goebbels wrote after viewing Heimat.54
Melodramatic effect is achieved by
the end of the film when Magda regains the recognition of her father, as he
finally abandons his moralistic objections to her sexual history and embraces
his illegitimate granddaughter. Thus, Heimat explicitly argued for women’s
work, and its construction of viewer identification supported the position
of the eroticized career woman and single mother.
	 Nazi cinema, in fact, did more to promote female careers than Nazi society
in general. A remarkable number of Third Reich films of all genres feature
professionally oriented women as central protagonists. Most commonly in
melodramas, as in Heimat and most other Zarah Leander films, the woman
is an artist or performer, and her work is described as being a result of her
exceptional talent. But spheres of activity other than the arts were also represented,
and some films suggested that women had skills that were more
commercial as well. Although Die vier Gesellen suggested that a femaleowned
business was inevitably doomed to failure, a few other films did cast
women in positions as the directors of companies.55
A surprising number
of Third Reich films also featured women in traditionally male careers such
as science, medicine, and law.56
Nazi cinema was even more liberal than the
Nazi legal system; at the same time that the Nazi film industry was producing
seemingly progressive images of female doctors, the Nazi justice system
was severely restricting women from practicing medicine,57
reflecting the
strategically mixed messages of the Third Reich in general.
	 In 1937 women with advanced degrees lost the right to be called “Frau Dok-
tor,”58
yet many films, such as Reifende Jugend, highlight women’s education
and the social status that academic titles brought.59
Such films anticipated actual
changes in the university populace during the war. By 1942 not only were
female students in the majority in many German universities, but they also
outnumbered men even in departments of mathematics and sciences.60
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74	 chapter two
AccordingtoSecurityServicereportsthattrackedchangesinthestudentpopulation,
economics and medicine were particularly popular fields of study for
new female students. The Nazi leadership, while taking note of this change
with some concern about women’s readiness for and commitment to higher
education, concluded that it would be necessary to encourage women to complete
advanced degrees in order to make up for the dire lack of professors and
professionals in the Reich. Academia was to become a more female sphere
after the war; as one 1943 report concluded: “One hopes to fill some vacancies
in the academic professions by increasing the number of female students. It
will become increasingly necessary to take this route, since a not insignificant
portion of male high school graduates and students who are now serving in
the war will no longer be returning from the front.”61
In Germany, unlike in the
UnitedStates,womenwerenotconsideredtobeintheworkworldonly“forthe
duration.” While America was plagued by the fear that women would refuse to
surrendertheirjobstoreturningsoldiersandonceagainbecomehousewives,62
Germany was preparing for the eventuality that its soldiers would not return
and that “housewife” would no longer be a profession widely available in the
postwar period, and Nazi romance films anticipated this change.
	 Predictably, however, women’s work was ultimately described less as a
means to autonomy than as a further form of servitude to the state. As Sabine
Hake has pointed out, women’s ambition in the Third Reich was explained
“in the context of the Protestant work ethic and its rhetoric of duty and
sacrifice.”63
The Film-Kurier commented on the representation of a woman’s
career as medical researcher in the 1944 melodrama Das Herz muss schweigen
(The Heart Must Be Still) in a corresponding manner: “Here . . . the sacrifice
of the woman in service of science and thus for the benefit of humanity is
shown. And that is not an exceptional case, since women have been engaged
in many fields of scientific life, as researcher, physician, chemist. They have
even sacrificed their own lives, and continue to do so, side by side with men,
in service of the people.”64
The writer of this article on “women’s careers on
screen” thus rewrote work outside of the home as a feminine duty, and added
that films representing their heroines primarily as lovers or housewives were
passé, because such women were engaged only in luxuriously private, emotional
concerns. The modern woman, the article suggested, could no longer
allow herself to languish in the private sphere, but had a responsibility to serve
science and the state, and cinema had to reflect the contemporary turn away
from domesticity. Recent productions showed “how great the responsibility
of film is as a proclaimer of reality, which today means that women can no
longer just devote themselves to their private inclinations, but are making
use of their strengths and their skills in all spheres of life.”65
Nazi melodramas
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	 Romance Melodrama	 75
such as Das Herz muss schweigen were thus to be employed against convention,
by encouraging female sacrifice in the public sphere rather than only
in the home.
	 It is not surprising that a film journal would promote the total mobilization
of female energies in 1944, a year when the “total war” was intensified.
Contrary to what we might expect, however, the cinematic promotion of
women’s work was not exclusively a wartime policy but actually predated it.
From 1936 on, Film-Kurier repeatedly highlighted female careers. The journal
promoted women’s careers on screen in film narratives as well as off screen
in film production. A 1937 article, for example, was titled “Women’s Professions
Created by Film” and highlighted “feminine” jobs in the film industry,
such as costume designer, production assistant, and film editor, while another
article published the following week underlined the importance of female
film journalists and newspaper editors.66
While promoting women’s work in
the film industry and elsewhere, Film-Kurier also called on film producers to
alter their representations of female characters, which they claimed no longer
reflected contemporary reality in the 1930s. Conventional romance film narratives
reinforced outdated notions of female inferiority, they said: “A couple
of months ago we first pointed out in the Film-Kurier the fact that in German
films, young girls are partly represented as having inferiority complexes in
relation to men, which absolutely does not reflect the attitude of the young
girl of today. One can see that, in film narratives which underline their modest
salaries, girls look up at wealthy men with only a humble glance . . . And
that’s not all—stuttering with embarrassment, they even express their worries
about being so small and insignificant.”67
Quoting an editorial from the
women’s magazine Koralle, the Film-Kurier also subscribed to the following
(limited) expression of female independence, which it described as “the general
opinion of audiences” in the Third Reich: “We wish the young girls of the
coming generation to know how important it is to find the man with whom
one belongs and how terrible it is to be together with a man with whom one
doesn’t belong. They should seize for themselves the genuine self-confidence
that comes from the proud feeling of independence, the knowledge that, when
need be, they can cope with life on their own and—as it should finally be
called—be woman enough to stand up for themselves [ihre Frau zu stehen
wissen].”68
But it was not the happiness of the individual woman that was truly
at stake here. If cinema was successful in teaching German women not to rely
on men and to come to terms with life alone, this had obvious benefits for a
society that was continually preparing for industrial and imperial expansion.
	 One romance film that made a case for female autonomy and altered
gender roles was Eine Frau wie Du (A Woman Like You), shot in the summer
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76	 chapter two
of 1939 and premiered while the Wehrmacht was trampling Poland. It is an
uncommonly tender romance, one whose battle of the sexes appears more as
a friendly, outdoor sport. Directed by Viktor Tourjansky, who also directed
the 1941 anti-marital romance Illusion, Eine Frau wie Du offered exceptionally
compelling images of sexual liberation and the illusion of personal freedom
within the Nazi state. Its model of coupling was also somewhat different from
the standard hierarchical constellations of teacher-student romances like
Reifende Jugend and Die vier Gesellen. Here, the romance occurs between two
lovers of relatively equal rank. Brigitte Horney stars as Dr. Maria Prätorius, a
psychologist treating workers in a large factory who begins a romance with
the factory’s attorney, Manfred. Notably, it is the woman in this couple who
owns the car, and much is made of Maria’s self-reliant nature. One of her
defining characteristics is her love of camping and fishing, and when she
takes Manfred out for a weekend camping date, he is forced to reveal his
comparative incompetence at pitching tents and baiting hooks. Despite his
lack of outdoor skills, Manfred clearly proves his masculine abilities when
the couple retires to the tent and he impregnates the Fräulein Doktor. This
Illusions of liberation for the female professional: Eine Frau wie Du (1939). Source:
Deutsche Kinemathek
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	 Romance Melodrama	 77
development is ultimately treated by the film not as a catastrophe but as a
fortunate event, a treatment consistent with Nazi cinema’s overall promotion
of premarital pregnancy and single motherhood.
	 The central conflict of the film is that between monogamy and sexual
freedom, work and pleasure. Here, somewhat unusually, it is the man who
represents both freedom and pleasure, and the woman restraint and duty.
While Maria spends her weekends alone engaging in outdoor sports, Manfred
spends them drinking at parties and nightclubs with his friends, a collection
of wealthy, glamorous young people (including a two-time divorcée), most
of whom have sworn off marriage and monogamy. Manfred also dreams of
escaping both work and Germany. After their camping trip there is a scene
on an open, tree-lined highway where Manfred begins to sing “O sole mio”
in Maria’s convertible and says: “It’s terrible, such a weekend! To have to go
home already . . . Ah Maria, let’s just keep driving, farther and farther!” She,
the representative of the German fascist work ethic, laughs and answers that
she has to be in the office at eight the next morning. Duty to the factory wins
in the end, but the film still presents brief moments when a more liberated
lifestyle appears possible for the youth of the Third Reich, a summery illusion.
In a brief shot at the beginning of the film, a sign posted outside Maria’s
factory announces the true outdoor activities that the Reich intended for
its youth: along with a swastika, the slogan “We are marching together!” is
momentarily legible. With its apparent loosening of sexual standards and
definitions of femininity, Eine Frau wie Du served to create the illusion of a
progressive society—instead of one in which women worked for the advancement
of a murderous military dominance.
	 A similar message was presented by Nazi love stories that thematized the
medical profession. Unlike in Hollywood, where the romantic heroine was
generally the patient/research object of the hero, the heroine of Nazi medical
romances was often his employee. Such workplace romances emphasized
total commitment to professional duties and, just like the teacher-student
romances, reinforced authority structures at home and on the job. The 1938
romance Die Frau am Scheidewege (The Woman at the Crossroads) even
suggested that a woman’s duties in the hospital were more important than
those in the home. The film opens in an operating room, where the director
of a university clinic, Dr. Henrici, is performing his seventh operation in a
row. He is observed by a crowd of male and female medical students and
accompanied by his loyal assisting surgeon, Dr. Hanna Weigand (Magda
Schneider). A film cut brings the camera to another room, where a male
servant comments to a nurse that the chief surgeon never thinks of himself
and sacrifices his own health for the sake of science, and the nurse responds
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78	 chapter two
admiringly that the doctor has virtually superhuman capabilities. Another cut
back to the operating room follows, and the chief surgeon orders Hanna to go
another round; she agrees, but then passes out from exhaustion. In a tender
two shot of the sort usually reserved for lovers’ discourse, he then tells her
with his arms around her shoulders that her “way of assisting is exemplary,”
that she is “an ideal colleague,” and that he “can’t work without her.” He then
orders her to take some time off and get some rest in the interest of increased
productivity, while she protests against this forced vacation under tears.
	 While on vacation at a seaside resort, Dr. Hanna is courted by Fred, a
macho but much less disciplined graphic artist (Hans Söhnker, essentially
repeating his role in Die vier Gesellen). A few weeks later Hanna returns to
work a soon-to-be married woman, much to the professor’s displeasure. He
is concerned that she will quit her job to become a full-time wife, but she
reassures him by saying, “God forbid! I just couldn’t live without my work!”
and adds that she will have to be the main breadwinner of the couple, since
her fiancé does not earn much. However, once Hanna and Fred marry and
move in together, he quickly becomes disgruntled by the fact that she is alThe
romance of divorce: Die Frau am Scheidewege (1938). Source: Deutsche
Kinemathek
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	 Romance Melodrama	 79
ways at the hospital and not at home doing housework. Instead of trying to
reconcile the heroine to a housewife role, the film encourages the audience to
view housework as a waste of her professional calling. When Fred ironically
refers to Hanna as “the little Hausfrau,” a reaction shot of Dr. Henrici shows
a wince of disgust at this lack of respect for Hanna’s surgical talents. The
audience is furthermore encouraged to view Hanna’s marriage as a mistake.
	Indeed, Die Frau am Scheidewege, with the title’s play on the word Scheidung
(divorce), is in essence a melodrama of remarriage—or a romance of
divorce. Its postmarital choice/competition narrative in effect argues that
marital bonds that do not work should be dissolved. Modifying the standard
romance film formula that educated the audience in premarital partner
choice, the film’s characterization elaborated all of the ways in which
the heroine and her husband were an unsuitable match. While the usually
unemployed Fred listens to jazz records, holds parties, and is sloppy in the
house, Hanna works with utmost discipline. Hanna’s sister, Elinor, a fashion
designer by profession, soon moves in with the couple and begins to take
over her sister’s duties in the home by cleaning up after Fred and sleeping
with him. But the film does not condemn this quasi-incestuous infidelity.
Rather, the sister-in-law is shown as being a better match for Fred, since she
has drafting skills and an attractive body that Fred can exploit to further his
own career, as her figure helps to bring in business from advertising clients.
On the other hand, the film rarely brings the legally married couple into the
same frame together, indicating that Hanna is actually more qualified to stay
at work under the authoritative eyes of her boss.
	 By aligning spectator identification with Hanna from the very first shot
of the film through close-ups, and by provoking admiration for her dedication
to the medical profession through dialogue, the film also offers an
apparent argument against traditional gender roles. Hanna, it suggests, is
not meant to be a domestic servant to her husband, but rather a more comradely
subordinate. When Dr. Henrici reveals his love for Hanna, he does
so through commanding, militaristic language. As he asks her to perform
a risky experimental operation, he whispers to her passionately: “Shall we
take up the battle [den Kampf aufnehmen]? Oh, Hanna, it’s so great to work
with you!” Die Frau am Scheidewege thus romanticizes militarily useful work,
encouraging women’s absolute, self-sacrificing commitment to professional
duty. This level of work discipline takes on a particularly sinister note when
Hanna carries out an untested and potentially lethal procedure on a human
subject, foreshadowing similar practices conducted outside of the cinema.69
After Hanna succeeds with the experiment, the professor praises her for
her courage, calling her a true Kameradin (comrade), and in typically fasHeins_NaziFilm_text.indd
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80	 chapter two
cist language, lays claim to her ethically questionable scientific advances:
“Comrades fight together and are victorious together!” he says. The film thus
engages female spectators’ desires for recognition of professional successes
and gender equality in order to create a new form of servitude. Die Frau am
Scheidewege proposed, in advance of the war, that both men and women
could be self-sacrificing working and fighting machines.
	 The film nears its melodramatic climax as Dr. Henrici invites Hanna
to dinner and fires her because he is in love with her, demanding that she
divorce and remarry him if she wants to keep her job. Hanna first resolves
to give up her career as her husband demands, but the following sequences
insinuate just how wrong such a choice is: as Hanna languishes unhappily
at home in the apartment, Fred impregnates her sister. In the series of rapidly
cut, phantasmagoric shots that follow, Elinor pushes through anonymous
masses at a carnival and heaves melodramatically, hearing Hanna in
a voice-over saying, “I want to try to become a good wife and housewife
to Fred.” Countershots of a woman circling manically on a carnival swing
ride suggest that this attempt at marital fidelity is entirely wrongheaded.
Finally, after it is revealed to Hanna that her sister is expecting a child,
the marriage is happily dissolved. The legal but unnatural union between
Fred and Hanna, Die Frau am Scheidewege suggests, stands in the way of
productive (and reproductive) efficiency. The final shot of the film ends
the romance melodrama where it started: with Hanna handing Dr. Henrici
instruments in the operating room, this time accompanied by triumphant
music, indicating that this medical work also has romantic significance.
Thus, the couples who work best together are brought together in the end,
and the narrative is resolved in a manner quite useful to a militarist state:
one woman becomes a reproductive artist, while the other maintains her
work productivity as a doctor even after coupling. The romance between
Hanna and Dr. Henrici is curiously sterile, though, as there is barely any
physical contact between the two. In the final shot of the film, the passing
of instruments from one antiseptically gloved hand to another substitutes
for the conventional kiss—not because the film is prudish, but because the
romantic pairing is essentially a labor contract.
	 Notably, it is the childless woman of talent who is generally the central focus
of Nazi romance melodramas. The heroine of another romance from the
following year, Irrtum des Herzens (Error of the Heart, 1939), shows a similar
aptitude for and absolute dedication to the medical profession and also falls in
love with her supervisor, again a professor and chief surgeon of a hospital. At
the beginning of the film the camera briefly explores the bright modern space
of a clinic decorated with Christmas trees. Professor Dr. Reimers, a middle-age
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	 Romance Melodrama	 81
divorcé, tells the adoring young nurse Angelika (Leny Marenbach) how much
he appreciates her because she never loses her nerve despite being chronically
overworked. The film’s script is thus designed to evoke admiration for the
(mostly female) hospital staff for ignoring holidays and sacrificing themselves
tooperatearoundtheclock.Itfurtherdissolvesanydivisionbetweentheprivate
and the professional by having them reside at their workplaces. Angelika lives
in a small room in the back of the hospital with another nurse, Therese, and
both are constantly on call. These two are joined by the vigorously efficient
and self-sacrificing chief nurse, a childless single woman who once had an
affair with Reimers, the chief surgeon, and now shows a complete dedication
to her work, where her maternal instincts can be applied to caring for the
sick and injured. These working women are contrasted favorably to Reimer’s
non-employed ex-wife, whom he describes as a “dumb goose” and who enters
the clinic overdressed in fur coats and makes the seemingly capricious and
unreasonable demand that, for the sake of their child, he finally take a break
from operating. Dr. Reimers then comes to realize his great mistake in having
acquired a housewife instead of marrying one of the hardworking nurses and
soon offers to marry his much younger employee Angelika. The engagement
falls through when she decides in favor of a pilot who is also courting her
(and is again played by the eternal winner Hans Söhnker). Finally the surgeon
opts to sacrifice love altogether in favor of a total commitment to work, and
the last shot of the film validates this rejection of marriage. Sitting behind an
authoritative desk, the doctor hero proclaims, “Apparently, everything else
besides my work was not strong enough . . . I should want to have nothing and
to be nothing more than that which God intended me to be—a doctor!” A
final track-in to a monumental close-up shot of his resolute face lends heroic
value to this choice.
	 It is easy to recognize how Irrtum des Herzens and other work romances
prepared viewers for a dissolution of the private sphere in war, even if war
always remained only a subtext of the hospital or corporate setting. The nurse
Angelika, we could assume, would soon be wedded to the war as a pilot’s wife
and caretaker of the wounded. The film thus exploits its spectators’ desires
for recognition of professional accomplishments to create a total identification
with war-serving industries and a sentimental vision of its servants.
The female workers of this romance film, as in Die Frau am Scheidewege,
are essentially slaves to their jobs (“well-oiled machines,” as the chief nurse
calls them). Another similar film that concerned a hardworking professional
woman unhappily in love with her supervisor, the 1940 melodrama Das
Mädchen im Vorzimmer (The Girl in the Front Office), was described by the
film journal Der deutsche Film as underscoring “such contemporary virtues
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82	 chapter two
. . . as self-sacrifice for the company through renunciation of all private life,
even of love.”70
	 Interestingly, in a self-reflexive moment, Irrtum des Herzens imagined one
sphere of feminine privacy: that of romance fiction. Early in the film, the
other young nurse, Therese, is shown reading romance novels during her
short breaks in her shared room at the hospital. Putting down her book to
return to work, she excitedly relates to Angelika her romantic fantasies of
owning hundreds of shoes and marrying an aristocrat who smells of English
lavender instead of ether. At the end of the film, however, Therese receives
a quick, businesslike marriage proposal from one of the hospital’s doctors,
which she promptly and dutifully accepts as though it were a job offer. The
fantasy of escape from work through romance is obliquely cited by the romance
film itself as just that—only a fantasy of private life.
Nazi Eroticism, Bourgeois Morality, and Excess
Romance melodramas, as we have seen so far in this chapter, designed gender
roles to support the Third Reich’s imperialist ambitions by inviting spectator
identification and erotic investment in character types that were particularly
serviceable to a militarist society. Although the main protagonists of these
melodramas were usually female, romance was not considered a purely female
sphere during the Third Reich. Nazi romance fiction was sold as the
oil to grease the male—as well as female—libidinous machine. According
to SD reports, romance novels were fashionable among adolescent boys,
for whom such popular literature was an ersatz form of pornography. The
Security Service reported in August 1940 that novels with titles like Sie ward
aus Liebe schuldig (She Was Guilty of Love) or Barbara im Liebesfeuer (Barbara
in the Fire of Love) were making the rounds among Hitler Youth troops
and were avidly consumed by one group of boys before being passed on to
others, and they commented that the mass influence of this form of entertainment
could not be overestimated.71
Similarly, Nazi propagandists could
count on reaching a large male spectatorship with romance melodramas,
another function of which was to portray Nazi Germany as the land of an
alternative sexual modernity.
	 Explicitly pornographic literature had been banned soon after Hitler came
to power, but this did not mean that all prurient art had disappeared from
the Reich. Rather, the sale of sexuality became a state monopoly. The Third
Reich’s repression of Weimar’s freer trade in sexual imagery and services was
not an attempt to reinstate a more puritanical morality. Instead, this repression
was an attempt to gain full control of the market in eroticism and to
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	 Romance Melodrama	 83
deploy images of sexuality as weapons of the state. As Dagmar Herzog has
emphasized, the official publication of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps (The Black
Corps), consistently delivered pornographic representations, all the while
using anti-Semitic rhetoric to disavow responsibility for its incitement of
violent sexual fantasies. The journal claimed that Jews were to blame for all
pornography, while the eroticism that the National Socialists advocated was
a fundamentally healthy and natural expression of a revolutionary, youthful
movement. Das Schwarze Korps, Herzog added, “aligned itself with young
people’s impatience with traditional bourgeois mores” by attacking what
it termed “‘the pathological tendency to Catholic virginalism.’”72
As historian
Annette Timm has further underlined, other Nazi media outlets made
common use of rhetoric about middle-class narrow-mindedness in order
to advocate a change in views about sexuality. As Timm states, there were
frequent “public statements from top Nazis officials about the need to destroy
notions of bourgeois sexual morality. Joseph Goebbels, for instance, viewed
himself as the ‘champion of progressive sexual morality’ and from the first
years of the regime he railed against Bettschnüffelei (snooping into the sexual
practices of others) in the party’s propaganda publications.”73
	 According to the Nazi usage, “bourgeois morality” was virtually synonymous
with Christian prohibitions against extramarital sexuality and
the religiously motivated valuation of chastity and self-denial. Nazism, in
its paradoxical rejection of the moral codes that supposedly typified the
middle class, followed popular cultural trends of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. However, the frequent denunciations of bourgeois
hypocrisy in Nazi media were in themselves hypocritical, given that such
attacks were directed toward the very same class that had most supported
Hitler, the petty bourgeoisie. As sociologist Maria Ossowska pointed out
in a study titled Bourgeois Morality, the term usually referred to stereotypical
petit bourgeois attitudes rather than the practices of the upper
middle classes, and it was a favorite epithet of turn-of-the century and
early twentieth-century Marxists, bohemians, and (proto-)fascists alike.74
All shared an overgeneralized portrait of bourgeois morality, defined by
characteristics such as prosaicism, mediocrity, timidity, aversion to risk,
and excessive concern with respectability—characteristics that overlapped
with an equally generalized view of Christian or “Puritan morality,” as defined
by humility and, in Ossowska’s words, the “hostility to every form of
pleasure and pleasure-seeking.”75
It was on this latter element that the Nazis
focused their critiques of bourgeois morality. Nazi propaganda appealed
to members of the lower middle classes with the potential of overcoming
previous social constraints through the collective experience of politics
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84	 chapter two
on a grand scale; it further suggested that working for the goals of Nazis
imperialism would entail not only sacrifices but also intensified forms of
pleasure. In their emphasis on the pleasures of transgressing mainstream
moral codes, Nazi critiques of bourgeois morality differed from Marxist
critiques, which tended to emphasize the self-interested material motives
hidden behind bourgeois notions of virtue. Theodor Adorno’s statement
that “wherever we speak of bourgeois morality we think in the first instance
of bourgeois work discipline” did not hold true for Marxism’s right-wing
opponents,76
as we have seen in the preceding discussion of Third Reich
workplace romance films. Instead, many Nazis thought first of the Christian
disciplining of the drives.
	 The Nazi critique of bourgeois sexual morality evidently found support in
Nietzsche’s condemnation of Judeo-Christian morality and his predictions
about a coming post-bourgeois, post-democratic era of immoralism. As
Nietzsche scholar Steven Aschheim has argued, the philosopher’s writings
were crucial to Nazism’s self-definition as a tradition-challenging movement,
and Nietzsche was portrayed by Nazi theorists as having defined the main
goals of the regime, among them the revaluation of the sexual drive and the
aggressive instinct. Even if Nietzsche’s works were very selectively read by
Third Reich commentators, the philosopher was celebrated in official Nazi
cultural organs because, as Aschheim stated, he “radically rejected bourgeois
society, liberalism, socialism, democracy, egalitarianism, and the Christian
ethos.” As a consequence, Nietzsche was treated by many Nazi theorists as a
thinker who was “central to the construction of the movement’s promise of a
thoroughly transvalued world.”77
Quoting several Third Reich commentators
who drew connections between the Nietzschean and the fascist view of the
body, Aschheim added: “The decadent and feminized nineteenth century
was to give way to a new masculine warrior age, one that regarded Nietzsche
as a pioneer of the ‘German rediscovery of the body’ . . . The old bourgeois
ethos of security was to be rendered anachronistic by the emergence of hard
personalities animated by the joy of living dangerously.”78
Nazi ideologues
sought to overcome the stereotypical petit bourgeois aversion to risk and its
stress on moderation by subscribing to the Nietzschean “noble morality” of
the powerful against the “slave morality” of Christianity, a transvaluation that
appeared to support Nazi imperialism (regardless of the fact that Nietzsche
himself had refused to endorse the domination of the German empire over
the rest of Europe).79
	 While battling Christian/bourgeois sexual morality, the Nazis also opposed
the more progressive and egalitarian forms of sexual emancipation
of the Weimar era. Shortly after taking power in 1933, the Nazis passed a law
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	 Romance Melodrama	 85
against nudism, but with this law they did not intend to force Germans to
hide their bodies.80
The main problem for the Nazis was not that Weimar-era
nudists were naked, but that they formed a movement with antihierarchical
tendencies. Nazism was to be the only cultural movement in Germany, and
nudity became the exclusive property of the so-called Volksgemeinschaft. To
be sure, some Nazi ideologues did advocate a more puritanical approach.
While Goebbels argued in favor of more uninhibited sexual relations in his
articles for official party publications, some comparatively prudish Nazis stood
in opposition.81
But social conservatives generally had less influence over the
imagery disseminated to the masses in print and visual media than did the
director of the Propaganda Ministry. As we have seen in Der Postmeister, the
eroticized, exposed female body was designed by the leaders of Nazi cultural
production to be the main pillar of film aesthetics and spectator pleasure.
	 Indeed, the exploitation of eroticism became a consciously articulated
policy within the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda
(Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, or RMVP). Erotic
thoughts were to replace critical thought, and fantasies of sexual liberation
were to stifle expressions of discontent in the political realm. In 1939 Goebbels
wrote in his diary that he was determined to eliminate all political humor
in the cinema and cabaret. “The political joke will be eradicated. Absolutely
and completely,” he wrote with his characteristic fanatic emphasis.82
Goebbels
knew that something had to distract from the excising of political opposition,
and he envisioned that nudity and sexual suggestion would fill that lack. He
was determined to remain, as he wrote, “obstinate against political jokes,
but even more generous with regard to eroticism . . . since playful instincts
[der Spieltrieb] must have free rein somewhere.”83
Goebbels therefore campaigned
to loosen the sexual morals of German entertainment. In 1935 he
noted in his diary that film censorship had to be reworked. “We are restricting
film too much,” he wrote, and noted his plans to liberalize censorship codes
and reduce personnel: “More freedom. Above all, the army of censors and
examiners out.”84
Two days later he wrote in his diary that his instructions
had been put into place, and that censors should be more forgiving when it
came to the representation of sexuality: “I give the film censors guidelines.
Loosen up! Don’t be so moralistic. We are not from Potsdam and we don’t
wear any little collars.”85
The stiff collar (Halsbörtchen) of the old-fashioned
bureaucrat signified for Goebbels a pedantic form of sexual morality that
Nazism had supposedly made redundant.
	 Similarly, the word Moralin (hypocritical moralizing) was consistently
evoked in the Nazi press to suggest that the Third Reich was a progressive
and modern society, as opposed to some implied past in which sexuality
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86	 chapter two
was repressed. As we have seen in the melodrama Heimat, this past was
generally that of Second Reich puritanism, the same cultural environment in
which Nietzsche launched his attack on Christian morality. But the memory
of democratic Weimar was not located far from the image of hypocritical
Wilhelmine (or “Potsdam”) morality for Goebbels and other Nazis involved
in film production. Weimar cinema has often been considered a cinema of
sexual as well as gender liberation, and many Nazi writers denounced Weimar
films as degenerate. Yet there was also a strongly conservative strain in
much of the popular cinema of the Weimar period, particularly after 1927,
when the directorship of the UFA (Universum-Film AG) film studios came
under the influence of monarchists.86
The progressive social agendas of the
women’s movement and the permissiveness of alternative gay culture in 1920s
Berlin did not make a strong mark on the morals of the masses or on the
majority of Weimar-era popular films. According to Hans Peter Bleuel, the
famed permissiveness of the Weimar period was overall an illusion, and
conventional morality reigned in all but the most isolated pockets of metropolitan
culture. Elsewhere, repressiveness was the rule: “The appearance
of a progressive emancipation of customs, of a loosening of ancient moral
statutes, was illusory. It was, despite all the legal improvements and fashionable
phenomena, only a very small circle of the population that had the desire
and the power to free itself from the traditional moral code.”87
The liberated
sexual and gender imagery visible in the Weimar-era press, Bleuel added,
was not lived out in the vast majority of Weimar homes.88
	 Similarly, Weimar cinema’s reputation for being sexually emancipated
is not always warranted. In most Weimar films, expressions of desire are
condemned by narrative conclusions, and female sexuality must necessarily
have melodramatic consequences, leading to prostitution or death. In fact,
the quasi-pornographic Aufklärungsfilme (sexual enlightenment films), for
which the Weimar cinema is generally considered to be modern and liberal,
belonged to a classic melodramatic narrative type in which feminine
purity is threatened by male desire. As Friedemann Beyer comments, the
Aufklärungsfilme were sensationalist melodramas that “rarely got by without
villains who defiled tender young virgins after they had seduced them into
taking drugs.”89
Such films, despite their pretense to scientific objectivity
and liberal views, ultimately reinforced standards of bourgeois morality by
titillating audiences with the myriad dangers of sexuality.
	 Nazi writers exploited this hypocritical Weimar morality by continually
trying to present themselves as being more sexually enlightened than the
culture producers of the so-called Systemzeit. They attempted to distinguish
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	 Romance Melodrama	 87
themselves from the makers of Weimar-era Aufklärungsfilme, which they
insisted were only cheap smut that revealed bourgeois prudery under their
tales of prostitution. As Rudolf Oertel wrote in 1941: “We are not prudish these
days. We can distinguish between morality [Moral] and hypocritical moralizing
[Moralin]. Pornography under the cover of scientific enlightenment is
unappetizing, and we have sharp eyes to determine whether artistic passion
or greed is at work.”90
The hypocrisy of the Nazi position, with its claim to
represent sexuality as a matter of “artistic passion” rather than economic
desire, is clear. The Nazis, of course, did not view film purely as an art, but
also as a profitable industry, despite their feigned protests to the contrary.
	 Eroticism in classical cinema’s most concentrated form—that of womanas-spectacle—was
marketed most obviously by the revue film, which provided
the most extended spectacles of exposed female bodies. The romance
film’s eroticism was embedded more subtly within narrative and included
fetishistic close-ups of actresses and the suggestion of sexual relations. Nazi
melodramas like Der Postmeister also effectively featured exposed extranarrative
bodies, of course. The spectacle of woman was often consciously
built into the background of romance narratives in order to enhance the
foregrounded relations of the main couple. The Nazi Party trade press Der
deutsche Film specifically recommended the mise-en-scène of the nightclub
or cabaret for love story scenes, since it allowed visual pleasure to coincide
with the dramaturgically necessary delay of the final narrative resolution:
“When ‘He’ flirts with another woman or ‘She’ flirts with another man at the
bar table, then there is a dance number going on in the background . . . The
happy-end dramaturgy combines here the pleasant with the practical in a
perfect way: this method . . . offers the opportunity to please the ear with a
hit song and please the eye with the sight of slender legs.”91
Thus, the halfnaked
dancers who connoted forbidden desire were exploited at the same
time for the erotic effects they produced.
	 This was clearly a planned strategy, and often a successful one. It was this
exploitation of eroticism that sold Nazi films to both domestic and foreign
audiences. In comparison to Hays Code–restricted Hollywood and even the
cinema of neighboring European countries, Nazi films appeared to many
spectators to be risqué. The Security Service reported in April 1944 that the
Catholic Church in Belgium had been agitating against Nazi films due to
their thematization of premarital and extramarital sexuality:
The strongest attacks by the clergy so far have been directed against the films
Die Goldene Stadt [The Golden City, 1942], Münchhausen [1943] and Das Bad
auf der Tenne [The Bath on the Threshing Floor, 1943] . . . Sermons have very
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often warned against going to these screenings. Even in larger cities, they announced
from the pulpit that believers would be committing a mortal sin by
going to see these films . . . In most cases, people in the cities do not take the
clergy’s warnings seriously, and the warnings have had the opposite effect of
contributing to an increased level of attendance for these films. In Antwerp, for
example, the popularity of the film Das Bad auf der Tenne, now in its third week,
is still not letting up. Viewers have commented that in this case, as in others, the
church unwittingly created the best propaganda for the film by trying to ban it.92
The “sinful” narratives of Nazi films brought Belgians to the box office, which
underlined the propagandistic, as well as economic, advantage of flouting
Christian sexual morality.93
	 In the films cited in the SD report above, sex is mainly suggested through
situation, double entendre, and fetishistic displays of bodies. Sex acts themselves
were never explicitly shown in Nazi feature films but usually happen—as
in virtually all classical cinema—in ellipses. In Die goldene Stadt a seduction
scene ends with a shot of a couple in bed—a shot, as Stephen Lowry has noted,
that would not have been possible under classical Hollywood’s censorship
codes94
—followed by a close-up of a clock, a cut, and another close-up of a
clock, indicating the length of time that the coupling required. Although sex
acts that are more explicit are not shown, what appeared newly threatening
to contemporary representatives of bourgeois or Christian morality was how
Nazicultureappearedtodissolvetheboundariesbetweensexualpurityandsin
and encouraged the expression of elemental drives. Weimar film, in contrast,
had generally maintained the dualistic morality of the virgin and the whore,
as demonstrated by the fateful symbols used to describe acts of sexuality as
tragic defloration. In G. W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), for example,
the melodramatic heroine’s loss of virginity is indicated through ominous
symbols like the knocked-over wine glass. In contrast, the loss of virginity is
rarely even an implied topic in Nazi romance films, as melodramatic emphasis
was generally shifted away from the issue of sexual purity. Shots in Nazi films
indicating that sexual activity is taking place usually suggest that it is natural
rather than fateful. There are thus many shots of the sky or sunny, placid bodies
of water inserted after a couple’s kiss in the bedroom (rather than the sort
of violently rushing water in the manner of Griffith’s melodrama, suggesting
that the heroine will die as a result of her loss of purity).
	 Obviously the Nazis had little interest in making old-fashioned melodramas
that championed virginity, since this would contradict their population
policies. The Nazi attempts to increase birthrates by loosening taboos on
premarital sexuality were met with church resistance not only in Belgium but
in the Reich as well. Catholic clergymen were particularly active in agitating
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	 Romance Melodrama	 89
against the sexualized imagery of Nazi media and attempted to fortify their
parishioners against the apparent attack on Christian sexual morality, but the
Nazi authorities responded harshly to such encroachments. In 1941 the SS
was ordered to arrest members of the Catholic Church who had distributed
pamphlets advocating virginity and celibacy.95
The sexual morality of the
Catholic Church appeared to many fervent Nazis as an intolerable form of
foreign domination. Nazi film critic Peter von Werder claimed that the conventional
cinematic images of women as either innocent virgins, dependent
housewives, or prostitutes were all non-Aryan and anti-German in origin.
Patriarchy and prostitution were Oriental inventions, he suggested, and he
condemned both:
the figure of the hetaera [is] from the ancient Orient and the deeply Easterninfluenced
antique Mediterranean world, reappearing up until now in constantly
altered form. On the other hand, along with the Eastern idea of the
privileged position of the husband and family father, there comes a corresponding
estimation of the woman as a dependent and ignorant creature, on the
grounds of which a new, more uninhibited view of sensuality is not possible . . .
for that reason, the reconstruction of love- and sex-life is a question of central
national importance.96
In a Germanic soldierly state, and in a properly fascist cinema, von Werder
suggested, sex would be unconstrained and men would not be considered
primarily husbands and fathers. The Third Reich, he insisted, should work
on liberating romantic relations from bourgeois family structures in the
interests of racial and military dominance.
	 But the cinema of the Third Reich played with a double-edged sword
here, since its project was simultaneously the provocation of desire and the
attempt to make it work for the state. In order to carry out the project of
liberalizing sexual relations, Nazi cinema had to encourage female spectators
to participate, but it thereby risked provoking desires that could not be
contained. The romance melodrama with a female main protagonist was by
its very nature the most conflicted and potentially hazardous genre in this
respect. By many accounts the Hollywood love story negotiated this risk by
attempting to repress desire entirely. As Mary Ann Doane has stated, the
main project of the Hollywood romance, and indeed all of love stories, is “the
tautological demonstration of the necessity of the failure of female desire.”97
However, as she adds, there are always difficulties inherently built into this
project, particularly in the case of the woman’s film or romance melodrama.
The love story “is one of the most vulnerable sites in a patriarchal discourse,”
Doane says, since “its flaw is to posit the very possibility of female desire.”98
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90	 chapter two
Even if Nazi culture attempted to reorganize patriarchy, the love story in the
Third Reich was by its very generic nature a highly conflicted zone. The risks
of Nazi romance were even greater than those of Hollywood, since it imagined
the possibility of desire outside of the containing order of the nuclear
family. Excess continually threatened romance melodrama’s demonstrations
of control.
	 Ideological ruptures, as many scholars argue, are indicated by the melodramatic
mode through “hysterical” mise-en-scène or camera work. According
to Pam Cook, stylistic excess is a symptom of the impossible task of balancing
the representation of female desire with the containment of it; excess, in classical
Hollywood cinema, is a “sign of the system threatening to break down.”99
In Nazi cinema as well the thematization of female desire sometimes coincides
with signs that seem to exceed conventional signification and threaten
to break apart stable narrative structures, and this melodramatic strain gives
evidence of potential failures of the fascist management of desire. Indeed,
one of the most stylistically excessive melodramas of the Third Reich, Anna
und Elisabeth (Anna and Elizabeth, 1933) is one that reveals a problematized
female desire in the form of strong homoerotic undercurrents and could be
categorized as a same-sex-romance film.
	Notably, Anna und Elisabeth starred the same pair of actresses who embodied
lesbian attraction in the Weimar precursor Mädchen in Uniform.
Dorothea Wieck plays Elisabeth, the aristocratic mistress of a rural estate,
a hysteric who is bound to a wheelchair with an inexplicable paralysis until
she meets Hertha Thiele’s character, Anna, a boyish farmer’s daughter. Superstitious
locals tell Elisabeth that Anna has special powers and can heal the
sick with her touch. When the pair meets, Elisabeth grabs Anna’s hand and
holds it on her own body until her expression turns ecstatic. Elisabeth later
testifies to others, “She put her hand on me and gave me a jerk. And what a
jerk it was!” Anna, however, does not believe that she possesses supernatural
powers, and the film largely validates Anna’s perspective. But Elisabeth’s
excessive desire for Anna is expressed in shots that also undermine narrative
authority and produce a hysterical shifting of identificatory positions,
leaving the spectator uncertain of the truth. Vertiginous point-of-view shots
from Elisabeth’s perspective allow the spectator to identify with her ecstasy
and pathos while she whispers her passionate anticipation of Anna’s touch.
Later, when they are alone together, Elisabeth miraculously rises from her
wheelchair and walks erect for the first time.
	 A central sequence, virtually a love scene, is so lengthy and erotically
charged that the spectator is encouraged to desire the release of tension
through a kiss. In one long, static close-up, Anna’s head is positioned in
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	 Romance Melodrama	 91
profile above Elisabeth’s as if to suggest her superior position in the relationship.
When a cut follows, the next shot reverses this construction: Elisabeth’s
head is now positioned higher than Anna’s, and the position is frozen into a
tableau-like image of the two women on a white background, a space devoid
of any social or historical context. No narrative justification is given for this
rather unusual construction of shots; it appears to be merely excessive style.
Covertly, these long takes with their balanced compositions do suggest some
harmonious balance inherent in female homoerotic desire, and the image of
the two women appears almost as a fantasy bursting forth from the uncontextualized
unconscious. As we will see in the next chapter, however, such
suggestions were not actually subversive of Nazi ideology. Yet the focus on
Elisabeth’s desire in these sequences halts the narrative progression in such
a way that the scenes become strangely extended and fetishistic, temporarily
violating classical cinema’s codes of transparency.
	 At the end of the film, Elisabeth falls off a cliff into a lake and drowns.
Narratively, the film thus provides the most conventional resolution to female
desire and the most sadistic demonstration of its failure—death. But
it also does not entirely contain the hysterical desire of its protagonist, and
Female desire and excess: Anna und Elisabeth (1933). Source: Deutsche
Kinemathek
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instead freezes in moments of narrative stasis, resting on the iconic image
of this desire. Ultimately, Anna und Elisabeth is a romance melodrama that
attempts to purge excessive desire through narrative violence, but this desire
still controls the film’s center and ruptures its logic from the inside. Although
such ruptured narratives could still pass censorship in 1933, melodramatic
excesses and avant-garde experiments were subsequently subject to stricter
aesthetic control.100
	 Beyond the purely textual evidence of the difficult negotiation of female
desire that “hysterical” melodramas such as Anna und Elisabeth provide (the
1944 domestic melodrama Opfergang is another example to which we will
return in the next chapter), the few remaining historical documents that
address spectator response in the Third Reich also prove that Nazi cinema
sometimes failed to manage desire as effectively as it intended. Many women
in the Third Reich, it seems, desired another form of romance than what was
offered in Nazi love stories. This seems to be particularly true of more fervent
Nazi women who were highly displeased with the cinema’s instrumentalization
of eroticism. Although A. U. Sander’s 1944 study of BDM and Hitler
Youth members and their opinions regarding film did not produce reliable
aggregate statistics about female and male viewing preferences, it did suggest,
in its quotation of interviews with individual girls, that the film production
of the Third Reich did not entirely satisfy the psychic or ideological needs of
female viewers. Sander quotes one BDM member who responded at length
to her survey and offered a particularly interesting critique of Nazi romance
films. The girl wrote:
Which one of us working girls does not long for sun, meadows, forests, and
fields? What film expresses our great love for nature? And how few films are
about a deep friendship between man and girl? What film represents the love
between man and woman so tenderly, that it is still emotionally appealing?
Along with many really good films, we have a massive amount of entertainment
films that . . . show us people in all their wretchedness, with no secure ground
to their souls. These types of films show us in a blatantly obvious way things
that we could guess already, but no, they also present it in word and image
and sound, as if it weren’t already obvious enough. Do we Germans have to be
shown something so dumb, so repetitive? Not only the casualness of men in
film, also that of girls—their flirtatiousness, their constant changing of clothes,
their frequent application of make-up, their fickleness—are bad examples and
are (unfortunately still) all too happily copied.101
Although this girl was probably a partisan of a more conservative wing of
Nazism, the Nazi version of romance was apparently too brutal for her. AcHeins_NaziFilm_text.indd
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	 Romance Melodrama	 93
cording to this respondent, romance films primarily showed commodified
eroticism rather than true love, failing to imagine functioning male-female
relationships. No convincing myth of romance as transcendence fully succeeded
in replacing the Nazi dissolution of bourgeois morality. Nazi girls,
it seems, had expected fascist culture to free them from objectification and
instrumentalization, but this expectation was ultimately disappointed. Sexualized
violence was instead the familiar product and instrument of Nazi
power, the source of the suspicious “things that we could guess already.”
Conclusion
This chapter has explored how Third Reich romance melodramas attempted
to form spectator desires to the benefit of Nazi imperialist aims. Nazi romance
films, as I have argued, positioned Third Reich culture as a liberation from
nineteenth-century sexual morality while encouraging female participation in
the public sphere in preparation for a war economy. The function of romance
films was to design gender role models, but these did not obviously fit the
regime’s racialist policies or its supposed orientation toward a classless national
community. Third Reich films most often celebrated cosmopolitan and upperclass
lifestyles rather than ordinary middle-class and rural virtues. Contrary to
the widespread assumption that Third Reich culture was traditionalist in the
sexual realm, the heroines of Nazi romance films were often single mothers
and professional women and were connoted through costuming as being willful
and sexually aware. Androgyny was common for women in Third Reich
film, but male images were less flexible, in accordance with the overemphasis
on masculinity in fascist culture. The selection of actor and actress types was
calculated to appeal to audiences beyond the Reich, supporting the colonial
ambitions of both Nazi cinema and the broader Nazi state. The subgenre of
Nazi melodramas that I have termed “work romances”—in which a woman
is paired with her teacher, supervisor, or colleague—anticipated the labor
needs of an expanding regime, even before the outbreak of war in 1939. These
romance melodramas supported a turn away from domesticity, advocating
careers for women and sometimes ridiculing housewives, but described work
outside the home as yet another form of feminine sacrifice and subordination.
Although gender inequity in education and the workplace was directly
thematized by some Third Reich romance films, they ultimately maintained
the hierarchical structures of fascism.
	 The love story also fulfilled the further political functions of distraction
and disavowal. Historical documents show that Goebbels encouraged the
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display of the female body, and erotic attractions were deliberately cultivated
in order to suppress political critique. Nazi films distinguished themselves
on the international market by offering sexual content that exceeded what
was allowed under the Hollywood Production Code. Within the Reich, ideologues
claimed that Nazi culture had overcome the repressive sexual morality
of the past, including that of both the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods.
Denunciations of bourgeois morality in Nazi media were partially influenced
by Nietzsche’s critique of petit bourgeois and Christian restraints on the aggressive
sexual drive, and aided in profiling Nazism as a battle against prudery
and hypocrisy. Yet the deployment of the erotic in Nazi cinema sometimes
backfired, and female spectators in particular refused to embrace the Nazi
version of romance. The generically determined acknowledgment of female
desire occasionally led to eruptions of stylistic excess and even homoerotic
undercurrents in a few Third Reich melodramas. The next chapter examines
how domestic and family melodramas were used in a genre-contradictory
manner to undermine nuclear family norms and to bolster an image of Nazism
as cultural revolution, and also reveals further failures in the management
of spectator pleasure.
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