Hitler's Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema (Culture and the Moving Image)

Hitler's Heroines Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema

Hitler's Heroines Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema

----

ANTJE ASCHEID

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

\ Philadelphia

Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 2003 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2003 Printed in the United States of America @Thepaperused in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ascheid, Antje, 1964Hitler's heroines: stardom and womanhood in Nazi cinema / Antje Ascheid. p. em. - (Culture and the moving image) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56639-983-1 (cloth: aile paper) - ISBN 1-56639-984-X (pbk. : aile paper) 1. National socialism and motion pictures. 2. Women in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures-Germany-History. 4. SOderbaum, Kristina. 5. Harvey, Lilian, 1907-1968. 6. Leander, Zarah, 1907I. Title. II. Series. PNl995.9.N36 A83 2002 791.43'658---dc21

2002071460

Fur meine Eltern

Gisela und Eberhard Ascheid

Contents

Preface

ix

1

INTRODUCTION

1

NAZI CULTURE? NATIONAL SOCIALISM, STARDOM,

11

AND FEMALE REPRESENTATION

2

KRISTINA SODERBAUM: THE MYTH OF NATURALNESS,

42

SACRIFICE, AND THE "REICH'S WATER CORPSE"

3

LILIAN HARVEY: INTERNATIONAL STARDOM,

98

GERMAN COMEDY, AND THE "DREAM COUPLE"

4

5

DIV A, MOTHER, MARTYR: THE MANY FACES OF ZARAH LEANDER

155

CONCLUSION

213

Notes

221

Bibliography

257

Index

269

vii

Preface

THE IDEAS expressed in this work have been taking shape in one form or another throughout my life. My initial encounter with the films of the Third Reich took place during my childhood as a naive spectator watching television. Musical pictures starring Zarah Leander or Lilian Harvey intermixed with Hollywood's Busby Berkeley films or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. Given the standard German practice of voice dubbing, it was only later that I realized that there was a fundamental difference between the various movie classics I had enjoyed as a child. One group belonged to Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s; the other was part of the dark legacy of Nazi culture. And yet my initial impression that many Nazi films had much in common with Hollywood movies was confirmed when I began to study National Socialist cinema and has been noted by many scholars in the field. What particularly intrigued me about these films were their female figures; their glamour and beauty seemed to contrast starkly with the stereotypical images of wholesome Nazi women I had previously associated with the National Socialist ideal. During my years as a graduate student at New York University, I developed a particular interest in questions of gender, genre, and politics. Moreover, I frequently encountered many of the tensions explored in the book in my studies of American film. Indeed, feminist film criticism has pointed to the difficult negotiations regarding the representation of women in dominant Hollywood cinema, many of which I have subsequently applied to National Socialist productions. In fact, when I turned to the films of the Third Reich, a number of approaches to reading the image of "woman" in popular culture previously adopted in cinema studies promised productive results. In addition, ideas advanced in the field of cultural studies have contributed significantly to my study of stars in Nazi culture. I am therefore indebted to both feminist modes of inquiry and cultural studies models, which have informed this work in fundamental ways.

ix

X

PREFACE

This project initially developed as a dissertation at New York University. Many influences and experiences, obtained through formal education or in private conversations with teachers, friends, and acquaintances, have gone into making sense of some of the issues this book seeks to address. The Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, and the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt am Main have provided significant archival resources without which this book would have been impossible. All still photographs for this volume appear with the permission of the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek. My professors at New York University, in particular my adviser Robert Sklar but also Chris Straayer and Richard Allen, deserve thanks for their support and encouragement. Special thanks go to Eric Rentschler for his expertise and advice as well as his efforts to help me present my work in the field through presentations and publications. In addition, Gerd Gemiinden and Linda Schulte-Sasse have contributed significantly by reading the manuscript, offering suggestions, and pointing me toward additional resources. Two articles containing some of the ideas covered in this book were published earlier. An essay on Lilian Harvey entitled "Nazi Stardom and the 'Modern Girl': The Case of Lilian Harvey" appeared in New German Critique, Spring/Summer 1998. A short version of an early draft of Chapter 4 on Zarah Leander was published as "A Sierckian Double Image: The Narration of Zarah Leander as a National Socialist Star" in Film Criticism, vol. 23, nos. 2-3 (Winter/Spring 1999). Furthermore, my friends and colleagues must be recognized for their enduring assistance and tireless rereading of the manuscript, their confident belief in the project, and their endless efforts in keeping up my spirits, especially Jeff Miller, Christine Haase, Alexandra Keller, Lucia Bozzola, Jan Nathanson, Wendy Rowland, Paula Massood, Roy Grundmann, and Kirsten Thompson. Finally I want to thank my parents, Gisela and Eberhard Ascheid, who welcomed the many family debates regarding Germany's National Socialist history that inspired this study, and without whose intellectual encouragement and financial support neither this book nor my pursuit of an academic career would have been possible.

Hitler's Heroines Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema

Introduction

IN 1938, the Nazi women's journal NS-Frauenwarte published an editorial that severely criticized the representation of women in the popular media at the time (Fig. I.}). Illustrated with a number of images, the two-page spread provided examples of what kind of representations the authors wished to disappear and how they should be replaced. On the left, we find a collage of scantily clad women posing as chorus girls and glamorous dames, heavily made up and coiffed, drinking champagne; on the opposite side, we see young females in sports tricots and peasant costumes, with long blonde braids and no makeup, exercising and dancing folk dances in clearly separated images. In bold letters, readers are told on the first page "You think: Charming and fun? We think: dirty and convulsive!" whereas the second page reads "You think: boring? We think: healthy and beautiful!" The text in the middle reads: Whoever has recently monitored a number of periodicals might have noticed with great surprise certain tendencies that seem Jewish, all too Jewish, to us. What is presented here, in films and in variety shows, as "woman" is precisely that demi-monde-type [Halbweittypl hostile to marriage and family, who is the living embodiment of the sterility that was a marker of the previous epoch of decay. The National Socialist idea is profoundly life affirming. Nothing could be further from us than prudery. Beauty and grace are the natural purpose of woman. The enjoyment of life and the pleasures of the senses are elements of the productive tensions of life. A beautiful girl certainly wasn't made to be a nun, but, and this is the difference between yesterday and today, she also wasn't made to be a coquette. The superficial and frivolous degradation of woman into an object of entertainment, the disgusting adulteration of a healthy, natural sense of the body into undisguised sexual greed, this whole distorted, unhealthy atmosphere exclusively belongs to the chapter of subversive Jewish propaganda! We will have a watchful eye to see that such tendencies do not reemerge under some kind of pretext. A look at what we have recentlyobserved in publications, which are being presented to the German people in the millions, lets us realize unequivocally just how deeply the Jewish pollution has infiltrated this particular area.) 1

2

INTRODUCTION

Figure 1.1. Before and after? This magazine spread contrasts glamorous "Weimar" images still present in Nazi culture with depictions of "natural" femininity that conform to the National Socialist ideal.

In its extraordinary conflation of issues of gender, sexuality, and race, this passage raises a number of tensions, which are the subject of this work. The feature juxtaposes two stereotypes of female representation as antagonistic, while identifying one as essentially anti-"German." The text alludes to various Nazi discourses that permeated the debates surrounding the National Socialist ideal of womanhood and the often discordant representations of women in the popular media of the Nazi state: anti-Semitism, reactionary "feminism," gender essentialism, antireligious tendencies, and a pronatalist discourse. The writer invites the reader to compare two sets of visual images. One, a modernist collage of half-naked beauties, offers images familiar from both German and American film productions; it is intended here to invoke a sense of Weimar and contemporary foreign cultures, suggesting degeneracy in general and women's objectification in particular. The other points to the volkisch imagery of Nazi folklore best illustrated by Leni Riefenstahl's aestheticized renderings of the fascist body.

INTRODUCTION

3

The ideological gap between them is impossible to bridge. Looking at these two pages, it is difficult to favor the one on the right. In fact, the author of the text assumed an imaginary reader who would reject it and needed to readjust her preferences ("You think: boring? We think: healthy and beautiful!"). Along the same lines, the magazine also complained bitterly about the German film industry and its products, arguing that contemporary films did not pay enough attention to idealizing the family and primarily featured childless couples, which once again points to a privileging of desire over reproduction. 2 As many scholars have noted, the representation of women in the Nazi state was in fact fraught with inconsistency and dissonance. Bound up in various cultural continuities, economic dependencies, and ideological frictions, National Socialist culture frequently produced its own contradictions and thus gave voice to the very tensions that underlay the repressive axioms of Nazi ideologues. The discourses that circulated through public figures and popular texts spoke to a multiplicity of female images and desires, which in tum articulate femininity as the object of continuing antagonisms during the period. In imagining German fascism, we are instantly overwhelmed with images. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of National Socialist culture is its positive embrace of modem technology, ranging from the fully developed use of emerging media to the efficient production of means of mass destruction. The orchestration of monumental spectacles and the programmatic use of film images for propaganda-overseen by Joseph Goebbels's newly founded Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda-were integral to National Socialist politics. Political rallies, Siegfried Kracauer observed, were aestheticized into "mass ornaments." Leni Riefenstahl's notorious documentary feature on the 1934 Nuremberg party congress, Triumph of the Will (1935), illustrates impressively how, in the words of Bertolt Brecht, the Nazis presented "political discourse as theater."3 Another contemporary observer, Walter Benjamin, proposed that Nazism attempted to break down the boundaries between aesthetics and real life, and mobilized technologies, such as the mass media, for that purpose. 4 As one would expect, then, film under Nazi rule consisted of more than weekly newsreels and propaganda features. By and large, popular film culture supported a cinema intent on entertaining the public. This does not mean that it escaped the influence of National Socialist ideol-

4

INTRODUCTION

ogy. The war films, or the so-called genius pictures, typically presented story lines that glorified the "masculine" struggle toward victory and encouraged the viewer to identify with the fascist project. This use of the genre was consistent with Nazi ideology, which primarily addressed the German male and was preoccupied with fantasies of masculine strength and heroic death. In National Socialist ideology, women's roles were limited to those of "wife" and "mother." In popular cinema, however, women usually played the central role. Remarkably, Nazi cinema is the cinema of the female star actress. Whereas the "exemplary females" of National Socialist ideology were oppressed in many areas of the National Socialist everyday life, women triumphed on the silver screen. Although the representation of women in National Socialist films functioned within the ideological framework of German fascism, attempting to represent and address only those spectators who were included in their system of "desirable" subjects, it also consistently depicted women as "other."s Fascist texts, such as the one cited earlier, associate femininity, sexuality, and race, directly revealing the difficulties Nazi culture experienced with respect to its female images. The conservative model of the virtuous maiden and self-sacrificing mother that National Socialist demagogues idealized generally failed to attract and titillate contemporary audiences, who preferred the "dangerous" images of Hollywood glamour and cosmopolitan allure. Yet, the social significance of women in diverse cultural contexts has been largely neglected in studies that deal with women in the Nazi state. Historians have tended to reduce women to victims or coconspirators, contrasting "Frau Hitlers" or concentration camp guards with females who were subject to Nazi brutalities ranging from job sanctioning to forced sterilization and genocide. Further, in the past historians have explored "ordinary" women's everyday lives primarily in terms of the Nazis' prescriptive delineations. For reasons connected to dominant ideas of historical relevance, the explicitly political overshadowed the more complicated, politically ambiguous manifestations of conflicting discourses in the realm of popular culture. That said, even female images that dramatically contradicted Nazi models had no tangible subversive effect. On the contrary, they might very well have aided the fascist project by creating the illusion of "false normalcy."6 Stephen Greenblatt has argued that capitalist systems (and Nazi Germany, after all, remained one) often create "regimes in which the drive

INTRODUCTION

5

toward differentiation and the drive toward monological organization operate simultaneously."7 In the same vein, Catherine Gallagher points out that "under certain historical circumstances, the display of ideological contradictions is completely consonant with the maintenance of oppressive social relations."B Following these notions, I will argue that the National Socialist state needed to embrace its ideological "enemy" to accommodate its public's fantasies; that even a system as totalitarian as Hitler-Germany could neither dictate nor contain public discourse in an ideologically stable way. Women figure prominently in this frame. Goebbels and his acolytes allowed for diversity in cultural expression, because audiences persistently continued to express their predilection for residual cultural forms that did not correspond to Nazi doctrine. Rather than conceiving of National Socialist films and its stars as solely "mass culture," women (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, also men) must be seen as a "mass audience" whose consumer preferences shaped the very contradictions we will encounter in this work. That is, I will explore National Socialist film culture as dynamic, as a set of relations that worked in both directions, not simply from the top down. Before Patrice Petro's revisionist feminist history of Weimar culture explored how Weimar cinema addressed female spectators and represented women's concerns, women had been figured chiefly as "modernism's other," reduced to symbols of "mass culture" lacking significance in the cultural production.9 The modernist trope that posited popular media as generating a culture of "feminization" regarded the public sphere that emerged in fascist Germany as popular and populist, as including all of mass culture's negative aspects. With fascist culture thus metaphorized as feminized (through women's identification with mass culture) and masculinized (in terms of its ideological celebration of male supremacy and its fascist modernismlO), the actual position of women in the everyday world seemed a minor element in a larger framework stretching from cultural coercion to physical persecution. To locate women in the everyday, I wish to turn directly toward the relationship between women and popular culture itself, in particular the way in which female stars both represented and addressed women in popular films and the concomitant star discourse. National Socialist culture approached women in two radically separate ways: first, in an ideologically conformist manner along the lines of Kinder, Kiiche, Fiihrer; second, an ideologically'problematic one promoting consumer lifestyles,

6

INTRODUCTION

professional or social advancement, and romantic fulfillment (which is ego-centered rather than community-oriented)-all of which were most prominently articulated through the movies and their female stars. As both Petro and Miriam Hansen have shown, the cinema had much to offer female audiences from its very beginnings. 11 In fact, women's mass consumption of popular culture led cultural critics to the sexist conflation of the two. The modernist binary that frequently identified women with "low" culture consumption and men with "high" modernism ultimately suggests the problematic conceptualization of fascist mass culture as "feminizing."12 The factual basis for this argument, howeverwomen's notable involvement with popular discourses-brings female audiences themselves and their relationship with the popular in National Socialist culture to the foreground. This in tum points toward the significance of female star signs as signposts that informed women's sense of identity as much as they indicated women's fantasies and identificatory desires. In the past, the main focus of feminist film critics investigating Nazi cinema has been on the representation of women through characters in popular films. I have departed from this model of isolated textual analysis and turned toward a contextual investigation of star images circulating in various media environments. This enables me to expand the scope of reading contexts and theoretical approaches and allows for the inclusion of star theory and cultural studies approaches. As mentioned earlier, the typical Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa) hit film belonged to the female star performer, the Nazi film diva.13 And it is through her, through the paradigm of the female film star, that womanhood most clearly articulated itself as one of the central areas of contestation within German fascism. Although Nazi culture synthesized its politicians-in particular its cultic Fuhrer-figure, Adolf Hitler-into its male stars, its only publicly visible female stars (rather than unrealized generic stereotypes) were Ufa film actresses, of whom a significantly high percentage were not even German. Conceptually, Nazism embraced neither the femmes fatales nor the femmes fragiles of the fin-de-siecle, nor did it approve of the "new woman" of modernity. It foregrounded instead the absolute of the "German mother" as well as the image of the deeroticized "female fighter and comrade." Accordingly, National Socialist media sometimes closely approximated its ideal in its representations of women

INTRODUCTION

7

through stars, both in its films and in its manufacture of popular star texts. Yet more often than not Nazi films featured actresses whose star images and screen characters struggled to incorporate National Socialist doctrine. In constrast, they referred back to those discourses operative in international cinema and Weimar traditions. Although all the stars of Nazi culture, as well as their films, reveal some influence of National Socialist ideology, we must question whether their popularity depended on these influences. Not only did different filmmakers and Ufa's media machine approach various female stars in radically different ways, but whatever they did, the figure of woman invariably points to frictions inherent in the problematic position women assumed in relation to fascist patriarchy. In contrast to what the Nazis envisioned, it was impossible to streamline popular culture; instead a strange parallelism permeated the popular, allowing a number of nonsimultaneous discourses to coexist. As other scholars have noted, a closer look at Nazi cinema reveals that cultural production always exists in a certain tension with ideological prescription: even if to a somewhat lesser degree, we find the same multidiscursive tendencies that have been shown to permeate Hollywood productions also in existence here. In place of Goebbels's grandiose fantasy of a fascist Gesamtkunstwerk-conceiving of "Germany" as a total work of art-then, we are once again left with a highly contradictory system that managed to contain its ideological tensions, but not resolve them.14 Rather than explore Nazism's modes of operation and cultural production to account for how it was possible that it came to exist at allin other words, to explain German fascism through cultural analysisI want to explore the instabilities of the culture that developed under National Socialist rule. Although it is useful to examine the uniquely prograMmatic character of the regime's propaganda work, such a focus risks p ::>ducing an overly formulaic analysis that will reproduce identical re~,ults regardless of what cultural phenomenon is under investigation. My analysis of the complexities surrounding womanhood during the period relates the various intersecting discourses that emerge to their diverse, and often discrete, histories. The very push and pull that transpired in National Socialist culture-the constant clash of ideological and cultural subjects-provides a fascinating account of the struggle

8

INTRODUCTION

over systems of meaning in the Third Reich. Thus, I am interested not only in placing the representation of women into the context of Nazism, but also in looking at the cultural descriptions and inscriptions of "woman" that surfaced under National Socialist rule as related to larger cultural contexts in which these images circulated and operated. In other words, one part of my project is to elaborate on the Nazis' technologies of governing, in particular, to borrow Victoria de Grazia's phrase, on how fascism ruled women. The other is to develop the idea that women, and their relations to the social contemporary, represented a highly unstable element in National Socialist culture. By using the figure of the female star to point to a larger historical problematic and to reveal the underlying instability of National Socialism's homogeneous conception of femininity, I can offer a more complex feminist history of women in the Third Reich. Chapter 1 surveys the three most prominent discursive fields that bear on my investigation of female star images in Nazi popular culture: film politics, the woman question, and star discourse. My aim is to use the historical information and theory debates introduced here to conceptualize the production and reception of singular instances of stardom, star signs, and the films. I consider the dominant discourses structuring National Socialist culture, along with the nondominant discourses that circulated at the margins of National Socialist Germany's repressive state apparatus to illustrate the tensions that informed the daily cultural operations functional during Nazi rule. This permits cultural production under National Socialism to be read within its political context but not exclusively through it. Next I focus on three female film stars of the Third Reich-Kristina Soderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander. I chose them for their prominence and popularity as well as for their varying generic characteristics, which reach across the wide spectrum of female images circulated through stars under the National Socialist regime. My analysis juxtaposes and compares their star signs, their roles in popular narratives, and other images of women that were disseminated and propagated during the Nazi era. My approach foregrounds the intersection of various discursive elements-communicated through the different media, such as films, magazines, political writings, and fan publicationsand juxtaposes cinematic, literary, nonliterary, and social texts in synchronic and diachronic social analyses.

INTRODUCTION

9

Chapter 2 centers on Kristina SOderbaum, who is frequently identified as the National Socialist star who most closely approximated the Nazi ideal of womanhood. As the National Socialist era's most homogeneous star persona and the heroine of some of its most notorious propaganda films, Soderbaum's example serves to illustrate an ideological model that was as atypical for Nazi cinema as it was conflicted within itself. My textual analysis of three of SOderbaum's films further shows that despite National Socialist director Veit Harlan's concerted efforts to create a female image consistent with the demands of National Socialist doctrine, the melodramatic elements connected to SOderbaum's persona exceeded their ideological containment and hence simultaneously described a positive ideal and its tragic opposite. Chapter 3 investigates the crossover star Lilian Harvey, whose career in Nazi cinema was preceded by Weimar fame and Hollywood stardom. Harvey's comedies and star image in National Socialist Germany therefore departed significantly from the ideological framework suggested by a star like Soderbaum and, instead, pointed to a number of continuities that were firmly embedded in discourses of international modernity. Harvey's case-in terms of her excessive image as a glamour star as well as her comedic performances in her films-thus indicates the difficulties National Socialist cinema faced in trying to combine the enduring appeal of anachronistic popular models with a National Socialist redescription of femininity. Finally, I turn to Zarah Leander, arguably Nazism's biggest and most complicated star persona, in Chapter 4. Introduced into Nazi culture as an "instant-diva," intended to replace Marlene Dietrich, Leander's star text most clearly exemplifies the multidiscursive and oxymoronic elements contained within the figure of the National Socialist film diva by constituting a star sign that oscillated between notoriety and saintliness. Leander's films perpetually repeated this pleasurable negotiation of antagonistic formulations, thus pointing to modes of audience identification and spectators hip issues-most strikingly articulated through her immense popularity with the postwar gay community-which must be seen as in excess of National Socialist objectives. What modes of address did these female star images rely on? What models of womanhood did they promote? And what changes did they undergo throughout the period? Did these female stars remain popular despite, or because of, the 'multidiscursive elements of their star per-

10

INTRODUCTION

sonae? Or did the Nazis simply follow Hollywood's model, which allowed for the brief representation of social transgression only to harness it through measures of narrative containment? In addressing these questions, I point to various literary traditions, modernity, Weimar and Hollywood culture, and Nazism. Additionally, underlying my account of these stars are issues that point to the more general problems the Nazis encountered vis-a.-vis the limiting role prescriptions their "philosophy" reserved for women. Ultimately, we come to see a Third Reich history of female subjectivity, one that Nazi cinema articulated, just as National Socialist politics sought to eradicate it. The female stars of the Third Reich thus lead us to discover an ideologically troubled regime incapable of overcoming modernity's gender gap.

1

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation

FILM CULTURE AND THE POPULAR IN THE NAZI STATE

The creation of small amusements, the production of daily doses against boredom and melancholy, we do not wish to suppress. One mustn't deal in ideology from dawn to dusk. Joseph Goebbels in his "Kaiserhof" address to the film industry on March 28, 19331

BERTOLT BRECHT described fascist spectacle as a theatrical discourse, a never-ending series of fireworks aimed at dissolving or exchanging the public's critical perception of politics with the irrational sensations of emphatic entertainment. 2 Along the same lines, "fiat arspereat mundus," the slogan Walter Benjamin suggested to coin the fascist motif of aestheticizing political life, of displacing the reality of totalitarian oppression and military aggression into the sublime sphere of artistic expression, is often cited to point to the Nazi state's self-stylizations. 3 Leni Riefenstahl's Hitler-documentary Triumph of the Will (1935) readily comes to mind when one thinks of Nazi film culture today (Fig. 1.1). Similarly, Nazi entertainment practices that went beyond the political rally or the propaganda newsreel, such as the Ufa pictures at the local cinema, are frequently analyzed as a "bread and circus" aesthetics aimed at streamlining and pacifying the populace by means of the mass media, not least by the National Socialist ideologues themselves. The speed with which the Nazis quickly took control of virtually all public and cultural institutions (Gleichschaltung), simultaneously eliminating their political opposition through measures ranging from coercive intimidation to radical persecution, is well documented. Shortly after Hitler's Natianalsazialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; National Socialist German Workers Party) emerged victorious in January 1933, the National Socialist culture machinery sprang into action. On 11

12

CHAPTER

1

Figure 1.1. Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia premiers at a Berlin movie palace.

March 13, 1933, the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium [iir Volksaufklarung und Propaganda)-in short, Promiwas founded under the control of Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels. 4 Two weeks later Goebbels addressed the film community, liberally proclaiming that "art is free and art must remain free," an unconvincing announcement already qualified by Goebbels's earlier definition of what exactly would be considered "art": " ... art is only possible if it is rooted in National Socialist soil. ... We have no intention to tolerate, even in the slightest, that those ideas which will be eradicated in Germany from the roots up [mit Stumpf und Stiell, somehow, disguised or openly, reemerge in film."s By this Goebbels did not rule out supposedly apolitical entertainment, but he followed the maxim that the best propaganda functioned unconsciously, "works invisibly so to speak."6 The years of Nazi rule saw the continuing production of popular Spielfilme (more than 1000 feature films were made between 1933 and

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 13

1945),7 gladly executed by the Ufa studios which, as Anton Kaes points out, had become increasingly proficient in imitating Hollywood's industry of "distraction and diversion" in the early 1930s.8 The conditions of production that informed Ufa's (and other German film companies') activities after the Machtergreifung (the Nazis' seizure of power), however, changed dramatically. No longer were capitalist interests--or even aesthetic concerns-the only measure that determined whether or not a film project was realized; rather, ideological monitoring and censorship influenced the film industry's commercial activities on all levels. Various institutions under Promi' s umbrella controlled the press, theater, radio, art and film.9 "Non-Aryans" could not receive membership in mandatory professional chambers and were thus quickly driven out of their careers. 10 New legislation, such as the Lichtspielgesetz passed in February 1934,11 introduced a system of precensorship that entailed the review of manuscripts and screenplays through a state official (Reichsfilmdramaturg) to "prevent in time that subjects which go against the spirit of the time are dealt with."12 In addition, the so-called Reich's film dramatist also oversaw the actual execution of movie production and was in charge of supervising everything from casting practices to stylistic aesthetics.13 The film press functioned under similar constrictions until, in 1936, Goebbels prohibited "art criticism in its present form" altogether. 14 Film criticism was subsequently renamed "film contemplation" (Filmbetrachtung) and had to closely follow interpretive guidelines previously issued by Promi. 15 Finally even audience behaviors became subject to the Nazis' relentless discipline. In 1941, for instance, a secret report informed Promi that the public increasingly avoided watching the mandatory propaganda newsreels that preceded feature film screenings by coming late or lingering in the theater lobby. Goebbels promptly stepped in to regulate such ideologically unwelcome habits by prohibiting spectators from entering the screening room after the newsreels had started.1 6 Moreover, from 1933 onward Ufa moved progressively toward becoming a state-owned business, a process that was effectively completed in 1942, when Ufa's new state-controlled mother company Ufi finally vertically integrated the entire film industry, incorporating not only production, distribution, and exhibition enterprises but even service industries, such as developing and printing houses.17 This degree of control virtually insured that very few films made under Nazi rule would be heavily censored or banned from release after

14

CHAPTER

1

they had been completed. 18 Goebbels trusted in his ideological state apparatus, to borrow Althusser's phrase, and was confident that what the Nazi state now produced was indeed Nazi culture. But was it? Questions concerning the ideological status of Germany's cultural productions in the Nazi era remained a continual source of political debate both during the Third Reich and afterward. In fact, numerous tensions emerged between Germany's culture industries and its ideological watchdogs, tensions that had less to do with political opposition than with the incongruence between certain National Socialist ideals and the requirements of the National Socialist state's commerce-based economies. In other words, products that were easily popularized and sold more often than not promised the fulfillment of those very ego-driven desires that the Nazis' idealized conception of fascist collectivity sought to counter; aside from the obvious propaganda picture, popular cinema still dealt in a currency of fantasy fulfillment that frequently concentrated on private scenarios of romance and individualized happiness. Other industries likewise addressed consumers' "private" interest in leisure activities, beauty products, and luxury goods. 19 As many contemporary articles and reviews indicate, the frequent inconsistencies that surfaced in Nazi popular culture were in fact identified and criticized in Nazi party publications. 2o A Nazi youth journal, for instance, concluded in 1938: "Except for portions of the newsreels, cinema in a new politicized Germany amounts to an apolitical oasis. A really clever person might claim that even if there are no propaganda films, there still is propaganda tucked away beneath the film's surface details .... [But] the more we go to the movies, the more inescapable is the feeling that the world we see on the screen by and large has nothing to do with the National Socialist world we live in."21 To be sure, Goebbels and his minions at the Ministry of Propaganda intended to infuse every aspect of the cultural public sphere with National Socialist thought and were particularly interested in using the popular appeal of entertainment cinema, the public's Filmsucht (film addiction), for their purposes. Yet whether they actually achieved what they set out to do through Ufa's filmic dream machine or simply claimed unqualified success (turning their strategy of manipulation into the performance of self-deception) is subject to debate. In the postwar accounts of National Socialist film culture, this problem initially articulated itself in a dramatic split between, in Eric Rentschler's

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 15

words, "adversaries and apologists."22 Studies such as Gerd Albrecht's 1969 Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik divided National Socialist films into various categories centered on genre and political content, which were further labeled "propagandistic" and "non-political."23 This organization led him to foreground films with overt propagandistic content in his discussion of film and ideology-largely to the exclusion of the majority of films, classified as "non-political"-a practice which long dominated the study of Nazi pictures. Erwin Leiser's Nazi Cinema also investigated a number of exemplary film texts containing overt propaganda. 24 Hilmar Hoffmann's The Triumph of Propaganda and David Welch's The Third Reich proceeded in a similar manner.25 Consequently, Karsten Witte critically summarized that "for decades, both German and international research concentrated on the exception rather than the rule. Again and again, about a dozen ostensibly propagandistic pictures were singled out and studied, while the rest of the films-sometimes banal material, sometimes genre films of above average quality-were ignored. The epistemological interest was focused on the reading of manifestations of propaganda. Totalizing ideas about system immanence dominated."26 Many scholars of National Socialist entertainment thus looked at National Socialist discourse as a coherent system that managed to produce a unified, homogenous mass culture that maintained and confirmed National Socialist ideology. As Detlef Peukert points out, postwar critics concentrated on reading National Socialist entertainment as a "means of consolidating passive consensus, an affirmation of the newly achieved 'normal status quo.' "27 As a result, many theorists proceeded to look at all of Nazi cinema as somehow aiding fascism, functioning as a kind of cultural indoctrination that was achieved through an allencompassing system of escapism or propaganda. In this view, escapist fantasies containing subtle ideological content-often referred to as "fascist kitsch" -allowed the German public to use the cinema to take breaks that would prevent the overaccumulation of their frustrations, whereas overt propaganda directly participated in the ideological manipulation of the German spectator. 28 Among the apologist and redemptive voices was that of director Arthur Maria Rabenalt, whose 1957 book Film in the Twilight argued for an understanding of "film as exile."29 He suggested that the film community simply tolerated their rulers, biding time in the apolitical atmo-

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sphere of Babelsberg's art world without actively supporting the system. One example in support of this view is the frequently mentioned fact that the new "German Greeting," Heil Hitler, was abhorred on the Ufa lot, as film people still welcomed each other with the traditional Guten Tag. 3D Most postwar fan books, star biographies, and autobiographies also adopt this position. Zarah Leander's It Was So Wonderfull, Kristina SOderbaum's Nothing Remains the Same Forever, and Hans Borgelt's The Sweetest Girl in the World: Lilian Harvey all use anecdotes to suggest their stars' opposition to the Nazi regime and present their heroines as having lived and worked in the virtually isolated world of theatrical glamour. 31 Of course, German fan publications and their nostalgic readers are not motivated by the desire for lucid historical analysis. Rather, they testify to the need to confirm what is a latent knowledge in German collective memory; in other words, they indicate that not everything that is remembered of the twelve years under Nazi rule is remembered as negative: "ordinary" people-that is people who were not specifically targeted by Nazi persecution-lived lives, went on vacations, played sports, fell in love, married, had children, and went to the movies ... it couldn't have been all bad. In the postwar years until the late 1970s two oppositional approaches toward National Socialist film culture divided cultural historians and film critics: 1. One viewpoint suggested that the Nazis were successful in their dissemination of fascist ideology through countless overt or covert propaganda vehicles, and that even seemingly apolitical entertainment was in fact spreading "invisible" ideological content. Goebbels's allowance for a certain cultural illusionism, his "daily doses against boredom and melancholy" aimed at creating the continuing "false" impression of normalcy and continuity, and thus constituted a deliberate strategy that was part of the overall political system. 2. The contrary position spoke to the Nazis' inadvertent admittance that certain areas of cultural production were never entirely cleansed of non-National Socialist influences ("certain tendencies that seem Jewish, all too Jewish, to us") and thus constituted free spaces in which a subdued form of alternative culture could survive in filmic "exile." Evidence for this perception, as mentioned earlier, can indeed be found in the National Socialist press itself.

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Since the 1970s these two dominant, though contrasting, views have been incorporated into a more complicated understanding of the nature of film ideology and its contradictions. In more recent cultural studies approaches to National Socialist films, neither view predominates. Linda Schulte-Sasse argues that Nazi cinema taught its ideological lesson not through "political content but in its generation of a subject effect of wholeness and mastery dependent on 'imaginary' experience."32 Schulte-Sasse's psychoanalytic investigation of National Socialist filmsdrawing on the work of Slavoj Zizek-suggests that the Nazis tapped into the public's collective desires for closure and completion by installing a sense of wholeness as the goal of the fascist fantasy, which was in tum produced through Nazi cinema. To do so, however, films didn't rely on National Socialist messages but instead reverted to artistic ideals of the eighteenth century with "its subject position of wholeness, of fusion with a cohesive social body."33 Schulte-Sasse also points to the possibility of ineffectiveness, of the films' possible failure at being ideologically convincing: If one dispenses with preconceived ideas and looks at these films, one

finds that not only are they riddled with the same ruptures and internal subversions that beleaguer virtually all narrative texts, but that the popular success many enjoyed may be tied precisely to these ruptures, which compromise-if not necessarily contradict-the "Nazi message." The struggle to make the Jew Other ends up making him ambivalent if not appealing; films about genius/leader figures may overshoot their mark, rendering their hero so insufferably perfect as to make his adversary more sympathetic; many films thrive on a melodrama not necessarily accommodated to Nazi totalism, which ... involves an exorcism of the private sphere. 34

Schulte-Sasse is not alone in investigating the obvious discrepancies between doctrinal National Socialist ideology and cultural production. Hans Dieter Schafer argues that the German public sphere displayed signs of a "split consciousness." On the one hand it was marked by the powerful images of Nazi propaganda-triumphal daytime parades and mystical nightly spectacles performed under the omnipresent symbol of the swastika-while on the other hand there were still international magazines at big city newsstands, swing concerts, Hollywood features, Disney cartoons, and Coca Cola. 35 Klaus Kreimeier's institutional history ofUfa similarly emphasizes the complex relations influencing Nazi

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film production. Yet in contrast to the ideological move that SchulteSasse indicates through the invocation of eighteenth-century tropes-a rejection of overindulgence and excess in favor of a premodern ideal of bourgeois/communal morality-Kreimeier's account leads us to consider a move in the opposite direction. Like Schafer, he describes a cultural environment that departed from National Socialist ideology through its privileged relationship with modem consumerism: "Advertisements addressed to the' common man' -for the family home and an automobile of one's own, for the radio and the photo-camera, for modem kitchen appliances, 'chic' clothing and 'worldly' cosmeticsmoved objects, which had previously only been connoted with lifestyles seen in society pictures, within close reach."36 The very promise of the society feature, however, of the elegant dress and of the cosmopolitan refreshment ensured by a popular American soft drink, was to rise to a lifestyle of luxury and consumption previously reserved for the upper classes. KdF (Strength through Joy) cruises and affordable fashions, organized leisure time activities and subsidized theater visits-all imbricated with the signifiers and connotations of privilege-thus functioned as the inconsistent counterpoint to an ideology that denounced luxurious indulgence as decadent degeneracy, while simultaneously benefiting from the perceived upward "democratization" of social inequalities. Nazi films, likewise, displayed an array of features that were difficult, if not impossible, to contain within party parameters in the strictest sense. Consequently, Kreimeier contends that it is one of the legends of film history that the National Socialists succeeded in infecting all genres of cinematography, each film, each material and every ever-so-far removed subject with insinuations from their ideological poison lab. Even if the minister's desires and the ambitions of his helpers aimed in this direction, frequently the material that was to be politically shaped ... slipped through the apparatus in spite of its multiform control instruments .... The very nature of the filmic with its incalculable, will-o'-the-wisp qualities and its affinity with micrological structures finally refused the "macro technique" of Goebbels' control machineryF

Hence we encounter in Nazi culture a technique of doubling. There was National Socialist ideology which, according to Georg Lukacs, was in itself constructed as "an eclectic synthesis of all reactionary tend en-

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 19

cies" (racism, nationalism, communitarian populism, antimodern tendencies) already in circulation in German discourse. 38 That is to say, the Nazi "philosophy" propagated a mix of "residual ideologies,"39 as Adorno put it, compiled into an overall Ersatz-ideology posing as a totalizing exegetic model, a quasi-religion. 40 Meanwhile, popular culture presented a similar mish-mash of influences on the level of entertainment patterns and everyday cultural practices, but in its manifestations not only drew on synthesizing "reactionary" tendencies, but mobilized other popular cultural trends and traditions as well. This allowed Germans, suggests Peukert, to lead a "double life" that carefully separated the ideological imperatives that dominated the organization of work and political life in the Nazi state from a routine of leisure time activities that embraced a certain degree of cultural diverSity.41 Although the Nazis attempted to disguise these frictions to appear as a totalizing whole, the dominant reality was one of fragmentation, both ideologically and culturally. The Nazis' ideological efforts to "cleanse" the public arena of the "foreign" or the "degenerate" through their revisionist rhetoric only thinly masked the multidiscursive and often contradictory continuities that flowed into the popular. KdF cruises, which perpetuated mass tourism, were justified as giving hardworking people a deserved break and thus furthering the volkisch health; attractive ladylike attire (as opposed to dressing in the National Socialist friendly "wholesome" manner, which emphasized "peasant" or "sporty" styles) was excused as a woman's duty toward her husband whose desire would in turn lead to a growing German family (and nation); movie stardom was rearticulated as ideological labor, and so on.42 The inconsistency of National Socialist rhetoric further revealed itself through its malleability vis-a.-vis the changing demands of current political and economic situations, which were expressed in the frequent modification of previously propagated doctrines. This understanding of Nazi film culture as including a variety of discursive fields and leaving many contradictory loose ends untied 43 leads us to ask why such a wide array of cultural means had to be mobilized, why National Socialist rhetoric alone did not suffice. Put differently, Schulte-Sasse's concept of multidiscursivity as instrumental to National Socialist film texts or Kreimeier's insistence on ideological slippage prompts us to investigate more closely how much of the culture the

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Nazis enlisted to ensure public popularity, or at least contentment, genuinely belonged to Nazi discourse. In fact, it makes us wonder if any "germane" Nazi culture existed at all. On the other hand, it also doesn't make sense to distinguish numerous cultural elements as somehow separate from the ideological sphere of fascism, "in" it but not "of" it, so to speak. Critics such as Eric Rentschler caution that the purpose behind a cultural analysis of National Socialist entertainment should be driven by wanting to understand the ideological mechanics of the Third Reich and not to rescue Nazi art. To address these concerns, Karsten Witte emphasizes political contexts, shifting away from attempts at aesthetic formalism (i.e., the question: what is a fascist film?) to turn to a historicized notion of National Socialist film culture.44 Along the same lines, Rentschler acknowledges the systemic environment that enabled cultural production as vital, but not singularly determinative, for its historical assessment. I regard Rentschler's argument that seemingly apolitical films didn't exist in political isolation, that in the Nazi state "politics and entertainment were inextricably bound,"45 as too limiting. Is it not possible that the inconsistencies we encounter in National Socialist film culture only appear as productive contradictions that ensured the public's acceptance of the fascist status quo? Recent studies by Sabine Hake and Markus Spieker underline this position. Hake's study of popular cinema in the Third Reich calls for a normalization of German film history by looking at Third Reich film culture as allowing audiences to continue to "partake in the ongoing transformation of mass culture and modernity, including in an international context."46 Spieker's history of Hollywood cinema in the Third Reich further highlights the continuing presence of American film ideology within fascist everyday culture. 47 Of course, the mere maintenance and expansion of totalitarian power has never required ideological consistency; it requires hypocrisy and the will to dominate by any means necessary. No analysis of German fascism that I can imagine, cultural or otherwise, will ever find that the Nazis didn't attempt to bolster their power at all cost. Yet if all of National Socialist culture-in whatever manifestation (given that overt opposition was actively suppressed)-served as a "mass deception,"48 then any examination of single elements of the period-films, directors, press publications, stars-would ultimately have the same result: that the Nazis used these films, directors, publications and stars to distract

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 21

people from the political reality of fascist totalitarianism. And what of overtly propagandistic materials? Are their masculine heroes and narratives of sacrifice in the end no different from their counterpartssprightly comedies starring sexually ambiguous film divas-insofar as both helped to manipulate their viewers into political compliance, albeit by radically different means? Again, if one assumes that National Socialist culture in all its materializations participated in making the Nazi state a functional system (itself a questionable notion), one might convincingly argue that ultimately they are no different at all. Rather than examining the rationale behind the fascists' cultural agenda and their apparent politics of (limited) toleration then, it may be more productive to make room for readings of National Socialist culture that problematize an airtight unidirectional model. If we not only acknowledge the range of cultural materials produced under National S0cialist rule but also conceive of contemporary National Socialist spectators as a potentially diverse audience--whose contradictory preferences might speak to the continuing existence of extrafascist perspectives-we find interesting, different historical results from those produced by a tapered gaze at the period. 49 More interesting than the idea of Nazi culture including extrafascist elements as an "alternative" reality or a distraction that supported the overall functionality of the regime is the possibility that it was not ideologically consistent. Although the Nazis clearly liked the idea that their cultural tolerance of problematic discourses helped them to maintain a tight control over the public by making a the National Socialist everyday feel less oppressive, these results do not necessarily mean that National Socialist culture was part of a functional political system. In fact, National Socialist cultural phenomena might very well point to the Nazi state's ideological dysfunctionality, its uncertainty and inconsistency, made manifest in its continual need to rely on its "other." What then do we call "Nazi ideology" for the purpose of this investigation into stars: what the Nazis officially believed in, or what they did to stay in power? The differentiation of these two concepts is the key to understanding the tensions that marked National Socialist culture, its fundamental hypocrisy and ideological confusion. Approaching "Nazi cinema"-or, to employ Axel Eggebrecht's qualified term, "film in the Nazi state"50-as a totality reduces single film texts or star figures to parts of a mass cultural system of repression and exhausts our options

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for interpreting these objects. If we shift the focus toward ideological structures of dominance that included the articulation of the nondominant, we can account for why the Nazi state permitted or produced its own ideological contradictions, and we can inquire into the vehicles that carried these contradictions. If we accept the idea that German spectators harbored notions of the popular that did not correspond to those of National Socialist ideologues, we can account for much of the period's cultural phenomena, including many of its female film stars. My particular interest is not only the means by which the Nazis sought to control German film audiences through stars, but also how these stars addressed viewers in ways that departed from National Socialist ideological imperatives. As I inquire into the star discourse of female performers, I am able to trace the problematic articulation of gender issues in Nazi popular culture. WOMEN IN THE THIRD REICH

If in earlier times the liberal intellectualized women's movements contained many, many points in their programs, ... the program of our National Socialist women's movement essentially only contains one point, and that point is 'the child' ... Women's emancipation is just a word invented by Jewish intellect. Adolf Hitler, speech at the Reichsparteitag September 8, 1934

The male figure engaged in heroic struggle was one of the most frequently invoked images throughout Nazi rhetoric. Hitler regularly presented himself as Germany's self-sacrificing servant and all-powerful leader figure-as the solitary suffering idol of the Filhrerkult, who led "a Spartan personal life" and was "a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a nonsmoker, and a celibate."51 According to Klaus Theweleit, the central tenets of National Socialist masculinity included strictly maintained boundaries of self enabled through male collectivity. The idealized protofascist soldier preferred same-sex comradeship to romantic (heterosexual) eroticism and found his identity as a member of a racial/ national/ideological male group. Women, associated with fluid ego boundaries and the threatening temptation of self-dissolution by way of sexual union, were excluded from the masculine sphere of fascist selfexpression. 52 Because of its preoccupation with fantasies of military conflict and sacrificial death, Nazi propaganda thus primarily ad-

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 23

dressed male audiences. To counter the male crisis of identity of the Weimar years-linked to World War I defeat, economic crisis and the new German democracy's political chaos-Nazi rhetoric promised men a regained virility and the rebirth of national pride. 53 Along the same lines, their presumed negative experience of a fragmented, isolating modernity in the 1920s was targeted with the utopian National Socialist vision of undying camaraderie and everlasting unity. Hitler envisioned a social arrangement that ultimately reduced women's role to reproduction. While the Fuhrer hid his relationship with Eva Braun and declared instead that "Germany" was "his bride," he upheld matrimony and motherhood as the singular goal of fascist maidenhood. Although the Reich's popular culture addressed women in a variety of ways-and not all conformed to its "ideal" -Nazi "philosophy" sanctioned only a few, clearly delineated models as appropriate for female identification. The tensions between these paradigms consequently emerged in theory as well as in practice: on the one hand the state's biological essentialism oppressed women politically, while on the other it allowed "alternatives" to persist in the field of fantasy production, National Socialist entertainment. According to state "philosopher" Alfred Rosenberg-who wrote some of the period's most notoriously sexist and racist texts-in the imaginary thousandyear-long reign that was to follow the NSDAP's victory, German females would neither have the right to vote nor otherwise influence affairs of the state through political appointment ("woman is woman thanks to a certain inability"), but their particular value was to be found solely in "the maintenance of [Aryan] blood and in the proliferation of race."54 For Rosenberg and other National Socialist ideologues, racially "pure" marriage and, more important, motherhood consequently constituted the categorical imperative of a woman's life, her singular raison d'etre. 55 Nazi "philosophy" thus conceived of a radical division of gender that infringed on almost all areas of Germany's social and political sphere. 56 While men were the center of the Nazis' ideological system, women's significance was relegated to clearly demarcated fields on the margin, areas of activity "which most closely agree with her [woman's] nature."57 Beyond prohibiting women from participating in the political arena or the legal apparatus alongside men (shortly after the Nazis' successful election, women could no longer vote or be elected58), women were fur-

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ther constrained in many other avenues that promised individual liberty or enabled "alternative" forms of self-realization. The education of girls concentrated on preparing them for motherhood or work in the "caring" professions, and young women's access to universities was rigorously restricted through the introduction of a quota system (a numerus clausus that prescribed that the female student body not rise beyond a maximum of 10 percent).59 In addition, female state employees who were married, as well as married women doctors, were fired from their jobs to make room for unemployed males;60 to the same ends, the Ehestandsdarlehen (marriage loan) promised young couples state credit to enable the formation of a small household, under the condition that the bride would leave her job once married. 61 Moreover, sexually "deviant" behavior was severely punished, leading to the incarceration of prostitutes, forced sterilization, and the public persecution and humiliation of women who had interracial sex (which was defined as sex with non-Aryans, primarily Jews). Meanwhile, "non-Aryan" women or female dissidents were treated just as brutally as men (resistance fighter Sophie Scholl, to cite just one example, was executed along with her brother and, of course, the Nazis' Endlosung conceived of the merciless murder of all Jews).62 Fascist entertainment culture and beauty standards similarly adopted National Socialist specific determinations. From an early age, girls were recruited to join a series of fascist groups-such as the Jungmiidel (girls ages 10 to 15) and the Bund Deutscher Miidchen, in short BdM (girls ages 15 to 21)-that organized leisure activities and advanced National Socialist "education" above and beyond what was taught in schools. Adult women were invited to join the Deutsche Frauenwerk or the elite organization Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft. The goal of these institutions was not only to control and monitor the female population, but also to further point women in the "proper" ideological direction, which in many ways meant away from both the radical concerns of 1920s feminism and the traditional culture of bourgeois femininity. This coincided with the renunciation of women's political power, as described above, as well as with a reconceptualization of feminine aesthetics and beauty ideals. The National Socialist women's journal, NS-Frauenwarte, for instance, wrote in 1938: [After World War IJ a number of foreign "cultural goods" found their way to Germany. That's when jazz, the Negro music, came across the ocean-

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 25 and also at that time a beauty ideal came to us ... and a kind of beauty routine ... that had been alien to us before. For a thinking person at that time it was often confusing how, for example, all those young working girls found the time to take care of their hands and nails in such a refined manner, that they didn't regret spending money on powder, lipstick and make-up, that they found it beautiful to present themselves painted and made up on a work day ... In addition, there was the unconditional worship of slendemess.63

This "false" ideal, argued the author, had led women to develop a negative attitude toward pregnancy and an unhealthy body image. To remedy the "mistakes" of Weimar's role models, women were accordingly urged to turn to a new understanding of female beauty and to reject "any kind of beauty cult that may contradict the highest purpose of woman, to be mother of a horde of healthy children."64 As Liliane Crips has pointed out, fascist publications-such as the 55-journal Das Schwarze Korpswere highly suspicious of "symbols of luxury (like jewelry and fur), getup (lipstick, powder, perfume, high-heeled shoes), and male attributes (such as smoking or very short hair)," which they declared to be "indecent, or rather, degenerate."6S What propagandists like Rosenberg now passed off as the desirable standard was "the Nordic beauty of woman," the familiar Nazi archetype of blonde and blue-eyed Aryanness. 66 Yet the Nazis' invocation of Aryan motherhood as the dominant female paradigm should not be read only as the articulation of its fusion of patriarchy with fascism. The National Socialist leadership knew that women's ballots had substantially contributed to the Nazi party's victory in the 1933 election. Women had voted not only for stability for their deteriorating families, work for their men and food for their children, as Annemarie Trager suggests,67 but also for the official validation of their work as mothers-a demand that had originated much earlier in the women's movement and is not unlike that of today's feminists who call for the acknowledgment and compensation of female labor in the home. 68 Although the Nazis-including fascist women---condemned the "degenerate" images of women as sex objects (another complaint shared by contemporary feminists) as much as they departed from antinatalist feminism, the National Socialist "new woman" indeed did contribute "her share" by shining in her own, however limited, space. In fact, Hitler pronounced that her suffering in childbirth equaled that of the soldier's in battle,69 and for that she received her own holiday,

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Muttertag (Mother's Day), and her own medal of honor, the Mutterkreuz (mother's cross), received for having four children or more.7o It is important in this context not to conflate previously established models of patriarchy, which traditionally limited women's options, with the specifically modem issues that also arose here. The unique move of fascist rhetoric in terms of the "woman question" was that it stressed motherhood not as a tradition but as the ultimate goal of its "women's movement," its suggestion that National Socialist policies liberated (working-class) women from the negative constraints of modernity, namely, work, to allow them to benefit their children and themselves by staying at home. In other words, in contrast to contemporaneous social understandings of womanhood that articulated conventional patriarchal norms, particularly noticeable in the case of fascism was its combination of feminist discourses that foregrounded gender issues with a move toward a repressive antimodern gender separatism. Moreover, a number of female activists who had engaged themselves to further the National Socialist cause initially continued their work under Nazi rule; some of them did not accept that the role of women should be limited to a merely reproductive function. Although motherhood was clearly the dominant model available to women in the Third Reich, the image of the "female fighter" and "comrade" (Kiimpferin und Gefiihrtin) also circulated in National Socialist discourse, showing residual traces of the Nazis' "revolutionary" rhetoric and the concessions made to the women's movement and female voters before the National Socialist victory. Sophie Rogge-Borner-publisher of the journal Die deutsche Kiimpferin (The Female German Fighter)7L-even turned against the underlying essentialism that informed the gender theories of other contemporary female authors (such as Gertrud Baumer, Gertrud Baumgart, and Bertha Braun) and in its place suggested a nongendered elitism. She argued "that the central term for women was not 'motherliness' but 'people's community,'" which in tum would be best served if the state's most gifted men and women were both able to assume leadership over the common "masses."72 Furthermore, the 1930s effort to drive women out of the workforce to solve the unemployment crisis gave way to wartime rhetoric that quickly reactivated the concept of the "female fighter" to enlist women as the cooperative workers on the home front. Matters of concern to

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mothers-for instance, worries about single parenthood, working mothers, and home births, all of which had been declared "solved" by the state's foregrounding of marriage, homemaking, and improved public health-had to be revisited once most wives had husbands at the front (or were widowed), labored in weapons assembly, and had less access to hospital care (now primarily reserved for the wounded of the Wehrmacht).73 Many working-class women were already active in the labor force even before the advent of war, largely because the Nazis' promise to meet their families' economic needs was hardly realized in practice. The role models provided for women in the Nazi state hence emerge as transmutable, serving to manipulate women to accept whatever function the state needed them to perform at the time and thus exceeding fixed ideological inscription. In this context, even female images that exploded National Socialist ideals fit well within the Nazis' hypocritical pragmatism. Still, investigations into the role of women in the Third Reich initially concentrated primarily on Nazi ideology and the resulting National Socialist policies, ignoring the contradictions that emerged in the overall cultural sphere. Parallel to the academic treatment of National Socialist film culture discussed earlier, historians in the 1970s (when "women" started to interest scholars as a category) began their debates regarding women's victimization and/or complicity under Hitler by turning to the Nazis' "official" political and ideological positions or probed into how these discourses were realized in the everyday lives of women. Correspondingly, female representations in Nazi cinema-if they were dealt with at all-were tested only in relationship to dominant Nazi paradigms, and films that deviated from such models were largely left unexamined or became the domain of apologist fan publications.74 In fact, until the 1970s National Socialist histories by and large dismissed women as marginal because of their assumed political insignificance, while isolated cases of women who had partaken in Nazi brutalities (such as female concentration camp guards) received sensationalist attention, arguably because their "unfeminine" violence rendered them exceptionally perverse. Women did receive blame, however-by Marxist and conservative historians alike-for their supposed lack of political sophistication resulting in a profascist vote, which was attributed to women's special susceptibility to propaganda.75 Women's identifica-

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tion with mass culture in various social theories, as Andreas Huyssen suggests, thus served to reduce them to a manipulated force that overran the progressive advances of a masculine, modernist left.76 Academic studies of women in the Nazi state have largely neglected the notion that what drew women to the cinema in the first place were predominantly female images that depicted neither passive house slaves nor political acolytes. 77 What happened to the progressive energies excited by women's suffrage? And what became of earlier Weimar models, the ongoing problem of shifting gender relations, Hollywood culture and international fashion? A view toward the popular culture of women's everyday life points to a number of answers that not only allude to the Nazis' attempt to redirect or even persecute these tendencies, but also show how persistently instantiations of prefascist themes continued to resurface, necessitating repeated revisionist correction or simply opportunist tolerance. A case in point: when Goebbels ordered the closing of all beauty salons (which flourished despite the Nazis' official "beauty reform") in 1943, because they "wasted light, heat and human labor," he almost cynically reassured women, that they would "appeal to our victoriously returning soldiers even without a peace-time get-up."78 Goebbels's sexual innuendo, however, also testified to the fact that even by 1943 women had not embraced the aesthetic package advertised as the Nazi ideal. By and large, neither German men nor German women-including the Nazi leadership itself-toed the party line on women's styles. Eva Braun is reported never to have worn a dress twice and frequently appeared before the Fuhrer wearing gowns that had been copied from movie stars' outfits; Goebbels's predilection for Ufa starlets, especially the Czech actress Lida Baarova, an almond-eyed brunette (Fig. 1.2), blatantly confirms this double standard. Yet while the National Socialist elite's personal practices simply attest to the fragility of their convictions (succumbing, despite themselves, to the standards of Hollywood beauty), the observation that many women adhered to conventional, prefascist beauty ideals is of larger significance. Recall that women's questionable identification with mass culture nevertheless strongly suggests female viewers as a mass audience, an audience that expressed its consumer preferences at the box office as much as in the beauty parlor. 79 Rejecting as inaccurate and misogynist the idea of popular culture as providing "low" and "feminine" consumer goods,

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we can still ask questions about how popular culture addressed women, given that they were so very interested in it. Moreover, if the images of women that circulated in the popular culture were at times incompatible with those propagated by National Socialist organs, and existed alongside them as alternative identificatory models for women, do they not speak to the imaginary preferences of female spectators at the time? It has often been remarked that Nazi films used popular strategies to first engage their audiences and then redirect them toward a more politically

Figure 1.2. Foreign affairs: Goebbels's Czech mistress, actress Uda Baarova.

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acceptable, new status quo, but the insistent reappearance of the same old predilections in itself says a great deal about the persistence of alternative models of womanhood. It is in this context that the female star becomes vital to a larger inquiry into women's culture in the Third Reich: although the most prominent, politically elevated and privileged prototype of "woman" was the generic figure of the "mother," the most visible individual images of actual women in the National Socialist state were Ufa's film divas. Nazi wives were seldom foregrounded in the press to maintain the impression of masculine individuality for Nazi leaders; Hitler, for instance, hid Eva Braun from public view entirely and even compared himself "to a matinee idol who loses its allure once married."BO Similarly, Magda Goebbels was often excluded from her husband's public appearances and diminished in status through his well-known (yet never publicly reported) philandering. Ironically, though, politicians invited being photographed in the company of female movie stars, women who hardly fit the political ideal of self-effacing subordination and sacrificing female servitude, even if the films they starred in made narrative concessions to this paradigm. To make sense of these ideological complexities then, we need to shift from "a closed and static, singular and homogenous notion of ideology," as Louis A. Montrose once put it, to "one that is heterogeneous and unstable, permeable and processual."81 NAZI STARDOM AND FEMALE REPRESENTATION

Film, aside from causing the spectator's personal connection with the film protagonist during the filmic unfolding, also creates the desire to be like him. How he clears his throat or spits, how he is dressed, how he acts, if and how he drinks, what and how he smokes, if he is a straight arrow or a bon vivant, all that not only has an effect in the film but also in the spectator's life .... It is equally indisputable that the women represented in films influence the beauty ideal of the common masses. For this reason, the casting of film roles cannot receive enough attention. It is not only a matter of this or that woman appearing attractive in this or that movie. No, the right woman chosen according to her external appearance as well as to inner qualities and attributes may, after repeated and successful use, positively influence the general tastes and beauty ideal of a great number of men, totally unconsciously but with lasting effect. This is not only valuable from the perspective of reproductive politics, but also in the sense of raising qualitative standards. Dr. Fritz Hippler Reichsfilmdramaturg, 194282

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 31

The power behind Nazism's ideological engine, despite its many different instantiations and variations, essentially derived from its oppositional attitude toward its historical predecessor, the supposed horror of Weimar's Systemzeit and its numerous anti-volkisch (antinationalist, antiracial, anticommunal) transgressions. The idiom of National Socialist publicists frequently alluded to the concept of historical change and the notion of political and social reform. And as we have seen, this perceived need for transformation had an immediate effect on cultural production, including filmmaking, influencing both form and content. Gone were the days when, as Anita Loos observed, "any Berlin lady of the evening might turn out to be a man; [and] the prettiest girl on the street was Conrad Veidt, who later became an international film star."83 The time when the media was preoccupied with androgynous imagery now firmly belonged to the past. Female representation in the Third Reich left no room for articulations of gender that were irreconcilable with the Nazis' understanding of the essential difference between the sexes. 84 Moreover, while Oskar Kalbus's 1935 film history still ca tegorized popular female images of the silent screen into types-types that included "the woman in pants," "the man in women's clothing," "the juvenile," "the naive," "the girl," "the sweet maiden," "the womanly type," "the worldly lady," "the vamp" and only finally "mothers and grandmothers" -his description of contemporary National Socialist film culture carefully abstained from assigning female type delineations.85 This was because the Nazis were concerned that the idea of "type" might suggest an avenue of self-creation for women---or to borrow Foucault's term, a "technology of the self"-that countered the prescriptive strategies of their own concept of biologically preordained life roles, and in particular women's essential linkage with reproduction. As Karen Ellwanger and Eva-Maria Warth elaborate: Fascism attacks the concept of women as "type" ... insofar as it smacks of Weimar emancipation; yet it is taken up when female modernity stands for activity, mobility and discipline and turns against the idleness of the bourgeois women of the tum of the century. The closed type descriptions of the Weimar years are dissolved---on the one hand, in favor of propagating the idea of belonging to a larger community, thus promising a social mobility which was actualized to a certain extent ... -but on the other hand especially because the notion of "type" was connoted with women's urban professionalism. 86

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Indeed Fritz Hippler's theories about the power of stardom cited earlier indicate that Nazi demagogues felt strongly about the necessity to redefine female star images. National Socialist film publications consequently argued that the depiction of women in Nazi cinema had undergone a deep transformation. Its "new screen heroines," insisted the journal Filmwelt in 1941, showed qualities that were the opposite of those spectators had encountered in Weimar cinema: The "film heroine" of today is one of us .... The line of her body is athletic, trim, healthy and quick. Her face is natural, fresh, pleasant, relaxed and real. Her inner feelings are not repressed and speak through the glow in her eyes and the shape of her mouth. There is nothing left of the maneating villainy of the vamp, of the playful moodiness of the capricious or worldly lady.-All in all, they are of a channing versatility. They are serious and cheerful, brave and womanly, childlike and yet, when it needs to be, of surprising maturity. They are lovers and friends, they are feminine, sympathetic and motherly.87

Thus, according to National Socialist discourse, images connoted with bourgeois decadence and sexual promiscuity, rampant in Weimar cinema and Hollywood films, had supposedly disappeared. And while the media continued to perpetuate stardom as a female fantasy, it also attempted to bow to National Socialist politics in redressing what stardom was supposed to mean. The National Socialist journal Der Deutsche Film, for instance, approached the issue by insisting that the times when film stars didn't need talent were over: "More and more will be done about those stars who have no particular qualities and no special skills, at least none that are relevant to film art. Let us think kindly of them, of those charming ladies and interesting gents! But they have got to go!"88 National Socialist discourse on popular culture thus took up the contention that movie celebrity previously had been void of content, a situation to be remedied in the National Socialist state. 89 On a more radical note, some National Socialist theorists even argued that the notion of stardom as such was due a fundamental overhaul. Regardless of the fact that Nazi propagandists stylized Adolf Hitler and other leading politicians into media superheroes with quasi-religious overtones, real movie stardom was suspect to state ideologues. Certain National Socialist publications hence lobbied against the general privileging of individual star players over the collective process in film production: "Not the single person-whose egotism is elevated to the level of delu-

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 33

sional grandiosity-can, may, should and will be the hero of the future, but only the genuine and honest artist, who integrates himself into the community and becomes a useful member of the ensemble, of its collective labor. Maybe some members of the public will mourn when one of their favorites will disappear. But the majority will surely join our desire to end the star disease in film: The star must die, so that film can live!"90 Of course, Ufa's star system did anything but disappear. The typical Nazi picture was always a star vehicle. And despite the Nazis' official rejection of woman as "type," typecasting was a useful promotional strategy for Ufa products. Goebbels and his ministry did not share the concern of ideological hard-liners and instead sought to fully pursue the primary goal of their propagandistic policies: popularity. To do so, they sought to instrumentalize stardom for their purposes. However, this vision of total appropriation-which Goebbels repeatedly invoked and took credit for-was not necessarily achieved. Instead, another pattern emerges: although the National Socialist press pointed to a number of significant modifications of Ufa's star culture, a closer look reveals that these so-called changes were rarely implemented in actuality. In almost every case we encounter a kind of double articulation of the given star persona, one that upheld her glamorous star appeal and another that posited that she conformed to the new National Socialist model and thus did not belong in the outmoded category of superficial, artificially elevated star figure. In other words, the paratextual star coverage paid lip service to National Socialist doctrine, all the while doing business as usual in most cases. The problem inheres in the concept of stardom as such. No matter how hard the star discourse argues for the "normalcy" of its object, the star-by virtue of the media prominence that guarantees her the recognition she needs to function as a box office draw-is never really "ordinary." Yet, in contrast to the practices of the international film market, which at the time sold their stars primarily as exotic dream figures, it was the Nazis' decided goal to present their popular culture as one of radical equality in which actors assumed equal rank with all other German workers without the "false" illustriousness they had previously enjoyed. Grandeur and special treatment were reserved for the "true" genius figures of German culture-from Frederick the Great to Beethoven-who were in tum frequently represented in film dramas that indulged this kind of hero-worship, the so-called "genius pictures."91 At the same

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time, images of Hitler's own genial grandiosity dominated documentaries and newsreels. Hence, while this tension between the "ordinary" and "extraordinary" qualities of the star also permeated Hollywood discourse, as John Ellis has shown, the specific bias toward "ordinariness" privileged in Nazi rhetoric speaks to a specific National Socialist articulation of stardom, albeit one that was impossible to realize in practice. 92 Officially then, there were no stars, only the genius/artist (a celebrity in music, literature, theater, or even film) or the ordinary creative member of the collective ensemble. In reality, Ufa continued to promote its screen actors as glamorous icons whose lives were marked by their special talent and unusual experiences. Nazi performers thus articulated larger ideological conflicts in National Socialist popular culture and spoke to the difficulties Ufa faced in trying to moderate between official doctrine and popular preferences. In fact, it is often argued that stars as constructed popular figures generally negotiate a number of social tensions that emerge from the overall culture in which they are produced. To further explicate this concept, Richard Dyer draws on Max Weber's notion of charisma to discuss the star phenomenon. 93 Dyer takes up the idea that political leaders often rely on their "charisma" to win popular support, especially during historical moments "when the social order is uncertain, unstable and ambiguous and when the charismatic figure or group offer a value, order or stability to counterpoise this."94 He further proposes that "linking a star with the whole of a society may not get us very far in these terms, unless one takes twentieth century Western society to have been in constant instability. Rather, one needs to think in terms of the relationship ... between stars and specific instabilities, ambiguities and contradictions in the culture (which are reproduced in the actual practice of making films and film stars)."95 Vis-a.-vis Nazi star culture, Dyer's suggestions regarding the social and psychological functioning of star signs and the star-audience relationship seem particularly relevant. Not only was the charismatic personality of the starleader central to the self-understanding of fascist political culture, which evolved around the belief in the Fuhrer figure, but star images that were not directly linked to politics also served as contested figures onto whose personae larger ideological questions were mapped. Owing to the particular dichotomies surrounding National Socialist stardom, the stars of fascism must be seen as containing the cultural in-

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35

congruities of the period, or better, as the embodiments of particular societal conflicts and contradictions. Female actresses' star images incorporated particularly difficult and often contradictory social elements and discontinuities in their construction. In addition, female stars primarily addressed an audience-namely, women-whose concerns were allowed only very limited modes of selfrealization outside the realm of fantasy. As I said earlier, in contrast to what National Socialist publications repeatedly put forward, the changes implemented in German star culture after the Nazi takeover, especially with respect to female performers, were far less substantial than they were portrayed. They primarily consisted in adapting screen narratives-in particular their endings-to the changed political climate by foregrounding plots that worked to overcome gender conflicts and moral dilemmas in ways that were congruent with Nazi guidelines. In other words, Nazi cinema generally privileged plot resolutions that placed the female protagonist in an ideologically "correct" position (Le., a wife, a mother or even a self-sacrificing tragic heroine). However, these were not the only or even the most appealing gender role representations offered by the films, nor did these representations necessarily extend outside the filmic context to the actresses who performed in them in their role as stars. Moreover, conservative narrative conclusions do not necessarily guarantee a viewing experience that is pleasurable only once the spectator embraces these values. The narrative conflicts and role models expressed in earlier parts of the film, as well as the general associations triggered by its mise-en-scene, film style, and cast are equally important. In her analysis of women in Nazi cinema, Ute Bechdolf mobilizes jameson's concept of reification and utopia in mass culture to suggest that to function ideologically, Nazi films initially tapped into actual social and historical contents, thus lending their voice to established collective fantasies, before giving a film's particular problematic a uniquely National Socialist bent. 96 In its simultaneous reliance on positive narrative elements that carried what Jameson has termed "utopian or transcendental potential," she suggests that Nazi cinema presented female images that did not always correspond to the ideal type of the "German woman." Bechdolf's reading of two exemplary film texts, Die Gottliche Jette (The Divine Jette, 1937) featuring Grethe Weiser and Capriolen (Caprioles, 1937) starring Marianne Hoppe, demonstrates that the films point toward "the withdrawal and appropriation [into patriarchal

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discourse] of women's desire for autonomy, but can also ... be interpreted as (limited) manifestations of this very drive."97 Bechdolf insists that "counter-images to the National Socialist ideology of femininity exist as a potential in these films."98 It is thus questionable whether the narrative maneuvers executed in the endings automatically worked to produce a reception that affirmed the National Socialist Weltanschauung. 99 Along the same lines, stars who, as female icons, invoked fantasies of creative talent, universal desirability, financial independence, and public adulation might very well have been popular because of, rather than despite, these qualities, even if the National Socialist press officially denied such a reception. Looking at stars instead of distinct films makes it possible to move from the analysis of singular narrative instances to include the realm of popular culture at large. Jackie Stacey's work on Hollywood stars points to the possibility of similar work on National Socialist actresses. 1OO Stacey proposes an investigation of Hollywood stardom and film reception that concentrates on female spectators and their relationship to female stars on screen. The viewers whom Stacey cites often describe their identification with strong female characters and disregard the frequently regressive plot resolutions, which had led earlier critics to dismiss the films. Stacey's viewers consequently avoid the conservative and patriarchal tendencies that the film narratives may contain, while selectively reading for representations of female strength and autonomy only. In shifting emphasis from textual analysis to a spectator-based form of reception studies, Stacey shows that factors above and beyond the narrative trajectories of individual films determine why certain female stars become popular with female spectators. A wide range of elements-including a star's visual appearance, performance style, and extrafilmic associations such as the star's lifestyle and relationships-influence audience preferences. Stacey, in departing from close textual readings in favor of critically foregrounding viewing practices, thus enables a polysemic interpretation of film function. She also allows for the kind of contradiction and ambiguity that is central to my own argument. Although it is difficult to assess the responses of actual National Socialist viewers owing to the lack of historical data, it is possible to investigate the various modes of address implicit in particular star discourses which in turn may point to fan practices similar to those revealed in Stacey's findings.

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 37

Among the male stars, we do find several examples of the heroic leader figure who was glorified by Nazi ideology. The masculine hero incarnate was Hans Albers, whom Kalbus saw as the "embodiment and messenger of the German idea of man itself."lD1 Otto Gebiihr was primarily associated with the role of Prussia's Frederick the Great-a historical figure much revered by National Socialist ideologues-whom he played sixteen times over twenty years. Emil Jannings's roles in Nazi cinema also frequently foregrounded authoritative figures. Together with Heinrich George, Kreimeier suggests, he most closely approximated the National Socialist ideal of "the leader-type or the Teutonic man of steel."l02 But as stars themselves, many of these theater-trained character actors (with the exception of Albers) lacked the youth, appearance, and erotic appeal that are crucial elements for many screen idols; in addition, their narrative preoccupation with higher purposes in favor of romantic engagement largely disqualified them for sexual projection. "Rather than crafting Siegfried-like supermen," argues Rentschler, ''Nazi propagandists created the disturbed great men of the genius films and fixated On the mortal enemy of the race [the Jew]; ... their sense of being derived more strongly from a negative image than from an ideal type."103 At the same time, some male stars were not so easily enlisted as ideological models. Willy Birgel's gentlemanly attributes reminded audiences of the appeal of aristocratic personage and upper-class codes of dress, style, and behavior; Victor Staal, despite his "Aryan" good looks, usually appeared as a "feminized" romantic lead,l04 and in the comedy genre, we encounter characters like Heinz Ruhmann's cheerful everyman or Willy Fritsch's boyish flirt, whose funny escapades seemed to dissolve the humorless seriousness often encountered in representations of Nazi masculinity. "In the films of the-thirties, Ruhmann, Willy Fritsch, as well as Gustav Frohlich and Hans Brausewetter expressed the degradation and secularization of stars to people of the everyday," argues Kreimeier, "in their figures the 'man of the streets' became the hero of grotesque narrative convolutions ... -mere shadows of an already wilted culture."105 These actors' escapist qualities and their insistence on a "depoliticized" private sphere, however, were also expressive of the general social tensions between politics and culture discussed earlier. The same logic, moreover, explains why Ferdinand Marianwho frequently played villains, such as the notorious Jud SuB-found

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unexpected popularity with female audiences, who were attracted to Marian's sexy otherness.1 06 By and large, argues Friedemann Beyer, the male screen stars of the Nazi era did not seem particularly masculine:107 They were to embody virtuous values and were meant to be honest and true. But they seemed pale, obedient and of weak character. No inner conflict haunted them, and no abyss opened before them. Their appearance was without sensuality and erotics. They hardly fired up the fantasies of their female spectators. They lacked force and virility .... In the films of this epoch, women were much more important. They are strong, mysterious and intelligent. They sacrifice themselves and help their men out of a rut. Where those waver, they appear confident and make the right decision, independent of the men. And even if they have to subjugate themselves, the action seems to circle around them. Some of them lead surprisingly autonomous lives. They are the more interesting, more complex personalities next to whom the men often seem like mere shadows.1°8

In female performers, the inherent ideological complications that emerged were even more overt than in the case of their male counterparts, whose colorlessness almost seems intentional. The male leads of Nazi cinema never meant to compete with the real star of the regime, Adolf Hitler, stylized into a grandiose cult leader in almost every newsreel that inevitably preceded the feature presentations at the theater. While the newsreels celebrated Nazi politicians, the Ufa hit film of the period centered on the star actress. Given that women were encouraged to identify with motherhood as fulfilling their life's purpose, the prominence of female film idols---especially when the narrative content of their films advertised motherhood-made them into highly oxymoronic figures. Various articles in the popular press of the 1930s and early 1940s indicated that many young German women wanted to become movie stars, instead of dreaming only of motherly joys. The publications of the period eagerly fed their film-crazed readers' desire for information about the glittering world of the movies. "Could you be a star?" asked the weekly Stern in 1938, followed by a quiz that prompted female readers to check whether they "were as photogenic as Brigitte Homey" or as "charming as Lilian Harvey," as "expressive as Zarah Leander" or possessed as many "special skills" and were as "disciplined a worker as Marika Rokk."109 Promotional materials sustaining the star frenzy were circulated in abundance. Fan booklets published movie stars' anecdotal histories detailing "how we became actors";110 and while one journal informed aspiring actresses on talent requirements and casting practices,

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 39

another kept them up to date with the events going on in "Hollywood wonderland."III Female stars were very prominent examples of working women and did not conform to the physical ideal of Nazi womanhood. If fashion and makeup were considered outmoded signifiers of "empty" modernity, Ufa actresses for the most part looked just as artificial as Hollywood's divas and never outgrew the stamp of Weimar stardom. Kalbus described Lil Dagover, for instance, whose career had started in the Weimar years, as "firmly embedded in modernity: she is the mature, intelligent and worldly woman; Germany's female ideal between 1919-1929."112 Ironically, she is also known as Hitler's favorite actress. I13 Brigitte Homey and Sybille Schmitz also failed to conform to the standard. As Cinzia Romani suggests, Homey was "intense, understated and highly expressive" and Schmitz was marked by her "enigmatic, somewhat troubled appearance."114 Kreimeier concludes that " ... the typology of the female star proved itself widely immune to the National Socialist cliche of the Jungmadel, the fertile German mother and the brave life companion. ... The dreams of German men were ruled by Marlene Dietrich, Lilian Harvey and Zarah Leander: their international flair and worldly eroticism dominated the emotions and elegantly triumphed over all guidelines of the Reichsfilmkammer and Rosenberg's theory of Aryan man."115 In addition to being visibly made up, extravagantly dressed, and carefully coiffed, National Socialist actresses didn't necessarily look German. In fact, a large percentage of them were foreign imports. Kristina S6derbaum and Zarah Leander were Swedish, Lida Baarova was Czech, Marika R6kk was Hungarian, and Lilian Harvey was British. Ilse Werner and Lil Dagover had grown up overseas. II6 Jt seems that these actresses' exotic looks, charming accents, and worldly flair were precisely what distinguished them from the overdetermined imagery of the "German woman," which in tum enabled them to function as stars. Leander, moreover, had an androgynous appeal and her postwar gay following allows us to speculate about her appeal to homosexual audiences during the Nazi era. Although none of the stars I closely investigate in this study-S6derbaum, Harvey, or Leander-was German-born, their foreignness was not a criterion in choosing them for this work. Rather, I looked for actresses who seemed to best cover the wide range of performers, genres,

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and star histories of the period in order to represent the spectrum of female film idols in the Third Reich. Taking into account both the stars' overall popularity, evidenced in the number and success of the star vehicles produced, as well as the extent of the press discourse engineered by Ufa's propaganda machine to promote its performers-it would have been difficult to corne up with more authentically "German" exemplars of the typical Nazi film diva. Capitalizing on actresses' foreign allure and exotic looks simply was the rule rather than the exception. Moreover, the fact that so many of the female stars of the Third Reich were indeed foreign in a culture so obsessed with German identity and racial purity sheds an interesting light on the friction between the National Socialist ideal of womanhood and the demands of female star appeal. "It was not so much the positive points of orientation that energized Nazi films," Rentschler points out, "but rather the non-German-that is to say, alien and outlandish-attractions."117 Ironically, Nazi cinema's film heroines were also the most popular women in Third Reich history, and their looks carried into the very culture that repeatedly demanded them. Just as Charlotte Herzog and Jane Gaines have shown in respect to Hollywood culture-where "women bought star products and tested star beauty recipes, circulating ideas about star image in their own improvised 'looks'" -many German women walked the streets as movie star look-alikes, along with uniformed BdM-girls and matronly housewives. 118 Thus in maintaining cinematic attractions antithetical in nature to the project of National Socialism proper, National Socialist culture expressed its ongoing need to address female spectators in ways similar to those exercised by international cultures of modernity elsewhere, and thereby confirmed Goebbels's pragmatic decision to continue entertainment practices seemingly free of ideological streamlining. In respect to women, this meant to represent fashions and attitudes that spoke to modern gender conflicts and female fantasies of a contemporary cosmopolitan mode. That is to say, to attract female (and male) audiences to begin with, the Nazis' attempt to educate and contain women through the popular media-while simultaneously bowing to concerns regarding economic profitability-had to rely on a language that was often antagonistic to National Socialist fantasies of womanhood. Examples of this are evidenced in my investigation into Lilian Harvey's and Zarah Leander's star personae. Further films that featured stars that seemingly embraced

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National Socialist prescriptions of womanhood, such as Kristina Soderbaum, revealed the more fundamental problems contained within its repressive formulations of gender and sexuality. I suggest that a number of cultural notions introduced in Weimar's modem times, which were actively kept alive through international COnnections until at least 1939, must be seen as forming parallel social discourses that were never eradicated but existed alongside the succinctly fascist messages that marked the period. Ufa's dream factory was informed by an uneasy binarism, a doubleness, that seems emblematic for the almost characteristic inconsistencies we can find in many National Socialist cultural productions. Thus, the schizophrenic operations of the Nazi media can only be described as fraught with irreconcilable antagonisms. We find these in the oxyrnoronic figure of the "new film heroine" who was a "natural" and a "diva" alike, but they also emerge in film narratives that celebrated the romanticized freedom of gypsy life, as KerstinLuise Neumann has remarked-such as Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy King, 1935}-while the SS rounded up Europe's Sinti and Romany pe0ple for deportation to concentration camps.119 Likewise, it is through the paradigm of the female film star that womanhood most clearly articulates itself as one of the central areas of contestation in fascist Germany.

2

Kristina S6derbaum: The Myth of Naturalness, Sacrifice, and the "Reich's Water Corpse"

Kristina SOderbaum, the young Swede, who is considered the biggest natural talent in German film these days, certainly isn't educated. Her acting lessons mainly consisted of refining her German pronunciation .... [I]t is her untrained skill, her genuineness and the pure nature of her being that is the precious source of her talent ... This small, blonde creature with bright eyes and a strong, but finely formed and well-proportioned body comes from the North, where people act restrained .... Her art is simple, but not her character.... Her severe nature is the foundation for genuine tragedy. Ufa promotion, 19421

AMONG THE actresses who gained prominence in National Socialist culture, Kristina SOderbaum is frequently identified as most singularly representative of the Nazi ideal, as the quintessential Nazi star. Cinzia Romani calls her lithe embodiment of the fresh, ingenuous German Fraulein-modest and selfless-as well as the strong and healthy Aryan-the fruit of Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy). The eternal child-wife, she provided an image of the feminine ideal of the Third Reich in a series of films that carried a strong message of propaganda." 2 Richard Grunberger similarly opined that as "a snub-nosed Nordic naiad cocooned in little-girlish femininity she packed cinemas with a series of marrow-withering characterizations which mingled treacle with hymeneal blood."3 As one of National Socialism's most homogeneous star personae, Kristina Soderbaum indeed starred as the heroine in many of Nazi Germany's most notorious propaganda films (Fig. 2.1). Although other Ufa actresses' success in Nazi cinema was later often mitigated by the ambiguity of their star image, Soderbaum, whose frequent filmic drowning had earned her the nickname liThe Reich's Water Corpse" (Reichswasserleiche), was later singled out as the prime ob42

Kristina SOderbaum 43

Figure 2.1. Kristina S6derbaum in Veit Harlan's The Sacrifice.

ject of antifascist criticism and ridicule. Spectators in the immediate postwar years heckled her off the theater stage and even threw rotten vegetables at her. When she attempted to attend the 1948 film premiere of Kurt Maetzig's Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in Shadow, 1947), which dealt with the double suicide of the Ufa actor Joachim Gottschalk and his Jewish wife, S6derbaum and her husband, National Socialist director Veit Harlan, were asked to leave. 4 Many of their films were initially banned after the war; Jud Sufi (Jew Suss, 1940) is still unavailable for commercial viewing in Germany today. However, S6derbaum also remained remarkably popular with less vocal audiences, who felt a quiet or even defiant nostalgia for Ufa's golden years. In 1953, polls showed S6derbaum to be the second most popular female star with the German public, despite the commercial failure of her postwar films. The Gennan weekly Stern further concluded in 1969: "At one time, Kristina S6derbaum was the blondest of all the Swedish women Germany imported-and the most successful: She was the biggest box-office magnet of German film history. Her films

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earned more than 200 million Marks, Die goldene Stadt [The Golden City] alone made 43 million."5 This grandiose assessment of SOderbaum's marketability, however, deserves as much suspicion as does the simplistic reduction of her star persona to a Nazi prototype. 6 That anyone actress alone deserves to be considered the most successful is, of course, arguable. Zarah Leander's earnings, for instance, far exceeded SOderbaum's, and star figures whose careers had peaked a decade earlier, such as Lilian Harvey, certainly enjoyed similar success and popularity at that time? What separates Kristina Soderbaum from her National Socialist colleagues is that she uniquely condensed what was distinctive in Nazi stars; her star persona as well as many of her screen characters most directly communicated the beliefs of National Socialist ideology. The style and tone of her films, as well as her narrative characterizations and acting style, display an immediate inflection of cultural tenets of Nazi propaganda. This is no coincidence. Rather, it is the logical outcome of Soderbaum's strangely unique career history, which is entirely dependent on her discoverer, her only director and husband, Veit Harlan, whose work is marked by its privileged relationship to fascist discourses. In fact, Harlan is the only film director who was tried (and acquitted) after World War II for creating overtly propagandistic works and in particular for his direction of the anti-Semitic 1940 production Jew Suss. BAs Regine Mihal Friedman has pointed out, Harlan "launched her [Soderbaum's] career and made her not only into his star, but also his wife. For a long time she stayed with this tyrannical Pygmalion-like character, seeing herself as his oppressed and unhappy Galatea."9 In contrast to the other stars treated in this work, Soderbaum further began her career as a bona fide ingenue. Her extraordinarily fast rise to prominence was thus accompanied by the Nazi assertion that Soderbaum's was a specificaIIy National Socialist success story. One might argue that Zarah Leander was another Swedish import who arrived after 1933, but Leander was deliberately built up to resemble Marlene Dietrich, whose worldly eroticism hardly conformed to National Socialist aesthetics. Alternatively, Soderbaum's career was fuII of National Socialist resonance, and so was Harlan's. In the 1920s Harlan had worked as an actor. By 1933, he publicly declared his aIIegiance to National Socialism, and the Nazi press praised him as a National Socialist artist who had triumphed over his former cultural enemies (such as the Jew-

Kristina SOderbaum 45

ish publisher of the cultural journal Weltbuhne, Alfred Kerr).10 In 1934, he made his directorial debut in the theater. In the following years, Harlan became a film director who specialized in literary adaptation. He directed twenty pictures from 1935 until 1945, many of which were characterized by motifs sympathetic to the Nazis' idealized conception of both nature and death. His political convictions and his ability to complete film projects quickly and economically gained him additional favor with National Socialist film institutions and further brought him to Goebbels' special attention. It was because of Harlan's privileged relationship with Goebbels, who repeatedly ordered him to direct highly propagandistic films {such as Jew Suss, 1940, and Kolberg, 1945)-which Harlan subsequently claimed to have resisted-that Harlan was later accused of having been the "devil's director"l1 or even a "mass murderer."12 Soderbaum's exclusive association with Harlan, on which he jealously insisted, thus fixed the couple into a union that is hard to separate. "He made me and, in the end, he also destroyed me/' she said after his death, forever re-enacting the role Harlan had created for her, that of a tragic heroine caught up in a fate that far exceeded her powers.13 Moreover, as Harlan's "creation/' the private (postwar) Soderbaum not only mirrored her cinematic representation as the eternal victim of Harlan's National Socialist melodramas, but her micronarrative also articulated a scaled-down version of what some have argued was National Socialist women's overall position under Nazi rule, constituting a group who equally suffered under the control of a paternalistic despot. At the same time, however, Soderbaum's character remained forever mired in the controversy surrounding her husband's guilt and responsibility, which led to questions that addressed her own complicity. The debates initiated by feminist historians who argued about women's accountability and/or victimization in Nazi Germany thus also surfaced in discussions of Kristina Soderbaum.1 4 Conversely, during the Third Reich Soderbaum, the star, was perceived not as a figure of suffering but as a talented actress who happily united her career with marital and maternal duties; as a performer whose privileged involvement in the artistic family seemed to exempt her from the ideological limitations imposed on women elsewhere. Harlan first cast Soderbaum, then an unknown acting student, after noticing her in a minor role in Erich Waschneck's Onkel Brasig (Uncle Brasig, 1936). As the lead in Harlan's 1938 melodrama Jugend {Youtht

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Soderbaum, age 26, began her career as Harlan's star wife. Altogether, Harlan and Soderbaum made ten films together under Goebbels; another six followed the war. Consequently, Soderbaum's star construction cannot be attributed to studio decisions alone; rather, it was more directly influenced by both Harlan and Goebbels themselves, especially since Harlan worked with several production companies. All of Soderbaum's early pictures, for instance, were done with Tobis and Terra, whereas her major color melodramas-Die Goldene Stadt (The Golden City, 1942), Immensee (1943), Opfergang (The Sacrifice, 1944) and the propaganda epic Kolberg-were Ufa productions. By using Soderbaum as the incarnation of German womanhood, the Nazi-controlled film industry in many ways killed two birds with one stone. The tradition of importing Scandinavian actresses-which began in the early Weimar years with performers like Asta Nielsen, whose dark "Nordic-foreign beauty," as Knut Hickethier suggests, signified an exotic allure-was continued, while the particular kind of Swedishness Soderbaum embodied was congruent with the National Socialist foregrounding of wholesome earthiness. IS SOderbaum's appearance, argues Stephen Lowry, "conformed to the ideas of beauty and femininity we can also find in the fine arts, the advertising and in the official attestations of the time." She was "blond, young, strong, and more athletic than she was elegant."16 In addition, her voice and demeanor further emphasized this impression. Her naive mode of self-presentation made her appear childlike, innocent, decent and pure but also vital and spontaneous.1t was these aspects of Soderbaum's persona in particular that were favored and underlined by the publicity discourse surrounding the star. In fact, Goebbels at times protested the casting of SOderbaum in roles that seemed to undermine the positive identification of her Aryan image and insisted on plot corrections for some scripts (The Golden City, 1942; The Sacrifice, 1943) or attempted to replace Soderbaum with a more appropriately brunette actress (The Sacrifice).17 Her inscription as a nature child further linked SOderbaum to the "blood and soil" motifs that informed Harlan's screen narratives. Harlan's emphasis on landscape is often related to works by Leni Riefenstahl and has reminded critics of Luis Trenker's mountain films. "Riefenstahl," suggests Ulrich Gregor, "sharply separates a romantic, intuitive, 'naturebound existence (glorified with all possible camera lyricism) from a more urban, civilized way of life that, of itself, smacks of decadence."ls Like-

Kristina SOderbaum 47

wise, Harlan's melodramatic characters are often either extensions of the landscape surrounding them or are bound up in a "naturalist" destiny that is beyond their control. According to Herbert Marcuse, nature is an element central to the fascist concept of the Volk: "Nature is interpreted as a dimension of mythical originality (well characterized in the phrase 'blood and soil') present in all things as a prehistorical dimension .... As something justified through its mere existence, this nature stands opposed to that which requires rational justification."19 "Blood and soil" films, Julian Petley elaborates, "while not concerned with nationalist movements or the theme of the return to the fatherland, are nonetheless highly nationalistic in the particular way in which they represent the German people and the German landscape, that is to say, in their representation of the 'folkish community.' "20 Soderbaum's implication in this discourse, however, was somewhat qualified by the demands imposed on her persona as a star. Her "naturalness" alone did not satisfy the demands of contemporary film audiences in general, let alone adequately address and satisfy the desires of female viewers. In Lowry's words, "The flip side of Soderbaum's screen persona was her quality as an erotic object. ... These erotic components were passively produced through a voyeuristic camera and actively enforced in her roles via coquetry, flirting and bashful allusions to sexuality. This must have contributed to her effect as a star. A pure innocent, an 'Aryan' model female, wouldn't have the kind of attraction a star needs in the culture industry (even in National Socialism)."Yet Lowry also suggests that Soderbaum's "erotic side was rendered innocuous through her infantilism."21 In other words, although SOderbaum needed to be sexy, she managed to be so in a way that was not threatening. Along the same lines, Klaus Kreimeier argues that the de-eroticization of the body was one of the central projects of National Socialist cuIture,22 This argument is frequently repeated in studies regarding National Socialist aesthetics and finds its psychological explanation in models like those of Klaus Theweleit, who argues that one of the aspects of fascist ideology was to remove the threat female sexuality posed for the male subject.23 Still, we must also acknowledge that this evident desire to somehow "clean up" sexuality, either by avoiding it altogether or by replacing it with same-sex camaraderie for men and virtue and motherhood for women, also revealed an anxious and paranoid preoccupation with the subject of sex. Nevertheless, if we pay close attention to the

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females in Nazi cinema, the presentation of women as erotic objects cannot be overlooked. As Hans-Dietrich Schafer points out, the Nazis were not successful in ''breaking the attractive power of guileful, 'un-German' eroticism or in preventing its circulation."24It was SOderbaum's body, in tandem with its naturalist linkage to the German landscape, whose corporeality marked the visual aesthetics of her films. One of Harlan's most prominent directorial characteristics, as Erich Liith has proposed, was the director's "exploitation of his own wife's physicality."25 To complicate things further, the actress's easy identification with Aryan strength and vitality must be questioned. Ute Bechdolf has pointed out that despite the fact that the National Socialists saw women as subordinate to men politically, they were not meant to be the weaker sex in the traditional sense: While the National Socialists looked at women primarily as child-bearers, men's assistants and keepers of the German family, their female ideal was not a reconstruction of the delicate, weak creatures of the nineteenth century. The "new" woman was supposed to be healthy and robust, athletic and strong, tenacious and brave; thus in a certain sense she was asked to assimilate to what surely were "male" norms and characteristics. Since the National Socialists wanted to make the German people into the biggest and strongest in the world, they needed physically and emotionally strong women-albeit only insofar as their female strength was not directed towards independence and self-sufficiency, but was productively placed in the service of the state. 26

Discussions of Soderbaum frequently connect both her film roles and her star persona to this conceptualization of National Socialist womanhood. Although these stereotypes of Nazi rhetoric almost exclusively informed Soderbaum's official star discourse in the press, Harlan's melodramas also reveal tendencies that speak to the opposite. The central question we must ask when looking at a star like Kristina Soderbaum is whether or not her star persona and screen representations were not only capable of expressing the National Socialist ideal of womanhood, but whether they also stayed contained within it. Did the Nazis manage to encapsulate their absolute in a star image that functioned on its own within the socioeconomic context of TIUrd Reich culture, or did German audiences ask for more than could be accommodated by the framework set up by Nazi ideology, even in the case of Harlan and Soderbaum? Beyond Soderbaum's image as a National Socialist star, what appealed to German audiences were the tragic com-

Kristina SOderbaum 49

ponents that were inevitably produced through her womanhood in Harlan's films. In other words, S6derbaum showed female audiences that even for women who seemingly corresponded to the Nazi ideal of femininity, life was a melodrama. In the destructive environment of Hitler's warfare, S6derbaum thus became the wartime star who most passionately addressed the experiences of loss and deprivation that had become an everyday occurrence in ordinary women's lives-not an idealized super female, but the tragic embodiment of fascist misogyny.

THE "NATURAL" AS STAR CONSTRUCTION

Star images that suggest stability and consistency are rare. Part of what makes celebrities exciting is that they keep their audiences wondering; speculations about what really goes on within the world of fame and fortune are the fodder of the media and its gossip industries. The tension among the media presentation of star images, the filmic representation of stars within screen narratives, and the insinuations of gossip often conspire to produce a paradoxical image that promotes the public's impression of the star as star. The notion of "scandal and haute couture" as a requisite for fame, for instance, which was circulated in both Hollywood and Berlin in the 1920s,27 suggested that it was glamour and hints of dangerous sexuality that constituted the potential for stardom.2B As discussed earlier, even in Nazi Germany the majority of National Socialist film divas' star images drew on the traditions of sex and glamour to erect their status as extraordinary figures. Yet stardom's flip side, the ordinariness that is an equally important aspect to the functioning of star personae-insofar as this quality enables audiences to identify with the star on a more immediate level-was prioritized in Nazi star culture. While National Socialist actresses were presented as at once ordinary and extraordinary, just like the Hollywood actors John Ellis has described,29 their ordinariness was a key aspect of the National Socialists' attempt to integrate the problematic star images that circulated in popular culture into a fascist everyday that emphasized collective identity and "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft). What made Third Reich actors "stars" was their specialness, yet what made them "National Socialist stars" was the proposed idea that they were ordinary workers who put their "talent" at the service of the German people, just as laborers or bureaucrats contributed their special skills to a larger whole.

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It was very difficult for Ufa's publicity machine to toe the line between fabricating stars that were attractive and exciting and simultaneously describe them as the kind of ordinary folks Nazi doctrine demanded. Trying to do so resulted in tensions that rendered most popular female star images ideologically problematic in relation to National Socialist philosophy. In Kristina Si:iderbaum's star persona, however, popular cinema found an exemplar that fully adopted the "reformed" National Socialist concept of stardom. A close investigation of Si:iderbaum's construction as a Nazi icon provides a detailed case study of how female star signs, which embraced the suggestions National Socialist ideologues had made in respect to stardom, attempted to shift the imagery by which women's identificatory desires were addressed. The actress was clearly promoted as a individual star-no National Socialist star could conform to the impossible maxim that "stardom must die" and still serve the German film industry by attracting audiences-but Si:iderbaum also was promoted in a way that closely approximated Nazi ideals: (1) the ideal of female innocence, (2) the notion of the artist/worker as a natural, (3) the ideal of motherhood, (4) the ideal of marriage, (5) the physical National Socialist ideal of beauty, and (6) the ideal of the Aryan race. In 1936, Si:iderbaum emerged in the German film press-among the many film novices that entertainment journals introduced regularlywith brief mentions of her supporting role in Uncle Briisig. The success of Harlan's Youth two years later, however, catapulted the actress to the fore of the public eye. Publicity efforts were overwhelming. The National Socialist press did not fail to recognize a newcomer so suitable to its efforts to redescribe German womanhood, and Kristina Si:iderbaum reports immediately appeared in numerous film journals and her image soon graced film calendars and star postcards. Biographical accounts of Si:iderbaum's private history usually began with the depiction a bourgeois childhood (her father was president of the Swedish Academy of Science) with a strict father and an artistically inclined mother. 3D Describing her as a tomboy with a profound love for sports and nature, the Nazi film press firmly connected the actress's past with her later representation in the National Socialist media. In addition, Si:iderbaum's history lacked the complicated elements that other Nazi stars needed to address in their star images. Zarah Leander,

Kristina SOderbaum 51

for instance, had a failed marriage in her past, and Lilian Harvey, during her career as a Weimar star, not only had been previously linked to several men, but also looked back on a stint in Hollywood. By contrast, Soderbaum's introduction as the National Socialist ingenue par excellence insistently foregrounded her image as an innocent with a "strong, innate gift." Soderbaum's path to fame always read like the fantasy scenario of an adolescent female spectator: the tale of a young woman's fantastic rise to prominence, which was achieved through the magical event of being "discovered."31 To uphold this scenario, Soderbaum's supposed status as a born "natural" was tirelessly invoked: her previous acting experience was described as consisting only of child performances in the home (her acting lessons were disguised as language training), while her "courage" and "bravery" (a young orphan alone, coming to a foreign capital to follow her calling32) created an association with the notion of "inner strength" that was frequently called on in Nazi rhetoric. This promotional strategy separated the star from the anti-image of the Hollywood starlet that National Socialist ideologues found so objectionable. In 1938, an article on Soderbaum in the National Socialist journal Der Deutsche Film, written in the form of an open letter, indeed cautioned the young actress not to err in the same direction that other European stars such as Soderbaum's compatriot Ingrid Bergman had gone, namely, Hollywood: 33 It wouldn't be a miracle if your ears were singing after all that has been

written about you in the last six months. No, it wouldn't be surprising if you consequently went crazy like a little American vamp, but it would be too bad! ... Do not become too secure, Kristina, due to our epistles. Because the one who doesn't doubt herself anymore, who doesn't have any doubts to overcome, who thinks that she can walk right into the creative process with the shining assumption of her triumph, she will walk right into a hollow, inflated nothingness .... Or will you, as soon as your wings are fully spread, fly off across the ocean? You still are-which is the nature of your charm-a fundamentally natural, simple creature--or are you suddenly already the kind of star to whom nothing is enjoyable and beautiful, and for whom the ordinary as well as the special things have been degraded to what is tired and average?34

Concurrently, many of the first person accounts published to promote the star reassured spectators that she wasn't a diva and never wanted

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to become one, that even in her private life, she resembled the child-like character she had played in Youth and was not a "spoiled and conceited goddess."35 To strengthen the public perception of Soderbaum as the National Socialist ideal, the performer's Aryan appearance ("light blonde, blueeyed, fresh, a country girl") was repeatedly emphasized in almost every article written about the actress. National Socialist star reporter Edith Hamann placed Soderbaum among the "new film faces" of 1938, who supposedly distinguished themselves from other stars by showing less "emptiness covered by make up" and "more personality," supposedly indicating a shift in public taste that was in accordance with National Socialist ideas about female beauty.36 Soderbaum's visual identification with country life further reappeared in her interviews. In an article entitled "1 want to be a real farmer," for instance, she was cited: "One of these days, I want to have a farm in the country, somewhere in Germany or Sweden, and there I want to ride horses and work. I think that I know more of agriculture than I do of theater acting and film work."37 Why a young women coming from an academic family in Stockholm should have such skills seems unclear, yet a different source reported that Soderbaum "came from a long line of farmers,"3B a phrase, incidentally, that also appeared verbatim in Zarah Leander's star publicity. It seems that National Socialist publicists simply invoked peasantry as an antidote to the association provoked by the privilege of celebrity. Another area related to Soderbaum's heritage was the racial aspects connected with her Swedish background. On the one hand, we must concede, the star's Swedish nationality served to render her exotic in the traditional sense, invoking the memory of famous Scandinavian predecessors such as Asta Nielsen and Greta Garbo. Simultaneously, however, being Swedish once again integrated her into the racial framework of Aryan superiority. She "doesn't have this tired expression," wrote the journal Licht-Bild-Biihne, "that some may find so interesting in other foreigners."39 A fan booklet dedicated to Nordic Film Stars-featuring Zarah Leander, Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman and Kristina Soderbaum on the cover-further explained that the Swedish people "are closely related to us by nature, [they are] beautiful, proud and of a robust vitality! And maybe this is the reason that their Nordic film stars have always been so popular with German audiences."40 The publication

Kristina SOderbaum 53

further described Kristina SOderbaum in the usual manner, insisting that, in essence, she was the quintessential Nazi star: "She is as she acts, her whole self is passionate and full of life's joy, fresh and simple. She shows no affectations, nothing is 'pose.' Kristina Soderbaum is the prototype of the unspoiled and uncomplicated Jungmiidel41 of our time. She is fundamentally healthy."42 Aside from using Soderbaum to counter the notion of artifice that informed the public's impression of stardom, attributing unusual natural talents to the actress moreover served to justify her overnight fame, which had not been earned by the years of struggle and sacrifice that the Nazis frequently invoked to account for other actors' privileged position in Nazi culture. Harlan's own National Socialist star biography was similarly marked by the suggestion that the actor / director had to overcome countless obstacles before becoming a celebrated National Socialist artist. Nonetheless, Soderbaum's star narrative initially avoided any references to her personal link with Harlan. The fact that hers was essentially a casting couch career was carefully hidden from public view. Detailed descriptions of her early relationship with the director were avoided in discussions of Soderbaum, even after the couple's marriage. The press avoided the otherwise popular anecdotal history of how the pair "found one another."43 This was because, even though both functioned well in National Socialist contexts their union could easily have been perceived as highly scandalous in a traditional sense. Soderbaum's background was easily available to suggest virginity and innocence, but Harlan's marital history was problematic for the Nazi press. In 1933, Harlan had described his loving relationship with his second wife at length ("At the bottom of his heart, he is a husband and a father. Harlan is happily married to Hilde Korber and they have three delightful children.").44 Even worse, his first marriage was to a Jewish woman, a detail that was never mentioned in National Socialist reports on the director. When Harlan's relationship with Soderbaum began in 1937, Harlan was still married to Korber. In addition, when Harlan married Soderbaum in April 1939, she was already pregnant with their son, Kristian. Incidentally, adultery is frequently the subject of Harlan's melodramas, and Goebbels personally intervened several times to order rewrites that reestablished the existing marriage in the film. While National Socialist ideology was not traditionally conserva-

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tive, a country at war-with millions of wives home alone----could not condone an atmosphere that allowed for extra-marital activity. It follows that although both Harlan's and Soderbaum's professional lives enjoyed significant attention in the propaganda press-Harlan even received an honorary professorial title-their romantic liaison became a promotional part of their film publicity only in the 1940s and avoided all mention of the couple's beginnings. Instead, press releases and photographs concentrated on depicting the Harlans as an "artistic family" dedicated to their joint creation of "German art." Soderbaum's union with a German national additionally strengthened her ties with the country. ''Through her marriage to Veit Harlan," one publication proudly announced, "SOderbaum is now German."45 In lieu of a presentable marriage narrative, coverage of SOderbaum concentrated on her motherhood. Star postcards and photo stories in film journals repeatedly presented her as a caring mother, and featured numerous photographs of the actress with her son (Fig. 2.2).46 SOderbaum's private image now fused girlhood with motherhood; in a National Socialist writer's words, she became an "enchanting mama, slim, strikingly blond, and blue-eyed," whose appearance made it "hard to believe that this young girl is a mother already, let alone the mother of such a strapping young boy."47 In addition, the performer was often depicted in her function as a housewife. The journal Filmwelt, for instance, published an article entitled 'The Female Film Artist as a Kitchen Fairy," arguing that movie fame was perfectly reconcilable with women's more domestic duties: "When looking at our film actresses, many a smart housewife may have thought that they might be great artists but have no knowledge of housekeeping and cooking. They will sit down at a set table, this housewife may think, without knowing how to make a scrambled egg, for instance. Of course, there are some of those, but most of our female film stars have much domestic talent, yes, some are true chefs from whom many young housewives could learn a 10t."4B A picture of Soderbaum dressed in Swedish folk dress as she worked in the kitchen accompanied the above text, and below we find her special recipe for cabbage soup. In fact, the star was frequently shown in peasant costume, both in her star publicity and in Harlan's films. Soderbaum's public representation as a hostess further extended to more overtly propagandistic contexts. In 1940, the publication Erikadie frohe Zeitung fUr Front und Heimat ("Erika-The Happy Newspaper

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander 201

Figure 4.11. Request Concert: Hanna is less of a seductress and more of a comrade in arms serving at the home front as she encourages the troops to sing that "it's not the end of the world."

join in the singing, thus creating an atmosphere of community and solidarity. Hanna's last stage appearance in Rome finally shows her in an ethereal dimension. "I Know One Day a Miracle Will Happen" is almost a fervent prayer for relief, an adjuration directed at sublime powers and intended to bring about the virtually impossible, an incantation. Hanna, dressed in white, is elevated on a stage of the same color, the image of heaven, revue theater style (Fig. 4.12). As she performs her song, she no longer makes eye contact with the audience, there is no longer a wink or an encouraging smile. Instead she gazes upward, Madonna-like, anticipating the final shot of Wendlandt and herself gazing skyward, thus putting their fate into larger hands. Eroticism has given way to transfiguration, prayer is substituted for desire.

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2

Figure 2.3. Folkloric vacation: Star postcard of SOderbaum in Swedish costume.

that ... "[w1e feel that this activity provides women with a way ... to keep up with the military exercises of men, which will, if necessary, enable them to prove their endurance and their ability to brave physical pain." so The vacation "snapshots" of Kristina Soderbaum thus went far beyond advertising fashionable lifestyles for the aspiring leisure consumer. Rather, within the context of National Socialist propagandists' wartime rhetoric, her photographs were effectively exploited to mobilize the female populace, suggesting that industriousness and physical fitness were qualities women needed to survive.

Kristina SOderbaum 57

It follows that Soderbaum's star text was "put to use," in Stephen Neale's terms, to advance the propaganda purposes of the Nazi state.51 Beyond providing diversion and entertainment, or even a space for escapist fantasy production-an accusation that must include all National Socialist stars and all forms of Third Reich entertainment to a certain degree-Harlan and Soderbaum participated in creating public images that were directly related to National Socialist contents. In this respect, Soderbaum's extrafilmic representation strongly advertised the National Socialist ideal of womanhood and addressed both female audiences who were sympathetic to the Nazi cause and those who had a continuing interest in movie stardom. In fact, Soderbaum's star persona sought to reconcile the antagonism that existed between the conflicting notions of femininity that inspired either group. Her political significance consequently reached far beyond that of female film stars whose exoticism served to create an impression of cosmopolitan internationalism, which strengthened Nazism despite its contradictory relationship with Nazi ideals. Rather, her example shows that it was possible to conflate commercial popularity with ideological substance. At the same time, even the National Socialist press wondered whether this kind of political promotion was effective with the contemporary public and cautioned that S6derbaum's representation in the media was overwrought kitsch. "Unfortunately, the plague of the schmaltzy interview has not yet been completely eradicated," complained a National Socialist film reviewer in 1938, arguing that sentences like "the blonde color of her hair shimmered in the magical twilight of midnight ... it was Christine [sic], the farmer's daughter" made him want to reach for a sledgehammer. 52 Given that film criticism was no longer permitted and that National Socialist media's output was tightly controlled, this critique seems somewhat surprising. What we encounter here is an attempt to reshape star publicity from within, to make it less transparent in respect to its sugar-coated and frequently inaccurate propaganda. It was a warning that the media's ideological proclivities were too overt. Considering that S6derbaum's unofficial nickname later became ''The Reich's Water Corpse," an ironic allusion that made fun of the actress's role in film narratives that celebrated female sacrifice, it seems that certain restrictive measures that limited the star's overdetermined association with ''blood and soil" tropes would not have been ill-advised. Nonetheless, the majority of film publications that addressed the actress's private

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life continued as they had before. In SOderbaum's case, ideological star publicity was anything but subtle. Nevertheless, certain fundamental tensions could not be neutralized this way. SOderbaum remained an exception, both among Nazi film divas and in respect to the general population. While she came across as more wholesome than other National Socialist actresses, as a film star, she did remain "special." Her function as a Nazi role model hence always remained partial. As an actress and a star she certainly was no role model; only the domestic aspects of her persona really connected with the central tenets of Alfred Rosenberg's ideal. Also, SOderbaum's film characters were hardly ever fully suited to uphold the foundation of the Nazis' essentialist gender descriptions. Rather, they frequently exposed the very tensions they contained. As a result, the para textual star discourse on the actress struggled to underline that the real SOderbaum was not as she appeared in her films. As in Hollywood culture-where, in Richard de Cordova's words, "the star becomes the subject of a narrative which is quite separate from his/her work in any particular film"Kristina Soderbaum's official star construction shared some elements of her onscreen characteristics, while neutralizing others through the counterdiscourse of her "private" star sign.53 "But she doesn't want to be dramatic," insisted a SOderbaum fan biography, "she is a cheerful, charming and well-balanced person, who doesn't remind us at all of the tragedies and suicides of her filmic existence."54 Hence, although SOderbaum's tragic heroines usually failed to achieve happiness, SOderbaum's extrafilmic star construction sought to counter this impression by creating an illusion of female fulfillment that conformed to Nazi ideals. To a certain degree then, SOderbaum's star persona, despite the concerted efforts made to control her image, was implicated in the very ruptures that are generally associated with stardom. According to Christine Gledhill, most stars produce a melodramatic identity that is build on disjuncture: ''The first promise of the star is access to the personality itself ... Second, the star in condensing select social values becomes him or herself a theatre for the enactment of conflicting forces much in the manner of the melodramatic persona ... If in melodrama the theatre is a public space, and its conflicting forces embodied in opposing personae, in the star the personality itself is theatricalised, with conflict taking place within and around the persona."55 Gledhill's conception of the star thus takes us back

Kristina S6derbaum 59

to Richard Dyer's argument, which describes the star as embodying the very tensions of the social environment that produced her. The two conceptual frameworks Gledhill builds upon, stardom and melodrama, are of great significance to National Socialist culture. In fact, two of the biggest stars of Third Reich cinema were exclusively melodramatic performers: Zarah Leander and Kristina Soderbaum. Soderbaum's generic association with melodrama, however, produced a number of additional conflicts that neither her carefully maintained star discourse nor the narratives themselves managed to repeal.

NAIVETE, CORRUPTION, AND SUICIDE: SODERBAUM AS THE HEROINE OF FASCIST VIRTUE?

"The male state, racism and masculine superiority are unbearable in the world of women. Under this trinity, weakness is as unprotected as beauty." Ernst Bloch56

According to Karsten Witte, German cinema accomplished its most remarkable achievements in its melodramas. Detlef Sierck's films with Zarah Leander, Victor Tourjanski's Verklungene Melodie (1938) and Illusion (1941), and Helmut Kautner's Romanze in Moll (1943) skillfully connected the far-reaching feelings of longing with fatalistic resignation. Here, the superficial extensiveness of Nazi aesthetics made room for intensity and differentiation and allowed for modernity and restraint to triumph over exoticism and pathos. 57 Yet emotion was not only the "star," as Witte put it, in films directed by Spielleiter, who sought to circumvent the kind of political "kitsch" foregrounded in propaganda pictures. Pathos and politics were also effectively fused in many of the more infamous Nazi melodramas. 58 "Fascist art," in Susan Sontag's words, "glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death."59 Rentschler correspondingly elaborates that "fascist artworks exercise a powerful and persuasive effect: they present seductive intimations of oblivion with visual beauty and operatic glory."60 Nowhere in film "art" were these elements more strikingly employed than in the cinematic spectacles created by Veit Harlan: his use of emotion was his stylistic trump card and constituted his unmistakable signature. The emotional energy of his narratives almost always centered on Harlan's star actress: Kristina Soderbaum.

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With the exception of one film (Pedro soli hiingen, 1940), Soderbaum appeared in all of Harlan's National Socialist productions following her initial starring role in Youth. And it was through the figure of "woman" that Harlan's films most clearly articulated their political message. How this was achieved, however, depended on the generic significance of SOderbaum's roles. It is important to note that not all of Harlan's films featured the actress in a leading role. In fact, those of his pictures that were more overtly propagandistic left no room for the elaborate figuration of female concerns, while his melodramas primarily focused on questions of sexuality and emotional fulfillment, which were in turn commonly considered "feminine" at the time. The type of politics pursued in Harlan's films therefore divides into two camps: the politics of race and war and the politics of gender. That is not to say that some elements of one could not also be found in films that centered on the other; these categorizations must remain fluid and are sometimes even interchangeable (race and gender, for instance, share certain common denominators in both Harlan's films and in National Socialist philosophy). Nevertheless, when we contrast the actress's use in both of the genres Harlan worked in-melodramatic tragedy and propagandistic drama-we see that Soderbaum's varying narrative characterizations in Third Reich cinema expose the fundamental tensions contained in the Nazis' philosophical and political conceptualization of womanhood. Harlan's propaganda epics, Jew Suss, Der grof3e Konig (The Great King, 1942) and Kolberg, belonged to the most expensive productions of the Third Reich. Goebbels had suggested all of them to Harlan personally, arguably making it impossible for him to refuse the assignment. Goebbels hoped for the creation of a new National Socialist film art, which didn't separate the personal from the political, but foregrounded nationalist goals as the private destiny of ordinary Germans. Furthermore, with the onset of the war some of the Nazis' political agendas became ever more visible, even in the entertainment cinema. The purpose of Jew Suss was to promote anti-Semitism in the public; by 1940, the dispossession and deportation of Jews could not be overlooked by even the most disinterested observer.61 The focal point of the narrative was the destructive dealings of an assimilated Jew who, by attaining financial power over the corrupt Duke of Wiirttemberg, not only gains entry for his people into the city of Stuttgart, but also ''bleeds to death" the decent burghers of the state in the process. Drawing on historical events

Kristina SOderbaum 61

that took place in the independent duchy of Wurttemberg in 1733--1737, which ended with the public execution of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer in 1738, the film coated its anti-Semitic message in the tradition of the bourgeois tragedies of Lessing and Schiller. As Linda Schulte-Sasse points out, Jew Suss thus appropriated narrative conventions that belonged to a tradition of social criticism that Germans remembered as progressive, while at the same time shifting the focus away from a corrupt aristocracy and toward the supposedly destructive influences of the Jewish race. 62 Eighteenth century plays, such as Lessing's 1772 Emilia Gaiotti, often presented their female heroine as the symbolic victim of a much larger political malaise. 63 Similarly, Dorothea Sturm's (Kristina Soderbaum) rape by Suss, and her subsequent suicidal drowning, triggers the final revolt against the duke and his Jewish courtier in Jew Suss (Figs. 2.4 and 2.5). "Dorothea Sturm's body," argues Schulte-Sasse, "is a contested territory."64 Subject to conquest and corruption, she personifies the possibility of miscegenation, making her death as necessary as the eradication of the Jew. In Mihal Friedman's terms, if Jew Suss sought to corrupt, it was women who were available for corruption. 65 The town's symbolic degradation and ideological violation thus converged in the female body. The German woman's rape by the Jew-which constituted the most monstrous metaphor of Nazi rhetoric articulating their irrational fear of racial contamination-in tum legitimized his destruction and the casting out of the Jewish people, both in the film and in National Socialist ideology. By the same token, however, women were rendered the weak link in Germany's armor, which connected them to the figure of the "other" represented by the Jew by virtue of their shared anticommunitarian desire for self-realization. 66 In this respect, it has often been mentioned that Ferdinand Marian's portrayal of Suss enticed hundreds of female spectators to write enamored fan letters to the actor, pointing to the fact that the film's erotics superseded its ideological bent for a number of viewers.67 ''What the Jew embodied in the film, and what women thought to see in him," argues Friedman, "was precisely that kind of sexualization of the body which the regime disavowed and neutralized." 68 That notwithstanding, Jew Suss's representation of Dorothea Sturm never openly suggests her possible willingness to become sexually involved with Suss. It is her naivete and innocence that expose her to his gaze, thereby attracting his desire to marry a Gentile woman. While SOderbaum's sexuality is clearly

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2

Figure 2.4. Race relations: Suss Oppenheimer's desire for a gentile German woman ends in Dorothea's rape.

displayed visually-her dress reveals much of her heaving breasts-the female stereotypes of fascist maidenhood are maintained throughout the narrative. Because the film spends less time on Dorothea's character than it does on drawing a negative image of Suss, the narrative limited the complications of womanhood the film broaches. In The Great King, Soderbaum's role similarly challenged Nazi role prescriptions, while simultaneously functioning in a larger propaganda framework. 69 Also commissioned by the state, The Great King is a war drama that, in Goebbels's words, was to serve "as an excellent expedient in the struggle for the soul of our people and in the process of cre-

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Figure 2.5. Reichswasserleiche: Dorothea's body is found after her suicide in the river.

ating the necessary German resistance needed to see us successfully through the war."70 If Jew Suss had demonized the Jewish people, The Great King glorified authoritarian leadership, patriotic sacrifice, and martial glory. "In both films," argues Schulte-Sasse, "Soderbaum's character is a metaphor for the social body, for Volk ... ; in both her character is sadistically tortured." While in Jew Suss she loses her life, in The Great King she loses "the private sphere that is the only sphere of women, leaving her symbolically transformed into a man."71 As the miller's daughter, Louise, Soderbaum encourages her lover to embrace his soldierly duties in Prussia's seven-year war against Austria by following his army as a soldier-wife. When he falls in battle, she keeps up her strength and, heartened by a caring Frederick the Great, returns home to run her mill as a single, widowed mother. The narrative is dominated by male characters and concentrates on the achievements of its royal leader, but the film script's inclusion of Soderbaum's part, which Har-

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Ian added on at a later stage, points to a specific address directed at female spectators at the home front. As traditional patriarchal values of womanhood were expressed through SOderbaum's motherhood and her admiring deference toward a paternalistic father figure, her independent resourcefulness also pointed to tropes associated with the early National Socialist image of the "female fighter," which Nazi propaganda reactivated during the war. But again, the film contained the independent energies of its heroine through its narrative context; if Dorothea Sturm's sexual vulnerability was atoned for through her suicide, Louise's "masculinity" was justified by circumstance and counteracted by her maternity. In Kolberg, SOderbaum's character Maria finally willingly surrenders all she has to aid the war effort, and she is without a home, family, or lover at the end, leaving her only the knowledge that her total sacrifice was part of her town's victory. "1 hereby order you," Goebbels had written to Harlan, "to produce a monumental picture named Kolberg. The purpose of this film shall be to show, by example of this town which gives the film its title, that the joint politics of home and front will overcome any opponent."72 Kolberg's narrative was based on a historical scenario, but key historical facts were falsified in the film to produce an ending that culminated in a German victory. Set during the Franco-Prussian war (1806-1807), the film combines numerous historical events to produce its own fictional dream war. Goebbels's tum to this "spiritual war-the war in one's head, war as a scenario of an unlimited delirious phantasm," as Kreimeier calls it-marks the final decline of the Nazi leadership into a psychic realm devoid of any reality.73 To personify the tragic sacrifice and immeasurable pain that this political stanc~oebbels's "total war"would necessitate, Harlan again turned to his wife. ''You have given all you had. But it wasn't in vain," the town's mayor reassures Maria in the film's final minutes, "the greatest things are always born in pain. And if someone has taken on all our pain onto herself, then she is great. You are great, Maria, you have done your duty and weren't afraid to die. You have participated in our victory. You too!" What Maria actually contributes to this success, however, is firmly linked to her feminine attributes. When she volunteers to act as a secret messenger, she uses her girlish charms to break through Napoleon's blockade isolating Kolberg and bring a message to the Prussian queen.

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"I know how to do things like that," she explains to a curious court official. When she smiles and bats her eyelids, he is convinced. Maria's subsequent appeal to the queen (the king is too busy with strategy planning to see her) and the queen's interest in the plight of her common subjects further underlines the importance of women's humanizing support in the war effort. In the end, it is the men who have to be willing to lose their lives (all four men in Maria's life die; even her pacifist, French-loving brother is accidentally killed when trying to rescue his violin), while the women must provide emotional fortification and be ready to give up everything else. By the time the film was finished, many German women had little choice but to do just that. Marching west in endless refugee treks with their families, owning only the clothes on their backs, they hardly needed the cinema to remind them of the cost of war. Needless to say, Kolberg was Goebbels's last propaganda spectacle; produced for close to nine million Reichsmark, the film used 185,000 extras, 10,000 historical uniforms and 6000 horses; several Wehrmacht divisions were withdrawn from the besieged front to act in battle scenes.74 Goebbels's absurd belief in the power of his media machine thus culminated in an epic monstrosity most Germans never saw. When the film was released in January 1945, Germany's infrastructure had largely broken down, and where there once had been cinemas there now was rubble. It is obvious that Kristina Soderbaum's representation in Harlan's state-ordered propaganda pictures spoke directly to the mobilization of womanhood for distinctly fascist purposes. In all the films discussed thus far, "woman" was the heart and soul behind all the male action, its supporter and its inspiration. Ultimately, audiences were led to believe, it was in the interest of the German family, and by extension the German Volk, to strike out against the enemy-whether an exterior foe or the internal threat of Jewish degeneracy-and in Harlan's films, this family was embodied by Soderbaum, who was placed at the center of the community as its motivating force. Despite SOderbaum's heroines seeming either overly vulnerable or excessively resourceful in the films, the limited expression of these attributes within the narratives (in each film, Soderbaum only has a supporting role) allowed them to function within the political framework of the filmic content. Although Soderbaum's characters were always tortured rather than rewarded, their suffering

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was linked to a larger social problem by which it was relativized. In addition, the films' political finales avenged her individual torments (i.e., the Jew is hanged or the battles are won). Once Soderbaum played the lead of a Harlan film, however, this balance shifted dramatically. The actress's status as a first-rate film celebrity first and foremost derived from her success as the star of Harlan's melodramas. In contrast to the propaganda films, in the melodramas, SOderbaum's most genuine star vehicles, elements that only momentarily rendered her screen representations problematic in the propaganda pictures emerged as the full-fledged melodramatic content of the narratives to complicate the films' ideological tendencies. The cause for this tension might very well be contained within the nature of melodrama itself. Melodramatic forms have often been described as a generic framework that promotes the articulation of tensions between the individual and the social as the source of insoluble tragedy. In Peter Brooks's words, "Man [sic] is seen to be, and must recognize himself to be, playing on the theatre that is the point of juncture, and of clash, of imperatives beyond himself that are non-mediated and irreducible."75 Thomas Elsaesser further sees melodrama as containing "elements of interiorization and personalization of what are primarily ideological conflicts," conflicts that consequently reach far and above the capacities of the individual to understand, let alone solve them. 76 In other words, as a generic tradition melodrama plays out unresolved social tensions in personifying larger social conflict in its characters, who in turn cannot solve the problems they encounter because they are unable to see their personal tragedy as a result of social construction and restrictive morality, and even if they could, they would be unable to change it. The family melodrama thus "more often records the failure of the protagonist to act in way that could shape the events and influence the emotional environment, let alone the stifling social milieu. The world is closed and the characters are acted upon. Melodrama confers on them a negative identity through suffering, and the progressive selfimmolation and disillusionment generally ends in resignation."77 Following Jean Mitry, the causes of the melodramatic situation are accepted rather than analyzed: "The pathos of their situation derives from this, and the consequences are: impossibility of forbidden love, or wrongs committed against morality, custom or social institutions."78 As a result, Christine Gledhill suggests, "the production of melodramatic

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identities involves excess of expression: hyperbolic emotions, extravagant gestures, declamatory speech, spectacular settings and so on."79 In addition, argues Robert Lang, "[a] woman (or a woman's point of view) often dominates the narrative of the family melodrama because individual identity within patriarchal context-always defined by a masculine standard-is problematically for women." 80 Harlan's melodramas, very much in keeping with the formal strategies of melodrama that surfaced in the bourgeois play of the nineteenth century and continued in Hollywood narrative, followed the pattern of heightened emotion, hysteria, and excess. In these films, women's internal conflicts were foregrounded and had a distinctly private dimension. Moreover, film narratives that featured SOderbaum as the central protagonist were driven primarily by conflicts that were produced through their heroine's sexual desires. Confusion and despair about romance and sexuality were privileged within the drama rendering the narrative a personal and individual tragedy and therefore separate from the concern of the larger Volk. Kristina SOderbaum's sexual body frequently was the cause for conflict. In Youth, for instance, SOderbaum played an innocent teenager named Annchen, whose sexual ignorance and naivete leads to her seduction and suicide. Worried about her illegitimate birth and influenced by a bigoted priest, Annchen cannot come to terms with what she fears is her heritage of sin. 81 When she falls in love with a young student and spends the night with him, his subsequent departure and her fear of pregnancy motivate her to drown herself, a first instance of SOderbaum's frequent linkage with water and death. The film, however, blamed the men (the dogmatic priest, the careless uncle, and the irresponsible student) for Annchen's demise and foregrounded her suicide as tragically unnecessary; its moral message remained ambiguous. While SOderbaum's purity and virginity were underlined, her sexual body was strongly foregrounded (Fig. 2.6). The poster campaign for the film, for instance, depicted the new star with her mouth seductively opened and revealed cleavage and a big cross dangling around her neck. Even though one might argue that the film conformed to the Nazis' antireligious leanings to foreground women's reproductive role, it cannot be said that the text created a blueprint of ideal fascist femininity. What came to the surface, rather, were the various contrary discourses pulling at this model. Correspondingly, Harlan's subsequent films, Verwehte Spuren (Lost Traces, 1938)82 and Das unsterbliche Herz (The Heart that Never Dies,

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Figure 2.6. Sexy virgin: Annchen's naive sexuality brings about her suicide in Youth.

1939),83 also show the actress in various states of confusion over where or to whom she belongs. Harlan's adaptation of Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Journey to Tilsit, 1939)-previously adapted by F. W. Mumau as Sunrise (Fox, 1927)-also depicted S6derbaum (named Elske in the film) as a seemingly wholesome wife and mother caught up in a love triangle. Her psychological response to her husband's adultery, however, results in her psychotic willingness to let him kill her. "00 you want to die?" he asks. "If you want me to. Yes," is her masochistic reply. Medea-like, she also threatens to take along their child. Although the married couple are reconciled in the end-Elske's dark-haired Polish competitor retreats-the film's narrative problematic as well as Elske's perverse longing for death and oblivion once again point to the tragic components that were transported through S6derbaum's image. The ethnic difference of Elske's rival, the operatic natural scenarios of Harlan's photography, and the close connection of the film's protagonists with the East

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Prussian landscape display a striking example of Harlan's naturalist embrace of "blood and soil" motifs, thereby linking nature and race with human destiny, but the private drama played out here hardly advertised marriage and reproductive bliss. 84 In fact, SOderbaum's performances in her melodramas have led redemptive critics, such as Frank Noack, to argue that Soderbaum's characters must be seen as contradicting the official image of woman in the Nazi state: "[Soderbaum] was the opposite of the obedient, submissive girl. ... In almost all her roles she is hungry for life, reckless and disobedient, hardly fulfilling a model function. She doesn't play by the rules and that's why she gets into trouble .... Security is never her COncern in her films ... She is the little rebel, too weak to win, but she stays tenacious until the end and would rather risk death than give in."85 In this respect Kristina Soderbaum's melodramatic roles may be read as symptomatic, insofar as they expressed the very conflicts that were also problematic in the Nazis' stance vis-a.-vis women in general. In fact, Soderbaum got much closer to the core of these tensions than any other star of the period. In the ideological framework of Nazi culture, the positive description of women as individual figures or characters was extremely difficult because they could be directed only toward the personal (romance, family) and were therefore only indirectly linked to the concerns of the nation or the political. That is to say, in the figure of "woman" there always resided a political tension, albeit not one between the Nazi ideal of womanhood and its alternatives, but one that inevitably arose once the focus turned away from the male and towards the psychologized figure of the female. Although the Nazis advocated a somewhat masochistic stoicism, in terms of their expectation that women bravely endure extraordinary hardship, the excessive suffering of melodrama exceeded this framework.

Die Goldene Stadt (The Golden City, Ufa, 1942) The Golden City was one of the most celebrated successes of Nazi cinema. Playing in theaters in Germany as well as abroad (the film was shown successfully in France, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and Finland and in many occupied regions in eastern Europe86), the picture served as the showpiece of German cinema used by Ufa to promote the German film industry internationally, while simultaneously assuring German audiences that Nazi art had a universal dimension. At its premiere

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at the tenth Biennale in Venice in September 1942, where Harlan and Soderbaum attended in Goebbels's company, the film received various awards, including prizes for its color cinematography and for Soderbaum's performance. Its enduring popularity lasted throughout and beyond the Third Reich. In 1944, The Golden City was listed as the leading moneymaker in the pantheon of films made in the so-called "Greater German Empire" (Grossdeutsche Reich),87 and even postwar polls showed that The Golden City was the number one film Germans wanted to revisit (all Harlan pictures were banned until 1954).88 With an audience of more than 42 million, it may very well have been the most profitable picture in Third Reich film history.89 With Harlan's move to ever-larger melodramatic productions, The Golden City was also his first film with Ufa. In addition, it was the company's first successful venture into color cinematography. Ufa's first color film, Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten (Women Are Better Diplomats, 1941) with Marika Rokk, still lacked a skillful dramatic employment of the medium and was an altogether unremarkable movie. Harlan's subsequent color films, in contrast, effectively used new Agfacolor technology to underline the narrative conflicts of his pictures by integrating color effects into his characteristically overwrought and excessive mise-en-scenes. Witte, who calls the director "the baroque fascist," attests that Harlan's central contribution to the Third Reich was his "heavy melodramas, which he staged with bombastic effects, symphonic music, and mass spectacles. His artistic ideal was gigantism .... "90 Indeed, in consonance with the general tendencies in National Socialist culture, Harlan's films were anything but subtle. Replacing Hollywood's rule of thumb of "show-don't tell" with "show and tell," the director counted on, in Lowry's words, "plump pathos" to "stage films full of ideologically effective stereotypes."91 The Golden City is set in the Bohemian countryside, where German farmer Jobst owns a large estate. He is a prominent and respectable personage in his region: his estate is worth a small fortune. His daughter Anna, played by Kristina Soderbaum, is his pride and joy. She is a lively, enthusiastic girl full of lust for life and brimming with an enterprising spirit. An only child, she will inherit the family wealth, and Jobst is eager to see her married to his trusted young farm hand, Thomas. In her father's opinion, Anna desperately needs to be settled, and thus bound to his estate without entering any romantic involvement that would

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take her away. According to Jobst, Thomas is a "weakling" (literally, limp dick [Schlappschwanz]), scarcely in danger of corning between the oedipally determined bond between father and daughter, and thus the ideal son-in-law (an early scene ends a confrontation between father and daughter with a close-up that shows them sharing a big kiss on the mouth to settle their quarrel).92 Because Anna's "wildness" alarms her father, he is strict and intolerant, suspicious of anything or anyone who might interfere with how things are done (and always have been) in his world. The reason behind this, we learn, is a repressed tragedy in the family's past. His actions are bound up with the memories of his late wife, a city woman from Prague who found the confining circumstances of country life (and implicitly her marriage to the patriarchal Jobst) so depressing that she killed herself in the nearby moor when Anna was a small child. In forbidding in his daughter any memory of her mother, he seeks to eradicate the heritage of difference that threatens his status quo. Anna in turn loves her father, but she also feels suffocated by his eversuspicious governance. We are introduced to her as she gazes lovingly at a glossy photo book of Prague, which has become the center of her escape fantasies. Next, we see her racing her horse cart through the picturesque countryside-laughing with her hair blowing in the wind-toward the sight of the moor, where a dashing young engineer from Prague, Leidwein, is working on plans for draining the swamps. The contrast between the couple could not be starker (Fig. 2.7). She is the peasant girl par excellence, a maiden in colorful local costume, fresh from the creamery with golden locks under a big yellow straw hat. Her enthusiasm for the big wide world moreover attests to her naIvete and ignorance, which at the same time constitute her appeal. It is Anna's innocent country charm that attracts the cosmopolitan Leidwein, whose appearance, background, and technical occupation firmly connect him to modernity, which the film locates in the city. And while Anna longs to see the city as much as she longs for her freedom---encapsulated in her imaginary concept of the mothershe does not look misplaced within the beautiful landscape that surrounds her, but rather seems to be very much of it. The representation of Anna Jobst in the beginning of The Golden City thus depicts the character through the same stereotype that the National Socialist press applied to SOderbaum's offscreen image, suggesting the possibility of a "perfect" female National Socialist heroine. It is this very stereotype, however, that is subsequently problema-

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Figure 2.7. Culture clash: Country girl Anna falls in love with the urban engineer Leidwein.

tized and taken apart by the narrative. The film shows Anna's world as beautiful, just as the moor looks innocuously pretty on the surface, but Anna is restless and unhappy.93 "Every third word you say is always 'my father says.' What do you say yourself, Fraulein Anna?" Leidwein prompts, clearly suggesting to her the possibility of making independent decisions. When Thomas later questions her about what she wants, she answers emphatically "I want to live!" thereby expressing an unspecific desire for authentic experience. Yet when Anna finally does break loose from both her father's and Leidwein's guidance to momentarily follow her spontaneous drives and impulses, and consequently loses herself in the city and in the arms of her fortune-hunting cousin, she simultaneously seals her fate. In his detailed analysis of the film, Lowry points out: "The film tells the story of Anna's search for her own identity. Her longing for freedom and 'living' are essentially nothing but the wish to separate from the father to lead her own life, pursue her own dreams, to generally become 'herself.' Yet this search for identity is already condemned through the rules and reality of patriarchal soci-

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ety. Because Anna can only become 'herself' by becoming a 'woman: But being a woman in this society is always defined in relationship to the man. This paradoxical situation is at the core of Anna's and the narrative's dilemma."94 The conflicts driving the continuing plot development oscillate around a number of different tensions-city / country, Germans / Czechs, father / daughter, male / female-many of which can be seen in a distinctly National Socialist light. The melodramatic force of the film, however, remains caught up in the tragic dimensions of being female in a male world. When Jobst realizes that Anna has formed a bond with Leidwein, he cancels the moor drainage project and drives Leidwein off his property. His jealous protection of his daughter thus fuses with an antimodern discourse, symbolized in the draining of the moor, in favor of a traditionalist stance against change and modernization. When Anna confronts him about Leidwein's dismissal, Jobst angrily strikes Anna's cheek. The tearful reconciliation is only short-lived; the father's control has become too oppressive. Anna tries to be contented with the life she was clearly made for: the film shows her in sweeping scenes at the local village festival, where she participates in a horse race (Thomas wins, Anna comes second) and dances in the traditional country costume. The exalting sequence once again celebrates a link with Kristina SOderbaum's extrafilrnic representations in the National Socialist press and further suggests that Anna could be happy at home, if it weren't for her despotic father and her longing for a mother she never knew. 95 But while Harlan visually glorifies country life, Anna's frustrations accumulate. When the men leave the village for a few days, the estate's housekeeper, intent on winning Jobst and the estate for herself, talks Anna into undertaking a day trip to the "forbidden" city. Finally in Prague, she visits her mother's sister, Frau Opferkuch, and her (illegitimate) son, Toni. Here, she is introduced to a life of looser morals; her aunt is visibly tarted up and drinks, and the dapper Toni is a waiter at a trendy coffeehouse and has a tumultuous liaison with its owner. They live in a small flat above a cigarette store run by Anna's aunt, which points to a low-class urban existence that negatively contrasts with Anna's wealthy country background. It has often been mentioned that the housekeeper, Frau Opferkuch, and Toni all have Czech accents to suggest that there is a strong racist component to the film. Nazi officials further underlined this interpretation in various internal state-

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ments. Nonetheless, the race-related aspects of the film remain somewhat ambiguous. It seems that if spectators brought anti-Czech sentiments to the film, a racial dimension became visible; if they didn't, the film played out on the level of city versus country and tradition versus social reform. 96 To complicate things further, even the city was not rendered as entirely negative. 97 Quite to the contrary, Harlan shoots the golden city of Prague in festive tones, the city's beautiful old architecture is celebrated, and Smetana's music is on the sound track, all of which serve as a seductive invitation to bourgeois tradition and high culture. The educated Leidwein, who visits Anna and takes her to the opera also isn't a negative figure, but a respectful, if paternalistic suitor. Instead, it is Toni and his mother who convince Anna that Leidwein is married, thereby paving the way for a romance with her cousin, who has alienated his mistress and sees Anna as an heiress. Rather than engaging in a clear-cut city/country opposition that favors one over the other, the film points to a discourse of "belonging," of understanding the rules by which city or country spaces are governed, of knowing whom to trust and which acts are irrevocable transgTessions. This is where Anna fails, once she is removed from her familiar surroundings. The film's allusions to anthropological heritage linked with destiny thus point to a direct invocation of "blood and soil" motifs, which surface primarily in the film's insistence that people's identities are fundamentally bound up with their heredity and their innate connection with their homeland. Anna's alienation from these concepts results from her unstable inheritance; the city mother's absence in her upbringing leads to both her lack of familiarity with her maternal family and her inability to negotiate her femininity. Leidwein's critical and patronizing attitude toward Anna's behavior in town irritates her; consequently, she does not adopt his cautious reserve toward her city relatives. It is her rebellion against patriarchal dominance, rather than a more conventionally romantic nature, which leads to her seduction. This rebellion, however, brings the film back to the gender conflicts that ultimately power its drama. When Anna allows herself to be seduced by Toni, it is her loss of control over her sexuality that triggers her demise. Moreover, her fall is not mired in the conventional trope of passion and deceit; she is not really in love with Toni, and laughs at him when he tells her they should spend their lives together. Rather, it is as if she pretends to be in love with him, so that she can succumb to her sexual desires. Toni's visual reconstruction

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of Anna ("You went to the opera like that?" he laughs, when Anna returns in her dirndl) further points to the idea that when Anna abandons her peasant dress for fashionable city clothes (a red polka-dotted dress) and makeup, she loses the very identity she hoped to gain when leaving her father (Fig. 2.8). Anna's transformation virtually literalizes the kind of de-Germanization that Nazi ideologues condemned in their philosophy, where makeup and fashion functioned as signifiers of unGerman degeneracy. For the same reasons, Leidwein is finally driven away at his last visit, when he sees Anna without her traditional costume, because the fantasy of pure country maidenhood that initially attracted him to the girl is now visually and narratively undone. 98 Anna soon finds herself in a familiar position. Pregnant and disowned by her father, she assumes the traditional tragic figure of the fallen woman; a kind of National Socialist Gretchen. Merely tolerated in her aunt's flat, and exploited for her labor in the cigarette store, she quickly realizes that her romance with Toni is a sham. When Toni learns of Jobst's plans to marry his housekeeper, thus making Anna's future ownership of the farm even more unlikely, Anna is asked to leave. AI-

Figure 2.8. Kissing cousins: Toni transforms Anna into a city woman.

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though her aunt realizes the desperation of her niece's position, her ability to empathize does not exceed Toni's will. None of the Opferkuch women, it seems, have any luck with men. Anna returns home to find her father celebrating his engagement. When he coldly ignores her, she decides to join her mother: "Mother, little mother, father has not taken me back. I'll come to you, little mother, I'll go down the same path as you. Mother, I hear you, you're calling me." Now fully engaged in a fundamental crisis of belonging, Anna chooses death. "My child doesn't belong here on the farm," she cries, "but I belong with my child. You were right, father, always right, until the end .... Forgive me that I didn't love my homeland the way you did." Before the search party led by a repentant Jobst can find her, she has submerged herself in the dark, swampy moor, from which her corpse is raised looking clean and angelic. Overcome with grief and guilt, Jobst abandons his marriage plans, hands the farm over to Thomas and orders the drainage of the moor. The film ends with an image of Anna's place of death, now golden with wheat crops blowing in the wind. 99 Two different discourses emerge through the significance of the moor in the film's highly melodramatic ending. The moor as the place where Anna finally belongs simultaneously stands for femininity and female sexuality as well as for the repressive traditions of patriarchy. Anna's "damaging" inheritance, which her father anxiously sought to suppress, is not the result of only the racial flaws of the mother (if we accept reading her mother as Czech) but her legacy of womanhood. 1OO Rather than simply constituting a problem of race genetics, Anna's hereditary curse is femininity. The drives and passions that propel her to rebel are triggered by her subordinate position and only result in her ruin because she is female and must learn to repress these wishes. Moreover, for all women in the film, life results in failure. Both Anna's aunt and her mother had tragic lives and unhappy unions with men; the same is repeated for Anna and her father's housekeeper (who is dumped after Anna's death). The idea that the moor needs eradicating is therefore not only a move toward eliminating the female from the text, as Lowry has suggested, but also a critique of an outmoded social practice. 101 The film invites the audience to identify with Anna; her end is not so much an inevitable tragedy, but places responsibility with the father figure (a similar suspicion dominates our understanding of what happened to Jobst's wife).lo2 The press discourse on the film similarly

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located the source of the conflict less in the danger of the city than in the overdominance of paternal control. 103 The film is tom between celebrating traditional country life and critiquing the antiquated morality of yesteryear. Nazi films often wanted to be modem and volkisch at the same time-just as Nazi philosophy saw itself as traditionalist and revolutionary, introducing a strange mix of reactionary and modem elements in their formulations of fascist womanhood. In fact, Nazi rhetoric often pitched the "rural" against the "modem," to then advertise Nazism as the conciliatory solution to the problem. Caught in the middle of this inherently contradictory discourse, women's happiness often ended up falling through the cracks. Although Anna's "death is quite clearly an indication of the fate which women who step outside their traditional role can expect," as Petley insists, the spectators' sympathies are melodramatically aligned with her character and further critical of the male actors in the narrative. 104 Unless we privilege the film's racist dimension above other possible readings, and thus see the narrative as a cautionary tale that strategically sought to promote racial purity, the heroine's suicide is profoundly meaningless. Neither does her death unite the people against evil (i.e., the Jew, as in Jew Siiss), nor does her suffering support a military victory as in The Great King or Kolberg. We can imagine a different ending. lOS As a matter of fact, the original stage play by Richard Billinger closed with the death of the father, not of Anna. It was on Goebbels's insistence that Anna had to die, "because her pregnancy would have resulted in the birth of a 'Czech bastard,' " while Harlan had argued it "unmodern and unreligious" to have a girl kill herself just because she will be an unwed mother. 106 Ufa press releases before the film's premiere often referred to the film's positive ending, meaning Anna's surviva1. 107 Importantly, I do not wish to propose here that readings that emphasize the use of race in the film are invalid, or belittle the impact of this analysis. Obviously, racist considerations shaped both the film-especially its altered ending-and its reception through Nazi officials and National Socialist audiences. I do suggest, however, that the film's representation of Anna's problems is not exhausted or limited to this interpretation. Clearly, the film made sense to a large audience that did not pick up on its anthropological racism, but saw it in the tradition of the ninteenth century social drama. I wish to foreground the inevitable conflicts that arise in the repre-

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sentation of women in Nazi cinema, even if they conform to the National Socialist ideal. In The Golden City, Kristina Soderbaum looks and acts like the embodiment of the vivacious nature child that the extrafilmic star discourse had constructed as the perfect image for the actress. At the same time, The Golden City points to the idea that the very vitality and natural sexuality the Nazis praised in their ideal could not function once placed in the central position of a film narrative. Women's pursuit of individualistic desires in Nazi cinema could never end in success. As is often the case in patriarchal cinema, the problem of female sexuality knows no positive solution. All of Kristina Soderbaum's melodramas illustrate this with striking clarity. Even film narratives in which Soderbaum's character commits no transgressions and in fact insists on staying at home-as we will see played out in Immensee-do not protect her from tragic disappointment.

Immensee (Ufa, 1943) In Immensee we encounter a Harlan melodrama that pays close attention to both its male and its female lead, while giving a certain preference to the male. In contrast to The Golden City, both Immensee and The Sacrifice are as much male as they are female melodramas. In each case, the impulses and actions of the male protagonist are stressed and determine his female partners' equally melodramatic fates. Immensee was Harlan's second color film; The Sacrifice, made simultaneously but released a year later, was his third. Shot back-to-back in northern Germany, the films function as mirror images to one another. If Immensee situates its romantic triangle by positioning the female star, Kristina Soderbaum, between two men, The Sacrifice places its hero, Carl Raddatz, between two women. lOB Moreover, beyond the similarities between Immensee and The Sacrifice, the films also show a strong intertextual connection with earlier Soderbaum melodramas. Immensee's homey Elisabeth, who watches her lover leave without being able to hold on, reminds us of Elske in The Journey to Tilsit who similarly struggles to hang on to her unfaithful husband; the same also happens to Octavia (Irene von Meyersdorff) in The Sacrifice. Likewise, Immensee's male lead, Reinhart (Raddatz), as well as the adulterous couple in The Sacrifice, Aels (Soderbaum) and Albrecht (Raddatz), bear a distinct resemblance to Anna in The Golden City, in terms of their desire to break away, defy convention, and follow their sexual impulses.

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Furthermore, Immensee was promoted under the subheading"A German Folk Song" and took up the themes of homeland and belonging that we already encountered in The Golden City, once again pointing to ''blood and soil" motifs. In Immensee, however, it isn't Soderbaum's character who leaves home to go "out into the world," but her girlhood sweetheart, Reinhart, who wants to seek fame and fortune in the big city and even abroad. Yet here, the melodramatic impact of leaving home does not mean that the protagonist has betrayed his roots. Rather than ending in suicide, the narrative describes a journey that, while marked by the familiar National Socialist elements of loss and renunciation, results in the male hero's refinement into a brilliant, if lonely musical genius. Where Anna loses her identity in The Golden City, the male protagonist in Immensee maintains his sense of purpose by sharing his artistic talent with the larger Volk. Still, romantic male characters in Nazi Cinema must be seen as feminized figures, who occupy a complicated ideological position vis-a.-vis the larger ideological framework of the National Socialist masculinity. If we compare Raddatz's role in Immensee and The Sacrifice with Willy Birgel's part in Sierck's To New Shores, Leander's musical director Rudnitzky in The Great Love, or Willy Fritsch's characters in Harvey's musicals, we find that the male partner in the romantic couple frequently doesn't harmonize with Theweleit's concept of the armored male. Victor Staal's performance in The Great Love further shows that if the male lead tries to approximate this model, the resulting tensions provide the conflict of the romance narrative. By and large, the male model of the heroic soldier was not suitable for melodrama or comedy, the leading genres in National Socialist entertainment (individual melodramas were most successful; comedies were most frequent). In Reinhart's case, it is his musical nature that allows for his emotional sensibilities and exonerates him from the accusation of being oversentimental. More significantly, in National Socialist contexts sentimentality and pathos as such, although they did need containment, did not carry the same connotations as in other Western cultures. American films of the 1930s and 1940s frequently feature cynical, self-depreciating male heroes-we might think here of the films of Howard Hawks-whereas this type of male is almost entirely absent from National Socialist pictures. Coolness, sarcasm and emotional detachment, which are often coded as male attributes in twentieth century culture, were not desirable in the

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Nazi state, which relied on nationalist hysteria, emotional overidentification, emphatic dedication and ritualized death. That notwithstanding, it is interesting to note that Immensee and The Sacrifice present very similar characters whose gender is reversed correspondingly in each film (i.e., Erich = Octavia, Elisabeth = Albrecht}.l09 Based on an early novella by Theodor Storm, Immensee is a melancholic reminiscence of a bygone youth and its lost promises. 110 The film begins with a framing story set many years after the main narrative events. In a great concert hall, Reinhart, the famous conductor, performs his masterpiece (entitled The Water Lily) with a full orchestra. Elisabeth, in widow's black, is in the audience. When the couple meets in a restaurant afterward, we realize they haven't seen each other in years. Gazing at the water lily that decorates the table, the symbol of their love, they initiate their joint walk down memory lane, and the flashback begins. The film thus initiates the anticipation of melodrama and introduces an intense feeling of predestination, which serves as a support system for the film's ideological fatalism, a notion that increasingly figured in National Socialist culture during the war, responding to the escalating negative personal experiences of wartime audiences. Immensee ("lake of the bees") is the name of both Elisabeth's hometown and the country estate of Erich, who is part of the adolescent friendship trio that also includes Reinhart and Elisabeth. While Reinhart feels a higher calling that propels him to "see the world," Erich and Elisabeth are steady and conventional, happy at home. Yet Reinhart and Elisabeth are in love; Erich, who also loves the heroine, suffers in silence. In an early scene, the couple's families take one last carriage ride through the countryside before seeing Reinhart off to Hamburg, where he will study at the music conservatory. As in The Golden City, Harlan depicts the small German town and surrounding landscape in picturesque images, replacing The Golden City's Bohemian peasant culture with the petit bourgeois idyll of small town domesticity as the object of his aestheticizing gaze. The dialogue, however, counteracts the impression of peaceful coexistence. When Reinhart declares that he is looking for variety and novelty ("New things, always new things!"), Elisabeth's dismissive mother compares him negatively to the gypsies. When Reinhart's father calls Elisabeth a real homebody, she concedes, "1 don't know what I am." Reinhart's daring is further expressed when the young people bathe in a lake. Despite Elisabeth's protest, Reinhart swims far out to

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pick a water lily floating on the water and, as she had warned, the tangled roots below the surface almost pull him down. The resulting argument metaphorizes the larger conflict motivating the plot: Reinhart prefers a "dangerous" path in the pursuit of beauty, while Elisabeth chooses the security of conventionalism (Fig. 2.9). Furthermore, in Immensee the underlying antagonism of "home" versus "world" plays out along a traditional understanding of gender. Reinhart's pursuit of his career away from home is an inevitable result of his talent, whereas the questionable morals of the women he encounters in the artists' milieu are represented as at least ambiguous. Erich, whom Elisabeth marries once she finds out about his "artistic" lifestyle, simultaneously strikes her as boring and unexciting. The wagon wheel nailed to the top of the Immensee bam remains empty, no stork will nest, pointing to the lack of fulfillment in the childless couple's sex life. Alternatively, Reinhart and Elisabeth's sexual attraction to one another is rooted in their opposition, in the contrast between the idealized figures of the male (genius) and the female (country girD, both

Figure 2.9. Golden cage: Reinhart and Elisabeth in Immensee.

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of whom agree with stereotypical National Socialist formulations. Correspondingly, even though both partners suffer because of the failure of their romance, Reinhart embraces a promiscuous lifestyle, whereas Elisabeth chooses the sexual boredom that is associated with her marital loyalty. Reinhart's erotic adventures are further coded as "different," and by extension un-German, whilst the disembodied notion of the pure Elisabeth lingers as his artistic inspiration and finally enables him to create great German works. "Music and plot," suggests Hartmut Redottee, "melt into an inseparable whole."111 Reinhart's compositions (one of which is entitled Elisabeth) are performed four times throughout the film, first in the opening concert sequence, second it is sung by one of Reinhart's fellow music students at a party at his Hamburg flat, next by Elisabeth herself, and last by an Italian opera diva in Rome. The first solely instrumental concert is simultaneously the last, the finished masterpiece, whereas the different renderings of Reinhart's music through songs in between also narrate his romantic trajectory. The music student in Hamburg is a casual fling with whom Reinhart shares the occasional night. "These are artists," explains the landlady, when Elisabeth finds the girl in Reinhart's bed on a surprise visit, "they are more liberal in these matters." In contrast, Elisabeth's own singing in Reinhart's home, which is only heard by Reinhart and his father, resonates with the traditional performance of feminine accomplishments, apt but not professional, contained in the performative space of the private sphere. The professional performer Loretta finally embodies Reinhart's temporary digression into a foreign culture. Reinhart takes off for a year in Rome after learning of Elisabeth's marriage to Erich because Reinhart had ceased writing to her. Harlan depicts the city as an impressive memorial to Italian history and culture. In a Germany cut off from international travel, the film celebrated the foreign allure of Italy (still a possibility) and expressed a yearning for international glamour that could not be contained by the story line. In fact, Reinhart and his friends seem awestruck by the monumentalism of Roman architecture. Remarkably, the group even wonders if Germans have as much "passionate faith" as the Italians, until one of them pushes aside their nationalist confusion by asserting, "1 believe in Bach, Beethoven," thus pointing back to a cultural identification that eclipses the National S0cialist stress on racial superiority. Yet, the film upholds the assumption of

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a fundamental difference between nations. Loretta, the Italian opera diva, is the opposite of Elisabeth's natural countrywoman. Dark-haired and glamorous, she is a star ("1 had more flowers in my dressing room than you," she tells Reinhart), suited to Reinhart's lifestyle but also an alienating presence (Fig. 2.10). When she performs Elisabeth in a striking operatic delivery in a Roman amphitheater, Reinhart's friends can hardly recognize the piece. "That's not you anymore. That isn't Elisabeth!" remarks one. Reinhart is bewildered: "This isn't my song, this is ... Verdi." "No," retorts his companion, as the Italian soprano finishes in a stunning finale, "this is Loretta." The next scene shows Reinhart and Loretta in an Italian villa. When Reinhart wants to join his friends at a German restaurant, Loretta convinces him to stay and make love to her instead. "It is hard to believe," he observes looking at the nightly sky, "that this is the same Venus as it is at home in Germany." "Is not the same," Loretta answers in accented German, "is a different Venus." When she tells him she loves him in Italian, he reluctantly replies with "te amo," as if saying it in another language cannot really mean that it is true.

Figure 2.10. When in Rome ... : Reinhart and the Italian opera diva Loretta.

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Of course, Reinhart returns home from his Italian adventure without Loretta. Back in Immensee, Erich invites his friend to spend a summer at his home to compose, knowing well that the relationship between Reinhart and his wife was never fully resolved. As the initial constellation is reestablished, the fundamental tensions of the narrative come to a conclusion. The attraction between Reinhart and Elisabeth still exists. At a local dance given to celebrate Erich's founding of a factory on Immensee's property-an element that suggests that the "home" space of Immensee is also moving into a progressive contemporary modernityElisabeth swings joyfully in Reinhart's arms, throwing back her head as if in sexual ecstasy. Erich witnesses the scene and realizes his inability to satisfy his wife. That night he releases her from her marriage vows ("1 want your happiness, because I love you"). As a result, Elisabeth realizes that Erich is the better, nobler person-just as Albrecht will come to understand the superiority of his wife's goodness over SOderbaum's Aels's sexual appeal in The Sacrifice. Dressed in a country dirndl-as we have seen, a typical Soderbaum image-Elisabeth informs Reinhart of her decision to stay with her husband through the infamous bee analogy. "You are free now," says Reinhart, "free to choose the fittest. That is the right of the queen bee." "Erich is the strongest," Elisabeth replies, "Now I know." Reinhart is flabbergasted: "You want to sacrifice yourself? Your happiness, your life, me, your love?" But Elisabeth explains that the larger social context of one's life is more important than individual feelings: "Your circles, this kind of freedom, that isn't my world. I am anchored here." Thus, Elisabeth finally overcomes her erotic attachment to Reinhart to find meaning in the larger concept of selfless, self-effacing, sacrificial love (Erich), while simultaneously embracing the notion of "belonging," the love for one's Heimat. When we return to the restaurant scene from the beginning, both partners have learned to move beyond individualist desires. Even though Elisabeth is now widowed, the couple chooses not to continue together. Presumably aided by his pain, Reinhart has achieved his great work, entitled The Water Lily, in dedication to their love. As the relationship is dissolved permanently, sexual love has finally transcended into art: Reinhart's mature composition is an orchestra piece from which the female voice has finally been erased. Whereas Reinhart's calling is music, Elisabeth's purpose is her small-town domestic sphere, pointing back to Soderbaum's frequent association with the social body

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and the homeland. "We have to be true to ourselves," she explains, "you to your work, me to my little world." It is not love-or another partner-that keeps them apart, but life, destiny itself; according to this philosophical perspective, the only possible response is fatalism. Once again, Harlan invokes romantic motifs that were ideologically connected to the Nazis' belief system. The final scene shows Reinhart departing on a small airplane, as Elisabeth waves her quiet good-bye. Shot in dim tones, the images look almost black and white. Moreover, her black dress and the airport imagery suddenly conjure up the scenario of war with its inevitable ramifications of separation and loss. The promotional copy of a Ufa-press release on the film summarized, "Stronger than any youthful love, is the law of duty!" suggesting that injury and renunciation are unavoidable components of "life" with all its overdetermined meanings.1 12 In addition, Julian Petley sees the film as a didactic lesson essentially concerned with female transgression and sacrifice. ''This exemplary moral tale," he further points out, "with its idealized protagonists, beautiful 'German' settings and 'picturesque' German peasant customs won it the subtitle 'A German Folksong' from Goebbels."113 Still, although Nazi films never allowed a German marriage to collapse (without the death of a partner), the ideal embodied by SOderbaum in this film centers on women sticking to their roots, rather than avoiding sexual temptation, as in The Golden City. It is Reinhart who falls under the spell of a more worldly eroticism, forsaking the more stable and less intriguing, but authentically German happiness he might have found at home. And although the act of leaving does produce in him the melancholic emotion of loss, it is this very experience that in turn serves to inspire him to create great art. Again, SOderbaum's character, even though she is now steadfast in her attachment to her homeland and morally virtuous, suffers more. As Redottee points out: "Going away-wanting to hold on, wanting to leave-having to stay: each has its price. And with Harlan, it is the women who have to pay."114 But Elisabeth's moral rectitude toward Erich, her understanding and acceptance of life's existential difficulties, and her love of home nonetheless make her an unremarkable and dull character, much less suited to move audiences the way Anna did in The Golden City. Elisabeth is an ideal that lacks allure, just as S6derbaum's star image could never animate the kind of excitement offered by other Ufa divas. Instead, Reinhart's feminized male emerges as the film's most interest-

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ing figure. From the outset, Elisabeth's positioning as a positive role model is engulfed in negatives, hardly the stuff that dreams are made of. In fact, the highly melodramatic contexts surrounding her characterization oxymoronically point to a strange kind of realism, reminding audiences that life hardly ever turns out anything like our (film) fantasies. The film is a dedication to nostalgia and remembrance, rather than a promise; quite fitting for a time where there was nothing to look forward to and the memory of peacetime domesticity was located firmly in the past. Redottee even goes so far as to argue, "we can perceive in the conflict between staying and leaving certain political undertones in these years of emigration."115 Rather than functioning as a morale-boosting Durchhaltefilm ("keep-on-going" fibn), a purpose that was more likely to be fulfilled by the many comedies released at that time, Immensee was an object lesson in self-denial. The suspension of desire and the promise of a delayed happiness that we find in fibns like Die grope Liebe (The Great Love, 1941/2) do not drive the narrative. Instead it follows a learning curve that finally results in the embrace of life as predestination, fate, and pain. The film addresses the issues of hope and desire, but is marked from the begiruting as a story that ends in melancholic nostalgia. Without question, Promi sought to use Harlan's melodramatic tearjerkers to pave the way for the equally sad experiences Gennans stood to endure in their real lives or to soften the pain of losses already encountered by creating an atmosphere of emotional bravery. Yet it is hard to imagine that Harlan's melodramas energized the spectator, giving her strength or spreading optimism. Instead, their stress on the inevitability of tragedy spoke to contemporary audiences by reflecting a mood of resignation and depression.

Opfergang (The Sacrifice, Ufa, 1943) Unlike Immensee, The Sacrifice could never have been called" A German Folksong." Despite its inversion of many of Immensee's themes, nothing about the film brought the narrative back to the Nazi ideal of a Germanic idyll. Instead, The Sacrifice engaged particular National Socialist values-especially the myth of naturalness and the notion of glorified death-and explored them in such an overwrought mode that the ideological undercurrents of much of Nazi cinema exploded in its excessive melodrama: on the one hand, the film's overaesthetization made

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these concerns clearly visible, and on the other their ideological purpose dissolved in the contradictory nature of the narrative. Goebbels interjected his objections to the project several times during production. First, he protested against the casting of Soderbaum in the role of Aels, a free-spirited young woman who almost destroys the marriage of an haute-bourgeois Hamburg couple, because a seductress of this kind did not correspond to the Nazi ideal of the Nordic type and should better be portrayed by a brunette actress. 116 Harlan persisted in casting his wife, but Goebbels did successfully change the ending. As in The Golden City, Rudolf Binding's original novel culminated in the death of the male protagonist and left the woman alive. Goebbels, however, demanded otherwise. According to Harlan, he argued that "thousands of soldiers were deserting at the front because they were plagued by the fear that their wives at home were cheating on them .... the woman guilty of causing the adultery had to die, not the husband. The marriage must be preserved. This was better not only for the front, but also at home in an educational sense [volkserzieherischen Sinne)."117 The finished film still left Goebbels undecided. Deeply moved by its "erotics of death" as he called it, he privately screened the film frequently, while holding it back from public release, presumably because the film's mood was too dark and hopeless. lIS When The Sacrifice finally premiered in December 1944, he had apparently given in to the somber tone of the narrative, knowing well that the war was coming to an end. Spectators, both in Germany and abroad, liked the film.119 Kristina Soderbaum herself would refer to The Sacrifice as her best work and her favorite film throughout her life po Just as The Journey to Tilsit and Immensee, The Sacrifice is essentially a love triangle. Where Immensee's Elisabeth finds herself caught between two men (Reinhart and Erich) and two lifestyles (one artistic, the other bound to traditionalist country-living), The Sacrifice positions the male lead Albrecht (Carl Raddatz) between two women and two lifestyles: Octavia (Irene von Meyersdorff), the overbred, ethereal senator's daughter identified with aristocratic "high" culture, and Aels (Kristina SOderbaum), the unconventional but doomed "migrant bird," who even in her association with death embodies pure physicality. The film begins with Albrecht's return to Hamburg after a three-year journey through the world-upholding the German "colonial spirit," as a speaker for Hamburg's Hanseatic League puts it. He has brought souvenirs from his

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travels to be given to yet unchosen female companions: an Indian statue of Kwannon, the virgin goddess of compassion and mercy, and a red kimono, which alludes to the sensuality of the Geisha. Both objects will come to stand for the two women in his future: one larger than life, the other firmly of it. "Octavia is heavenly," he will later complain to his friend to explain his adultery, "Aels is earthly." Yet, initially Albrecht is attracted to the translucently beautiful Octavia ("how can one give a girl a Roman name these days?" he mocks) with her all-encompassing goodness and empathy, and he soon asks to marry her. Octavia is seen as a creature of luminous light. She is an angel, engulfed, as a contemporary review put it, in a mise-en-scene of visual excess of a "snow-white, silky-shimmering palatial salon ... , the floor covered in a ankle-deep carpet."121 The cultural traditions that describe her, however, are also steeped in deep shadows: on Sunday mornings the family gathers in the dark hall of their mansion on the river, the curtains drawn (Fig. 2.11). Octavia plays melancholy tunes, the old senator recites Nietzsche's morbid poem "The Sinking Sun." In Frieda

Figure 2.11. Cool elegance: Octavia in her bourgeois Hamburg home.

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Grafe's words: "The art of the upper classes is colorless and shy of light. Poems about the premonition of death, Nocturne by Chopin, they give each other orchids from their greenhouses, instead of flowers from their gardens. They favor wearing black and white, and when they allow themselves excess, they wear silver or gold, more shiny than colorful."l22 Albrecht feels suffocated. "Night, night, night, always night and death," he protests, "and outside the sun is shining.... Tell me, don't you find this spooky?" Through Albrecht, the film expresses its inherent critique of an "overeducated" bourgeoisie and its perceived lack of physical fitness and joie de vivre and presents as its counterpoint the daring vitality of bodily expression-a move that resonates with National Socialist attitudes toward class. Insisting that he needs "wind and waves, the burning sun," he storms outside, tolerated by his benevolent fiancee who will, throughout the plot, selflessly encourage whatever makes him happy (akin to Erich in Immensee). As Albrecht sails out onto the water, his next love, Aels, appears out of the waves like a mermaid holding on to the back of his boat. She is swimming naked (SOderbaum is also seen this way in Immensee during the bathing scene), yet is disguised by the water, a virtual spirit of nature. The intrigued Albrecht soon learns that she is Octavia's neighbor, a wealthy Swedish woman who restlessly travels the world. "She is like a migrant bird," explains Octavia, "and generally adopts a very unorthodox way of life." Dora Traudisch consequently juxtaposes the two heroines as personifying two opposite nineteenth century types, the trope of the femme fragile and image of the mermaid: the first is marked by an anemic beauty free of erotic signifiers, the latter by her engulfing, mysterious and dangerous sexuality.123 Yet despite the film's clear invocation of these literary figures, an unequivocal identification of its female characters with these tropes is made impossible by the continuing narrative. Aels is not at all healthy, but terminally ill, and Octavia's self-sacrificing forbearance will not result in the femme fragile's consumptive demise but give her the strength to win back her husband. As Albrecht runs away from the morose contemplation of night and death in Octavia's drawing room, he embraces a woman who thinks and speaks of nothing else. In his move toward the other lover, then, he turns away from abstraction and toward experience. In Harlan's melodramatic universe the only experiences waiting for its occupants are those of loss and dying. Along the same lines, Friedemann Beyer points out:

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Indeed, in most of her roles S6derbaum played women with the primary German virtues: she is loyal (rather than lascivious), naive (rather than cunning), and willing to make endless sacrifices (rather than selfish) .... [Butlleaving those cliches aside, new perspectives open up. Even though she likes to ride horses and swim in her films, she hardly embodies the type of a healthy, vigorous superwoman. The more vital she appears, the more vulnerable becomes her over-sensitive soul, incapable of coping with the harshness of life with its rules made by men. Despite her external robustness, Kristina S6derbaum is the "femme fragile" of Third Reich cinema. 124

Although Aels initially presents herself as a seductive Lorelei-like figure, the impending narrative doom is directed at her, not Albrecht. It is Aels who is the femme fragile, pretending to be the mermaid. While an unsuspecting Albrecht begins his daily horse rides with his fascinating neighbor and falls in love with her, the spectator is privy to her private conversations with her doctor and hears her explain her attitude of uncalculated risk. Surrounded by a "pack of spotted Great Danes that are meant to express Aels's spiritedness:'125 she explains that she put her favorite dog to sleep when it became too sick to enjoy life-an analogy which has often been read as the film's implicit approval of euthanasia-insisting that she wants to "live," not "vegetate."126 "The erotics of death that bothered Goebbels about the film is undisguised," propounds Grafe, "Its healthy look is only appearance, a sickly red glow caused by fever and excitation. Aels is burning." The Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter similarly observed: "The passionate urge to want to die young, to ride on the waves like the elegant bride of the wind, to race along on horseback, that which is unrestrained, feverish, and addicted to life is expressed very effectively through Kristina Soderbaum."127 Her defiant stance, however, and her daring sensuality are what attract Albrecht. Their joint excursions, which are alluded to in this quotation, become increasingly erotic. Aels, dressed in red, literally aims her (love) bow and hits a bull's-eye. In another sequence, she is seen riding bareback in a white bathing suit (Fig. 2.12), leading her horse into the ocean, riding the waves in a sexually unambiguous manner. She further angTily rejects the intervention of Matthias, Octavia's cousin, arguing for her right to pursue her own unconventional happiness. Under pressure, it is Albrecht who moves away to avoid the collapse of the marriage he has now entered. His relationship with his wife, how-

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Figure 2.12. Nature child: Aels's hysterical joie de vivre is not the result of her healthy vitality but indicates fatal disease.

ever, is represented as dysfunctional. At an extravagant carnival party, a scene were Harlan explored his sense for mass spectacle in glorious color, Octavia is seen as incapable of enjoying herself. Dressed as a Roman goddess at the masked ball, her attempts to please her husband are merely pretenses of self-enjoyment. While he flirts with two ladies in tuxedos and top hats-a faint allusion to 1920s lesbianism-one of whom looks like Aels, Octavia is miserable. Riding down the tongueslide of a gigantic Harlequin's head (Fig. 2.13), she looks almost violated. And when she is elected the queen of carnival and lifted up by the crowd, she escapes in tears rather than delighting in her coronation. Amidst Harlan's spectacular mise-en-scene-meant to suggest a colorful, vibrant world-Octavia longs for the quiet contemplative atmosphere of her river house. Moved by his wife's unhappiness and homesickness, Albrecht decides to return to Hamburg. But the "migrant bird" has not moved on: weakened by lovesickness, Aels is now bound to her bed and only Albrecht's return lets her regain her strength and continue the

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Figure 2.13. Harlan's spectacular carnival scene in The Sacrifice.

affair. "We are in love, my friend," she tells him, "and it will get bad." Beyond her mysterious disease, love too acts like an illness. An additional element of the Aels characterization is her unwed motherhood, which is left unexplained and unexcused by the heroine. As Octavia's acceptance of Albrecht's extramarital pursuits gives way to jealousy, Aels's confusing identity is further investigated. In a striking scene, Octavia and Matthias follow Aels down the street, watching her without being seen, as Octavia is intent on discovering Aels's "secret": Octavia: Look, how all the men turn around after her. Nobody looks at me on the street, even though everyone tells me that I'm beautiful. You've often told me, Albrecht told me. Why is this? She's just like a magnet! Matthias: You can say that, yes! Octavia, be glad that no one looks at you on the street. You are a pure human being. Octavia: No, that isn't it! That she is too. She is superior to me. There's no need to pretend otherwise.

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As Traudisch points out, the pair soon detects that Aels has a daughter and thus locate her "superiority" in her "true womanhood."128 But the narrative simultaneously complicates the character's motherhood. Aels's nebulous "tropical" fever forces her to live separately from her child to avoid the pain of separation she herself suffered when her own mother died young. The hereditary aspects of this curse/ disease further complicate her easy identification with the life-affirming stereotype of National Socialist motherhood. Just as for Anna in The Golden City, the legacy of femininity with its potential for sexual fulfillment comes with an early expiration date; for Harlan, it seems, where there is female pleasure, death cannot be too far away. Aels is a "good" woman, in the National Socialist sense, and simultaneously its opposite. Likewise, the film's resolution is caught in a number of contradictions. As Aels's illness worsens, a typhoid fever takes hold in Hamburg, threatening Aels's young daughter. Albrecht is sent to rescue the child, but catches the fever himself. Weakened, he apologizes to Octavia for all the suffering he has caused. Moreover, when Octavia learns that Aels is also dying at home, waiting in vain for Albrecht's daily ride by her house to greet her through the window, Octavia makes her final sacrifice. Fulfilling the deadly love circle, she dresses up as her husband once a day to deliver his silent message of love to her dying rival. Albrecht's discovery of Octavia's altruism, however, finally enables him to separate from his desire. In an almost psychedelic superimposition, Aels and Albrecht are both seen in bed, communicating with each other as if in a fever fantasy: he explains that he must return to Octavia, Aels understands and dies. Ironically, then, it is because of Octavia's superiority and selfless nobility-which, as we have seen, the film associates with aristocratic breeding and high art-that she triumphs in the end, thus resurrecting what the film initially sought to criticize. Its suggested dichotomy between art/ death and life/nature is proved false in the end, stripping the film of its ideological consistency to make room for the expression of inescapable doom. ''Veit Harlan's The Sacrifice," Rentschler concludes, "culminates in a hypnotic demonstration of sickness unto death as another transgressive heroine takes her place in the procession of female martyrs."129 In the final scene, the married couple ride along the beach on horseback (Octavia has clearly absorbed some of Aels's characteristics) commemorating the

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dead women by throwing roses into the sea, a last gesture, one might be tempted to gibe, for "The Reich's Water Corpse." Cinzia Romani further contends that the film's ending does not necessarily negate SOderbaum's role: "Once again SOderbaum dies; but despite the unhappy ending, the character she plays is not wholly a negative one. Romanticism and pantheism and the wish to become 'one with the universe' are mingled in a character of a woman who speaks in terms of dreams and other worldS."130 At the same time, the film's reliance on romanticism and pantheism are precisely what locks it firmly into a National Socialist framework. As Petley observes, the film is critical of the aristocracy through Albrecht but uncritical of pantheism, fatalism, and romanticized death, all of which are staple components of National Socialist ideology.l3l He further argues that the film's "glorification of physicality," even SOderbaum's nudity, firmly connect with the Nazis' simultaneous celebration of the "body beautiful" and its deeroticization.132 Consequently, the question of whether or not Kristina S6derbaum's role in The Sacrifice can be read as transgressive is subject to some debate. Petley argues that Aels could "hardly be described as an earthy sensualist, particularly as played by Kristina S6derbaum," suggesting that the actress's star image and performance style worked against the controversial elements contained in the character.1 33 Alternatively, one can also read the character of Aels as condensing the very components that had marked S6derbaum's star construction-naturalness, a large capacity to suffer, physicality, sexuality-in such a way that it was impossible to contain them. It is wrong to argue that the Nazis had stripped their stars, and S6derbaum in particular, of sexuality, even though the National Socialist discourse itself disapproved of the frivolously "erotic."l34 To a large extent, what S6derbaum melodramas are about is sexual desire, as well as its containment. Along these lines, Redottt~e asserts that "a clear-cut definition of a character-type, whom Kristina S6derbaum embodied, is hardly possible. Her description as an innocently naive blonde cannot be maintained. Aels in The Sacrifice is neither innocent nor naive."13s Moreover, as in earlier Harlan melodramas, the film's embrace of pantheistic fatalism is disconnected from larger nationalist concerns. And as is common in female-centered National Socialist narratives, Aels's readiness to live life to the fullest and then die does not serve a purpose-it is uselessly tragic. In fact, each woman's "great sacrifice" is

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intensely private; they have nothing to offer to "the people," nor does the male protagonist, Albrecht, whose preoccupation with leisure and romance overshadows his token introduction as a messenger of German colonialism. In addition, the film's excessive style and pathos-its marked readability as "kitschy" or "corny"-add an element of reflexivity to the film's already confusing ideological messages. l36 Ultimately, what makes The Sacrifice so complicated is that it related to many cultural tropes-some generally linked to German culture, others specifically connected to National Socialist denominations-albeit in a way that did not fully cohere with anyone of them. While the film wholeheartedly embraces the notion of sacrificial death, it also maintains an ambiguous attitude toward its "weak" characters, none of whom can be seen as fulfilling a representative model function and whose obsessive preoccupation with their own identities never leads to their approximation of a National Socialist "ideal." As Michael Althen wrote in 1995, "The Great Sacrifice whips itself into a feverish frenzy, which lets the film oscillate between ecstasy and exhaustion, between the lust for life and the longing for death .... There is something in Harlan's films, which may be considered German apart from nationalist delusions. A self-tormenting melancholy lives in these characters, a sadness about being unable to leave their skins, to be caught in so-called German virtues, and also a tendency towards self-destruction."137 Immediately after the film's premiere, Harlan and Soderbaum relocated to Hamburg to escape the dangers waiting in a falling capital. Released only five months before Germany's total capitulation, The Sacrifice reached fewer spectators than earlier Harlan/Soderbaum triumphs. It does, however, strikingly reflect a national absorption in the very discourses of death and survival that Althen has suggested. We must conclude, then, that although Veit Harlan's melodramas with Kristina Soderbaum vividly articulated the Nazis' obsession with nature, sacrifice, and death, they also pointed at the problems contained within this ideological system. An article in the Siiddeutsche Zeitung published on Soderbaum's eightieth birthday explained: [In The Sacrifice] appearances are as deceptive as in the pair's other films. Soderbaum, who looks like the embodiment of naturalness and health, is anything but nature impersonated. Like Dietrich and Garbo, she is an absolutely artificial creation, the perfection of suffering. Synthetic nature,

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the nature of synthesis: with Harlan, melodrama seems to have lost some of its innocence by putting itself in the service of propaganda. But melodrama wasn't the Nazis' genre. As much as it might have functioned to support the state ... through films which moved Goebbels to tears, the closer it moved to the edge of the abyss; and never closer than in Harlan's fi1 ms. 138

In addition, Harlan's films painfully illustrated the problematic status these ideas assumed once they were focused on female protagonists. That is to say, SOderbaum's film characters addressed the very tensions that are inherent in the female-centered melodrama-namely, the contradiction between the foregrounding of the female figure and the subordinate position of women vis-a.-vis men in National Socialist ideology and, by extension, in all patriarchal cultures, which result in her representation as conflicted and torn between different discourses. Soderbaum's lead characters oscillate between their desire to fulfill themselves individually and the social pressures imbedded in their environment, and thus describe both women's desire to break out and their failure to do so. What was enjoyable about watching SOderbaum, especially for female audiences caught in an identical dilemma, were her characters' tireless efforts to fight for their happiness, even if this meant that they might have to die in the process. Whereas Harlan's propaganda pictures managed to contain the "female problems" that emerged in the narrative by reducing the significance of the female figure to that of a minor character whose feelings and motives were absorbed into National Socialist stereotypes without deeper investigation, the melodramas fully explored the tragic difficulties of female identity under the Nazis' ideological system. In its recurring odes to death, Nazi cinema revealed German fascism's self-destructive tendencies. Veit Harlan's melodramas show that the trajectory of dying extended far beyond the "glorious" death on the battlefield or the atrocious extermination of "undesirables" in Nazi concentration camps. In the ideological economy of National Socialist philosophy and its cultural fictions, death also called for ordinary German women, all of whom possessed fatal qualities, anchored in their problematic physicality, which could ultimately never be resolved in a positive fashion. Even in her status as an idealized figure, Soderbaum always remained a victim. Ironically, postwar accounts turned this description on its head.

Kristina SOderbaurn 97

While Soderbaum eventually gave up acting to take up star photography, the news media as well as SOderbaum herself now embraced the star's prior filmic description as the perpetual victim of male society and applied it to Soderbaum's career as a Nazi star. 139 If in Nazi cinema she had often been the victim of "degenerate" males (Jews, Czechs, religious zealots), now she became the victim of the misogynist figures of Goebbels and Harlan. l40 The melodramatic description of Soderbaum, the star, thus remained forever mired in the very discourse that had also informed her screen popularity: women's supposed incapacity to take charge of their destiny.

3

Lilian Harvey: International Stardom, German Comedy, and the "Dream Couple"

"Look here, there is our little dancing flea!" Minister President Hermann Goring, receiving Lilian Harvey upon her return to Germany in 19351

The press is asked not to take notice of actress Lilian Harvey's expatriation. National Socialist press orders, October 9,1942 2

LILIAN HARVEY always appeared as a sprite, a dancing figurine in a glass menagerie, a fairy ballerina engulfed in tulle and taffeta, a pixie as cute as a button, who between the years of 1924 and 1940 performed her idiosyncratic mix of romantic heroine and tomboyish comedienne in fifty-five romantic dramas, musicals, and comedies (Fig. 3.1).3 In the 1930s Lilian Harvey was in fact the most popular star of German musical comedy and, while melodrama was the dominant women's genre of the 1930s and 194Os, both in the TItird Reich and in the United States, among the whole of the feature films produced under Hitler, comedies led. Indeed, an overwhelming 48 percent of all movies available for German audiences between the years of 1933 and 1945 were Lustspiele, plays of a humorous nature. 4 Most of them were German-produced, but among the most successful were also a significant number that wore the label "made in Hollywood," an occurrence that seems less surprising when we consider that American films remained in distribution in Germany until 1939 and in certain places even until 194J.5 Karsten Witte has pointed out that following the Nazi takeover in 1933, rather than going through a short episode of radical transformation, the German film industry experienced a long period of transition. 6 Moreover, what was initially envisioned as Ufa's transitional phase by Promi in many ways became the normal film practice. Nazi cinema, especially the films made in the years immediately succeeding the Nazis' seizure of power, often 98

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Figure 3.1. Publicity photos of Harvey frequently looked like Hollywood glamour shots.

showed more affinities with Hollywood and Weimar traditions than they did to the "new way of thinking," the National Socialist neue Geist? This was especially apparent in Ufa's construction of new screen idols, and in particular Marlene Dietrich's "replacement" Zarah Leander, as well as in its treatment of already established stars such Lilian Harvey. Unlike the "innocent" Soderbaum or the "instant-diva" Leander, Harvey was not an ingenue, but a seasoned star figure deeply rooted in Weimar and Hollywood. With respect to National Socialism and its conception of "new womanhood" Harvey's general association with extrafascist prototypes created a number of complications.

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To make matters worse, on January 30, 1933---the day Hitler came to power-Lilian Harvey was already on her way to America, a fact that would later result in her being accused of "escaping the Reich"(Reichsflucht).B She was soon followed by screenwriters Walter Reisch and Robert Liebmann, composer Franz Wachsmann, director Friedrich Hollaender, producer Erich Pommer, and actors Mady Christians, Conrad Veidt, and Heinrich Gretler. All of them had worked on Harvey's latest picture Ich und die Kaiserin (The Empress and I, Ufa, 1933), which finished shooting in January 1933.9 Lilian Harvey had decided to leave long before the political upheaval that motivated many of her colleagues and especially the Jewish ones to emigrate. Like other European superstars of the time, she had been wooed and won by a seductive offer from Fox, which was eager to appropriate overseas talent, hoping to thereby gain Europe's most charismatic actors for their own productions and simultaneously destroy their foreign competitors by luring away their biggest stars.l0 As one of the most popular female actresses of the Weimar period at the height of her Ufa career, Harvey had every reason to assume she would be successful in the United States. In 1933 a reader poll conducted by the journal Licht-Bild-Bahne confirmed Harvey as Germany's number one female star, ahead of both Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. l1 In fact, Harvey-who was born to a British mother and a German father12 but largely raised in Germany-was already an international star. She had performed in several successful multiple-language versions of her Ufa musicals (French, British, and German versions that, aside from Harvey, costarred different national actors) that had made her popular not only in Germany, but also in England and France.B Readers of the French magazine Pour Vous, for instance, voted her the most popular non-French actress in 1932.14 In addition, 52 percent of all foreign film imports on the American market came from Germany, among them, of course, Ufa's most popular films starring Lilian Harvey. Once in Hollywood, however, Harvey encountered fierce competition and only moderate success. Dissatisfied with her status as a small fish in a very large pond, and because of a personal romance with her protege, director Paul Martin, Harvey returned to Berlin only two years later, having made only a few unremarkable films in Hollywood. Hollywood's other big German hire, Marlene Dietrich-an actress who had

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been less firmly established as a long-term German star when she first came to the United States, but was already very successful in Hollywood by the time Harvey arrived-would later be canonized as the quintessential female star emigre. Conversely Lilian Harvey, in lieu of Hollywood fame, almost instantly resumed her big screen success in Germany when she returned in 1935, starring in some of National Socialist cinema's most successful and, many critics agree, most interesting comedies. However, despite her desperate attempts to find film work in France, Hollywood, and postwar Germany, Harvey's film career ended abruptly only a few years later with a second emigration in 1939. Lilian Harvey first appeared on the German screen in the Austrianproduced Der Fluch (The Curse, 1924) and subsequently appeared in more than thirty silent and sound pictures before shooting her first American movie in 1933. As a Weimar actress, she did not star in films we nOW associate with German expressionism. Instead she often portrayed frisky coquettes in comic dramas of mistaken identity, playing, as Karsten Witte puts it, "the heiresses of the Germanized versions of the Hollywood comedy."15 Her attraction was that of a "girl," an image reminiscent of Mary Pickford or Lilian Gish (Fig. 3.2). "Ufa exploited Lilian Harvey's cuteness," argues Witte, "her spruceness combined with a twist of overwrought sauciness," which resulted in the "fusion of child-woman Shirley Temple and the German Gretchen."16 A popular song from the 1930 film Liebeswalzer (Love Waltz, Ufa, 1930) dubbed Harvey the "sweetest girl in the world" and thus solidified a characterization that she would not be able to escape thereafter. Although Harvey's early roles showed her as a generic girlish flapper, her appearances in the late 1920s paired her with silent-screen heartthrob Willy Fritsch and quickly constructed Harvey into the female half of Ufa's number one, and arguably only, "dream couple."17 Harvey's success as Fritsch's perpetual love interest in a number of romantic comedies, and the enormous fascination the press and public developed in their private relationship, subsequently locked both actors into a partnership that dominated the rest of their careers. By 1933, the Harvey-Fritsch pair was an established fixture in the Ufa firmament, and the officials of the Ministry of Propaganda quickly declared its reconstruction upon Harvey's return in 1935 as a cultural triumph, rather than an unfortunate atavism. 'The emancipation of the day," Ernst Bloch wrote in 1937, "was the return of the prodigal daughter."18 Har-

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Figure 3.2. Little Lilian: Harvey's body seemed. almost preadolescent and avoided. the associations with adult sexuality and desire that other female star images accentuated..

vey was presented as reformed, tired of Hollywood superficiality, and happy to turn to more "serious" screenplays.19 Despite the familiar Heim ins Reich narrative, however, Lilian Harvey remained in many ways more of a Weimar or Hollywood star than she became a National Socialist heroine. Newspaper headlines from the 1920s and early 1930s, proclaiming that Harvey bathed in champagne and had her nails cov-

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ered in mother of pearl and reports that Willy Fritsch lived a homosexuallifestyle, linked the couple to "prefascist excess" and were not easily forgotten, especially since Harvey continued to frequently present herself as enjoying her well-deserved luxuries. 2o In addition, the standardized narrative that came to mark Harvey films of the Nazi era often initially represented Harvey as an unruly or androgynous figure. Even in her National Socialist films, Harvey's erotics still derived from a certain pubescent appeal; often, she is mistaken for a teenage boy or displays qualities that were not considered feminine. Although these attributes tended to become the starting point for a narrative "taming of the shrew," as Eric Rentschler suggests, Harvey's almost asexual screen persona also moved away from the National Socialist ideal of womanhood. 21 A comparison between Harvey and National Socialist stars like Leander or Soderbaum, whose careers began long after the Nazis had established themselves as cultural "reformers," elucidates such differences. If Kristina SOderbaum's melodramas approximated narrative models that pointed toward the ''blood and soil" rhetoric of National Socialist ideology, the problems we encounter in her star persona derived from inconsistencies that were inherent in National Socialist philosophy and political practice vis-a.-vis the role of women-its strange mix of patriarchal conservatism, women's emancipation, and political participation. Soderbaum might have been naive and virginal, but her body spoke of "womanliness" and her physicality was linked to sex. This tension frequently elicited the narrative problematic of her melodramas, furnishing a trajectory from innocent sexuality to corrupted maidenhood or disappointed desire. Zarah Leander, on the other hand, was "all woman" to begin with. Her sexual experience, acknowledged desire, and often her motherhood constituted the starting point for a narrative development that worked in a direction opposite to Soderbaum's films. Leander's films began with a worldly "diva" who was then purified, cleaned up, and brought back to a more conventionally moral status quo. In contrast, Lilian Harvey was not really a "woman" at all, but an audacious, sprightly girl at play in a musical land of song and dance. Further, her musical comedies did not necessarily require her characters to fundamentally change. There never was anything threatening about Harvey's femininity to begin with. Morals were never seriously at stake.

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Harvey's sexuality was innocently romantic; her actions carried the weight of a childish prank. Amusing and light, Harvey's films assumed that their narrative events and conflicts would turn out to be much ado about nothing and inevitably result in the marriage between Harvey's and Fritsch's screen characters. For Karsten Witte, Lilian Harvey's onscreen appearances even recall a mechanical doll, rather than a lively child: Ufa's direction, who wished to launch her, as neither a vamp nor a lady, but as "the sweetest girl in the world," left her with only one facial expression: mechanized jolliness. Harvey always wanted to glide across the parquet floor like a fairy, but her patter more closely resembled a woundup puppet. This siren never sang, she whined out of a built-in voice box. . . . Lilian Harvey, always the dream in blonde and the lucky kid, was the perfect synthetic actress, whose human traits consequently picked up the mechanics of animation. 22

The criticism that Lilian Harvey seemed lifeless and artificial, however, does not make it any easier to connect her exclusively to National Socialist aesthetics. Busby Berkeley's Hollywood musicals, for instance, or Weimar's popular Tiller girls of the 1920s, also engaged heavily in generating mechanized spectacles of femininityP In addition, we must remember that National Socialist ideologues proclaimed that the new German film heroines had left behind all artifice and instead appeared "natural, fresh, pleasant, relaxed and real."24 Both the lack of seriousness and the excessive artifice we encounter in Harvey (in her films, star interviews, and public appearances) indicate that Harvey's persona is not easily absorbed into the National Socialists' rhetorical and aesthetic framework, which on the contrary can be frequently identified by its ponderous stylistics and ideological earnestness. Rather, Harvey's artificiality and antirealism sidestepped politics, functioning neither as an affirmation nor a condemnation but simply existing alongside it, innocently sparkling and ostensibly unbiased. The ideological problems embedded in Lilian Harvey's image point to Weimar holdovers---consumerism, internationalism, modernity, and mass culture--that became visible against the backdrop of Nazism's ideological system. Anton Kaes sees Lilian Harvey as essentially "modern," "neither vamp nor mother, but an audacious coquette with androgynous traits," and thus firmly connects her to her Weimar roots.25 This leads us to wonder just how scrupulously Hitler's regime imp le-

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mented the changes they envisioned. That is to say, while National Socialist culture was repressive in some areas, it was lenient in others, tolerating many trends and fashions that didn't fit the party program in a strict ideological sense. "Nazi aesthetics were anti-Modernist, racistpopulist and neo-classicist," explains Thomas Elsaesser, but "Nazi art practice, by contrast, took the form of an extremely eclectic historicism, ... a coexistence [of stylistic elements] that could be said to prefigure post-modernism's 'anything goes.' "26 In other words, Harvey's troubled gender identities, her insecure position somewhere between glamour star and girl-next-door, and her frequent narrative confusion about heterosexual fulfillment and personal independence all point to the ideological conflicts surrounding the position of women that were triggered by the introduction of women's political and social emancipation decades earlier. Furthermore, these discourses marked the social sphere of modernity in all Western nations at the time and, as a result of the Nazis' repressive politics regarding women, were in fact less prominent in many other areas of National Socialist culture. "[Harvey's] films showed," Klaus Kreirneier contends, "that the 'American' star cult, insofar as it still rudimentarily existed within the National Socialist Ufa, was hard to instrumentalize for the regime's hero- and Fuhrer worship; it didn't stand in opposition to it, but it didn't have anything in common with it either."27 Yet perhaps, as many critics have countered, the existence of a star like Harvey weakened the public's impression that the Nazis fully intended to insert their convictions into every area of cultural and public life. Goebbels frequently underlined the importance of a "politics-free" cultural sphere, suggesting that overindoctrination might exhaust the public'S tolerance for the Nazis' political invasion into everyday life. In fact, as Hans Dieter Schafer has illustrated so strikingly, the prewar years in National Socialist Germany-to those who were not specifically targeted by the Nazi repression (i.e., Jews, Gypsies, communists, and gays)-had an impressive cosmopolitan flair. Schafer's muchquoted stroll through an imaginary Berlin in 1937 convincingly illustrates this contention: "From 25 to 30 September 1937, the Kurbel on the Kurrurstendamm ran, a Marlene Dietrich retrospective. As Mussolini drove down the Via Triumphalis [with Hitler], one could enter the film world of Shanghai Express, and afterward in the Femina-Bar applaud Teddy Staufer, who ... in his own way denied Hitler's militarism and

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chauvinism as he played 'Swingin' for the King' and 'Goody, Goody.' "28 This perceived tolerance of the cultural system, Schafer's "split consciousness," then, might be regarded as an ideological stratagem that deliberately allowed for, in Rentschler's words, a "double identity" that provided "a respite from the hard work increasingly demanded of Germans, the constant sacrifice, the atmosphere of threat."29 Taking these considerations into account, we still can look at Lilian Harvey from other angles. Even if the Nazis rationalized all of National Socialist culture as a box of tricks which in some way or another allowed Hitler's totalitarianism to become a functional system--or, more particularly, if stars under National Socialism could not help but become tools whom the Nazis tried to use to further the National Socialist causetheir sociohistorical function can neither be fixed nor limited to these determinants. In fact, Anton Kaes suggests that the utopian illusionism we encounter in Lilian Harvey's National Socialist films is present in her Weimar pictures as well: "As much as [Harvey's] films were products of the German culture industry and, according to Horkheimer / Adorno's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment,' should be considered 'mass deceptions,' most of them still kept alive a spark of the utopian promise of happiness. 'Somewhere in this world, there is a little bit of happiness,' Lilian Harvey sang in Ein blonder Traum (1932), and thus spoke for thousands, who-with all their false consciousness-warmed themselves at the thought."30 Thus, the debates surrounding the ideological function of mass culture, and not only in Harvey's case, do not produce analytical results that are necessarily germane to Nazi film culture. Rather, Frankfurt school models of cultural analysis disclose the commonalties between fascist and other Western-capitalist operations. "If we consider Nazi cinema as part of popular culture's propaganda for consumerism," says Thomas Elsaesser, " ... then their popularity makes more sense, because we still share the same aspirations toward the good life embodied in lifestyles and consumption."31 To say that National Socialist film allowed for cultural gaps that were deliberately kept free of overt propagandistic content does not explain why a star like Harvey bridges these gaps. Winfried Gunther's fictive critical dialogue cynically comments on the limits of oversimplified readings of stars like Harvey:

Lilian Harvey 107 A: Now we haven't said anything about Lilian Harvey as a

"prototypical image of woman," which "within the cultural politics of the Third Reich didn't only have an unbiased entertainment function." B: ... yes, exactly, how Harvey ideologically supported fascist rule by appearing on screen-or was it the other way round: was she supposed to distract from it through her entertainment function? Or did she support fascist rule precisely by distracting from it? In any case, the master teachers of Vergangheitsbewiiltigung [coming to terms with the past] will accuse us of being totally uncriticaP2

Although Gunther's ironic listing of the prototypical exegetic results that frequently appear in the critical analysis of female star figures serves here as a polemic, the ease with which he summarizes the central arguments of contemporary National Socialist criticism also warns against an overreliance on generalizations and its lack of specificity. As the embodiment of a "cross-over star" -a figure who circulated with astounding ease between systems of political opposition-Lilian Harvey's example attests to the interdiscursive relationships that informed popular culture during National Socialism, as well as its aforementioned reliance on Hollywood models, Weimar traditions, and the historical context of modernity.

THE "SWEETEST GIRL IN THE WORLD" AS AN INTERNATIONAL STAR

From its very beginning Lilian Harvey's star image straddled the notion of everyday normalcy and the overdetermined imagery of superstardom, of cheerful down-to-earth attitudes and lifestyles awash in excessive luxuries and overconsumption. The first model originated in tandem with Harvey's introduction into stardom in the 1920s: the film media's construction of a girl full of enthusiasm and dreamy aspirations. The latter image, that of a fur-clad power player in control of her productions, went along with Harvey's star appearance once she had achieved the status of full celebrity in the 1930s. In this Harvey did not differ significantly from ather stars, especially Hollywood actors; both Harvey representations coalesce into what we generally encounter in stars, that is, a configuration that John Ellis describes as an image "com-

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posed of elements which do not cohere, of contradictory tendencies."33 Harvey's fusion of the ordinary with the extraordinary simply conformed to the general practices of Hollywood star manufacture, which in many ways found its German equivalent in the Ufa studios. The excessive images of "star-ness" that surrounded Harvey, however, were what made her an anachronism in National Socialist Germany, where overindulgence and excess were primarily reserved for inherently fascist fantasies of military strength and nationalist pathos. As we saw earlier, National Socialism had a complicated relationship with the concept of stardom, resulting in the ideological creed that "the star must die, so that film can live!"34 Yet the notion that star status was generally undesirable in popular performers-Harvey or any other-was in itself never fully pursued, by either Ufa or Goebbels's Promi; too precious were the returns guaranteed by star successes within Ufa's studio system. Moreover, the ideological impact that could be achieved through the alliance between a popular performer and a political film narrative was invaluable for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, Harvey's particular association with wealth and light entertainment went beyond her obvious status as a movie star; it also separated her from the ideal of the new Ufa player. In an article, entitled "Brave Little Women," the journal Filmwelt summarized what distinguished the female stars of the previous era from the contemporary National Socialist heroines: The type of woman we encounter everywhere these days is fundamentally different from her most recent predecessors .... The "film heroine" of today is one of us, one of the anny of the everyday, with our problems and worries, who shares our joys and cheerfulness. She is not a "diva", and when we just called her a "heroine", we did it in the hope that we wouldn't be misunderstood. Because these brave little women do not want to be seen as "heroines", they don't think that giving their whole being is in any way unusual or deserving of special mention. 35

This renegotiated interpretation of Weimar's Filmstern described a star concept with which other actresses-led by Kristina Soderbaumeasily harmonized, while Harvey's association with consumption and movie star lifestyles worked against it. The fact that Harvey belonged to a supposedly outmoded paradigm of stardom, from the spoiled yet innocent child ingenue to the glamorous film diva, consequently prevented her from being fully appropriated by what National Socialist

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philosophy saw as its own brand of "political correctness. Instead her image upheld star models belonging to both the antecedent Weimar star culture and the contemporaneous practices of the Hollywood studio system. In I92S-when Harvey had not yet been signed by Ufa and was under contract with her "discoverer," producer Richard Eichberg-"little Lilian" emerged in the press as an adorable child, a Gennan Mary Pickford. The magazine Der Film, for instance, wrote the same year: liThe image of Lilian going to bed with her teddy bear is perhaps the best in the whole film [Liebe und Trompetenblasen, 1925]."36 Harvey perpetuated her infantilized image in public interviews. Asked about the best and the worst role she ever played, Harvey answered in 1926: liThe best part was the one that I have not yet played. (For instance kissing a lover or getting a raise from the director.) The worst part was Die Kleine vom Bummel [Little Girl Shopping, 1925], because I never got to the studio having had a good night's sleep."37 The kind of artistic naivete and sexual ignorance expressed in this statement also emerged in publicity photographs. One, for example, featured Harvey in her apartment wearing silk pajamas, whistling to her canary, and carrying a stuffed animal. Harvey also began to publish her own writings, short magazine segments recounting her views and experiences, a habit she followed throughout her career, thus actively participating in the "writing" of her star persona. 38 One of her first articles, for instance, emphasized Harvey's virginity: "[In school] I didn't yet know the value of innocence, since it consists of losing it. I had no word for it, since it didn't get 10st."39 And again in 1930: "00 you think I've ever had the chance to live an adventure? ... [M]y contract doesn't allow it: a moral life is the main condition .... I'd really like to be just any little girl and experience a great adventure."4o The absence of Harvey's real-life relationships (with Willy Fritsch and Paul Martin) in these texts produced a dreamily romantic sexuality for Harvey that precluded a direct link with sex. Peculiarly, this model of romantic engagement and sexual abstinence continued to be played out in the construction of the Harvey-Fritsch dream couple. As soon as Harvey and Fritsch began acting together onscreen, their private relationship was subject to intense media attention and speculation.41 Harvey and Fritsch regularly appeared as a couple, star postcards showed them vacationing together in exotic locations, and they gave joint interviews. Yet they denied a romantic relationship, perII

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haps in deliberately unconvincing terms.42 Aside from Ufa-controlled press releases, the emerging yellow press of the Weimar years perpetuated the intrigue surrounding the couple's romantic status. A front-page headline of a 1932 daily, for instance, announced liThe Truth About lilian Harvey," "revealing" in the article that Harvey was not British but German and that Fritsch and Harvey were "secretly married," that Fritsch was not "the other way around" (homosexual), and that the couple simply kept separate flats to maintain the illusion of availability for their enamored fan audience. 43 Of course, Ufa denied such claims. Discourses on the stars' private and professional identities were thus closely monitored to maintain a cohesive redundancy between the star and his or her film persona: Harvey and Fritsch could neither be perceived as living together as sexual partners, which would undermine their onscreen appeal as a couple whose romance was always just about to blossom, nor could they be convincingly confirmed as "just friends," resulting in the disappointment of the spectator's fantasies. Lilian Harvey therefore remained an innocent, while fully engaging in the romantic couple. This dual mechanism of star publicity-in support of both the cinematic illusion and the maintenance of a consistent star image-finds its equivalent in the American star system. Harvey's image was also strongly linked with popular fashion, an upper-class lifestyle, and conspicuous consumption. Magazine features showed her giving instruction in Charleston dance steps; she lectured on the virtues of horseback riding and provided insights into the complexities of film fashions. 44 Star postcards and magazine photos of a "private" Harvey further support Harvey's complete immersion in and promotion of Weimar's culture of modernity. She was depicted in her splendid art deco apartment, posed with Fritsch in front of a luxurious ski resort, and went from brunette to platinum blonde. As Lilian Harvey grew up onscreen, joining Fritsch as Germany's quintessential star couple, she was simultaneously transformed into the epitome of the extravagant star actress. While publicity about Harvey continued to point to her natural "girl-next-door" appeal, she nonetheless appeared in splendid movie-star attire: she arrived at her film premieres in ostentatious gowns or mink coats and departed for her villa in the south of France in a much-photographed custom-made white Mercedes convertible with the license plate lA-lIllI, suggesting that her quality rating was of the highest order. Harvey's embrace of upper class

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signifiers thus invited the fantasy of social upward mobility in the female viewer. In other words, Harvey's star image was an open invitation to unbridled consumerism, and a frustrating blueprint for the countless deprived young women of the Depression era. In Weimar Germany, just as in the United States, a relationship existed between star images and their commercial exploitation through consumerism beyond box offices sales. 45 Hollywood and Ufa models heavily stimulated the garment industry, while (privileged upper-class) consumers were inspired to purchase the latest movie styles. In America, Harvey's depiction as a creature of luxury introduced the star in a similar vein. The Mercedes that Harvey had purchased after signing a contract with Fox accompanied Harvey to Hollywood in 1933. It was a unique luxury car rivaled only by Gary Cooper's Duesenberg. 46 The publication Screen Play described Harvey's Hollywood arrival as follows: Lilian Harvey, the prize package of Europe, arrived neatly wrapped in cellophane, and stamped with the official seal of Hollywood. A stranger in a strange land, Miss Harvey was more like Hollywood than any of the natives! ... It seems as if Lilian Harvey, the most famous screen star in all Europe, really belonged in Hollywood. Everything about her was typical of Hollywood. Not only that, she went the local stars one better on every point of glamour. A twenty-five-carat diamond ring weighed down her engagement finger. Diamond bracelets encrusted her arms. Her bare toes, peeking through sandals, revealed manicured toenails lacquered blood red. Her car, a glittering snow-white Mercedes coupe, was longer and more spectacular than any other motor seen in Hollywood! Her gowns were more exotic and extreme than anything worn by native stars .... All the other foreign stars who have been brought here have been a far cry from the types glorified in pictures. Often they have been frumpish in their clothes, shy or quaint in their manner, bewildered or awed by the sights Hollywood had to offer.... The other foreign stars "went Hollywood" after they got here. She was Hollywood when she arrived. 47

Almost daily updates followed in the press. Fashion spreads and star photographs were published in abundance. Harvey's friendship with Gary Cooper led the gossip columnists to romance speculations. Hollywood's star-making efforts worked to perfection. "Here's a new star who's a real star," announced a Fox publicity ad, "she fascinates ... she devastates ... exhilarates ... sings, dances and entrances. It will be love at first sight when your audience sees this diminutive darling in 'My

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Weakness' ... another FOX hit."48 The American press and audiences liked Harvey, even though her films flopped or were even held back from release. 49 Back in Germany, however, the tepid reception of Harvey's Hollywood films inspired gloating comments in the Nazi press, which treated the absentee Ufa star with reservations. My Weakness was banned by the National Socialist censors, and My Lips Betray inspired the journal Filmwoche to taunt, "didn't they say that America could offer her better opportunities than Germany; didn't they say she was overly typecast in Berlin-and that she needed America to achieve new accomplishments, encounter more liberal themes and greater challenges? ... It seems that we'll have to wait."so In fact, Ufa's perception of Harvey's continuing popularity was so unstable that on learning of Harvey's plans to return to Germany in 1934, Ufa sent a memo to all its theaters requesting feedback as to "whether we should take her under contract again," and if so, "what film partners should she be paired with."51 When she finally did arrive, however, she was publicly received with open arms. Her "homecoming" was portrayed as the return of a remorseful daughter, who had learned "[t]hat Hollywood wasn't the perfect film paradise. It had as many disappointments in store for her as it had for all the others who had arrived from Europe with the highest hopes. But then she hadn't gone over to stay forever, but to see new things, to gain experience and learn.... the artistic results of her two years in Hollywood were not productive, but on a human and intellectuallevel they were important."52 Akin to the representation of other film stars in Nazi Germany-especially of Zarah Leander-Harvey was subsequently discussed in a manner that simultaneously sought to justify, or even rectify, her star-ness on the one hand, and uphold and maintain her established star persona on the other. The biography that contains the above quotation also featured numerous glamour shots of Harvey in Hollywood: Harvey in her villa, at the pool, with Gary Cooper, and so on. In fact, the Americanism implied in Lilian Harvey's Hollywood history remained a constant referent in connection with both her films-especially Lucky Kids-and her perception as a star. Gary Cooper's 1938 visit to Babelsberg, where he met both Willy Fritsch and Karl Ritter, further strengthened the public's perception that strong ties still existed between Berlin and Hollywood.53 Moreover, Harvey's U.S. interlude was now justified in the National Socialist press

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as educational, having provided valuable lessons likely to influence and improve the quality of German film work. 54 Harvey also continued to be seen enjoying consumer luxuries and displaying aristocratic pretensions; she purchased a castle in Hungary (Paul Martin's homeland) and bred Austrian Lippizaner horses, a lifestyle that invoked class privilege rather than the labors of a hard day's work. Yet while Harvey continued to appear heavily made up on screen, or even as a cross-dressing tomboy, there were also attempts to shift her physical image. She still dressed in fancy designer gowns on opening night-as did all Ufa stars of the time-but several columns criticized Harvey's figure as too thin, arguing that Harvey had returned with a look that was out of synch with the "healthy" body that was the new National Socialist idea1. 55 Harvey's continuing waiflike appeal, a body image that never fully developed into sexually realized adulthood, did not present a welcome model for female viewers under National Socialism, because it offered an identity that neglected rather than foregrounded the possibility of pregnancy. Consequently, the star discourse Ufa created around Harvey's persona attempted to include elements that would suggest a more contemporary, that is National Socialist-friendly, image for the star. Now Harvey posed in fashion spreads modeling clothing inspired by traditional local costumes (the subheading reads: "Does she appeal, the pretty lass, in her colorful embroidered peasant dress?").56 A 16 mm star documentary available for sale to fans, which presented a day in the life of Lilian Harvey, not only included Harvey undergoing her daily exercise routine and breakfast with her mother, but also showed her weeding in the garden and feeding the chickens.57 Furthermore, her diligence and work ethic, as well as her status as artist, were strongly foregrounded to correct the previous impression of effortlessness and privilege. Her Hollywood reminiscences also began to include critical sentiments or efforts at redemptive retraction. Asked about meeting Greta Garbo, for example, Harvey explained that this Hollywood diva par excellence preferred not to wear makeup and wore practical clothing when in private. 58 In Kristina SOderbaum, we have already encountered the notion of the film artist as "natural" and "worker"; and in Zarah Leander's star persona we will find a concerted effort to fuse these notions with the figure of the tragic diva. We can see here that Harvey's star representation in National Socialist Germany also showed

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traces of this model. Yet they were implemented only with considerable difficulty. Edith Hamann's biographical Harvey booklet from 1938, for instance, struggled to rewrite Harvey's life story as follows: There still are plenty of people, especially among the young ones, who imagine the life of a film actress as being idle happiness and pleasure, particularly of an actress like Lilian Harvey ... who continuously appears as cheerful and radiant as a little Fortuna .... And even those older and more contemplative, who know that being an artist means being a worker, often allow themselves to be deceived by superficial appearances: elegant cars, wonderful clothes, beautiful houses and all the other things that belong to film actors as much as advertising belongs to their films. But even Lilian Harvey will look back on her life some day and ascertain with great amusement that it has all been "a lot of effort and work."59

In this passage the very tensions that prevented the ready integration of film stars into the overall paradigm of the National Socialist social sphere are clearly spelled out. In fact, most National Socialist writings that dealt with the star "Lilian Harvey" attempted first to address and then to correct the public's perception of the actress. The Nazi journal Der Deutsche Film, for instance, wrote in 1937: "Yet we have to remove all sorts of obstacles to be able to catch a brief glance of the real film actress Lilian Harvey. One will have to imagine as absent almost all of the photo, interview and anecdotal materials of the Harvey publicity: Lilian before departing at the airport, Lilian taking off, Lilian arriving at the airport, Lilian at, on, above or under water, Lilian like this or this or that. Behind this publicity Lilian there is Harvey, the artist, to be discovered anew."60 Another example of such counteractive rhetoric appeared in the publication Gefilmter Tanz: "Lilian Harvey does absolutely not belong to those stars, spoiled by life, who suddenly light up in movie heaven and overpower everything with the shining glare of their successes. It has been a slow, earnest and not in any way easy journey she had to put behind her, before her name became to mean something in film art."61 The "revisionist" discourse that Lilian Harvey's new star coverage engendered, however, must be seen as complementary, existing alongside rather than replacing the star's former image. In other words, these authors' insistence on the notion that a life of a star is not experienced by the star in the way audiences imagine it, does not in any way change that fantasy. Given the strength of Harvey's preexisting star image, and

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her continuing deviation from National Socialist models of womanhood on screen, Harvey's star sign never underwent a complete reconstruction. Richard Dyer has explored the notion of star authenticity arguing that even "features on stars which tell us that the star is not like he or she appears to be on screen serve to reinforce the authenticity of the star image as a whole, ... [while] many star images were authenticated by showing that the star really was like he or she was on the screen."62 Dyers's analysis is particularly relevant to Harvey's case since both her star appearance offscreen and her film roles deviated from what the Nazi media attempted to suggest. Harvey's film roles especially continued to depict her as inexperienced, innocent, and playful (even the professional Maria in Frau am Steuer [Woman at the Wheel, 1939] keeps a stuffed animal in her desk) and thus easily reconnected her to even her early Weimar representations as a vivacious child surrounded by toys, which countered the impression of Harvey as a matured artist. Moreover, one of the central elements of Harvey's star persona, the one that allowed Harvey to be read as sexually conservative, yet reassuringly heterosexual-a set of signifiers that affirm the patriarchal elements in Nazi culture--collapsed in 1937 when Willy Fritsch married the revue star Dinah Grace. Harvey's imaginary real-life relationship with her costar, her involvement in the fantasy of the "dream-couple" was thus dismantled by actual events. 'What should one say about confusion of meaning in the audience, who want to project everything that happens in the unreality of the screen into reality, where it absolutely will not happen?" wondered a National Socialist critic, who continued: "Even as we try to clear out the attic of the German film industry (which includes the German audience), and begin to sweep out the tender cobwebs of false meanings, ... we have to stop and smile at such sweet manifestations of film insanity."63 Once again National Socialist criticism pointed to the Nazis' supposed reformation of film function, its systematic housecleaning targeting both the notion of stardom and film spectatorship. Yet in this case, what needed "sweeping out" was foundational to the illusionism that underlay Harvey's stardom. One can easily argue that Harvey's image after the Fritschian nuptials shifted in a direction that was quite the opposite of the National Socialist ideal of either womanhood or stardom. In fact, the descriptive elements of Harvey's star persona that were left over after the "private" Harvey "left" the romantic couple cumulatively revealed Harvey's rad-

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ical privileging of stardom over all concerns that were generally connected with more ordinary women's "model" lives: ambitious careerism (she was perceived as having left Fritsch to pursue a Hollywood career), single womanhood (Harvey was unmarried until a brief marriage in the 1950s; her relationship with Paul Martin was never publicly mentioned outside Hollywood), childlessness, and the aforementioned emphasis on the excessive enjoyment of consumer luxuries. By virtue of reduction, Harvey's image now mainly consisted of elements that did anything but redress her generic description as a star. What remained instead was a ladylike icon that furnished a model for contemporary female spectators that in no way corresponded to Nazi-propagandist Julius Streicher's 1937 appeal to women never to become "ladies" -associated with bourgeois modernity-but "remain German girls and women."64 Nevertheless Harvey's unruly modernity might also fit another kind of Nazi paradigm, one less ideologically consistent, but no less foundational to the workings of Nazi economics: a system of commodification and commercial advertising. In Thomas Elsaesser's words, "as long as Ufa was profitable, and also an important promotional tool for German goods and the German way of life ... , it could behave as a style-guide, a brand-leader with the zeitgeist on its side."65 Harvey's luxury consumption and fashion styles, if seen in this light, do not serve to counter the workings of the Nazi regime; they actually work to uphold the economic underpinnings of its capitalism. Yet the fantasies of consumption that the overdetermined images of female glamour may have inspired in spectators can also be read as stretching beyond considerations of cultural product placement and invisible capitalist machinations. As Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog have emphasized, women's identification with glamour stars may very well also involve a (perhaps false) empowering component, suggesting that "women who read star beauty and fashion advice would know that this rise [to stardom] could be achieved through good grooming, diet, exercise and proper dress."66It follows that Lilian Harvey's consolidation as such a star, while working within the framework of capitalism, simultaneously described a female fantasy that elides the material considerations of the market and gives way to sentiments of identification and desire. Of course, Harvey was not alone in her alternative representation of womanhood. Nazi cinema provided a whole stable of "ladies." Cinzia

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Romani names Olga Tschechowa, Lil Dagover, and Henny Porten as personifying fashionable life, and similar arguments can be made for almost any other Third Reich actress, at least in tenns of their extra textual appearance as female stars.67 As Liliane Crips has shown, women's magazines that targeted the privileged, such as the journal Die Dame (The Lady), continued to foreground Parisian elegance and the worldly lifestyles of the affluent. 68 In the years 1938-1939, for instance, the magazine published features on the international aristocracy, special travel reports on Italy, reviews of the Paris collections, to name only a few, and even printed society portraits that showed the Nazi leadership, such as the Goebbels family, in a decidedly bourgeois context. 69 What this dearly indicates is that a number of discourses predating the Nazi era emerged in the star figure of Lilian Harvey, as well in the general contemporary of National Socialist popular culture, without significant alteration. That is to say that even in their description of commodity fetishism, these discourses might be productive of, but not gennane to, Nazism. It is interesting to note that the Nazi press worked much less hard to unite the contradictions between Harvey's image and the National Socialist ideal of womanhood than it did in the case of Zarah Leander. Instead they simply tolerated or even encouraged the associations with Weimar and Hollywood that Harvey's crossover image triggered, thereby using her to demonstrate that Nazi cinema also possessed the kind of competitive universalism that might enable it to triumph on the international film front. Zarah Leander's star sign in many ways functioned as a bridge between the image of an absent Marlene Dietrich and the "new" woman of National Socialism, whereas Harvey, as long as she was in Gennany, was an original that had been preserved. This also might account for the fact that the media took no notice when Harvey left Gennany for a second time in 1939. Losing another one of the great prewar Ufa stars, especially one who had returned from Hollywood before, was an embarrassment. In 1942 the office of propaganda (Reichspropagandaamt) issued press orders that instructed the media not to report "the revocation of Lilian Harvey's citizenship"(Ausbiirgerung).7oUnlike the case of Zarah Leander, whose return to Sweden was vehemently condemned in the propaganda press, Lilian Harvey's second "defection" was quietly ignored, while new Ufa stars such as Hungarian Marika Rokk gained popularity in the musical genre. 7l

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Harvey's position in Nazi cinema is therefore limited to a prewar discourse that still allowed for a cultural sphere that was inclusive of elements of transition. Both her Nazi films and the image the National Socialist star coverage tried to produce for the actress clearly showed traces of the regime's ideological propaganda work, but the "star" Lilian Harvey remained at its core embedded within the frameworks of Weimar and Hollywood stardom. COMEDIENNE, DANCER, SWEETHEART: LILIAN HARVEY PLAYS GERMANY'S GIRL-NEXT-DoOR

Lilian Harvey's description as a comedy star combined the physical impression of frailty, connoted through her small body frame, with a standard story line that circulated around Harvey as the narrative source of turbulent mixups that set in motion a comedic carousel of confusion and mistaken identity. Her early Weimar appearances already showed Harvey in a large number of silent pictures that told of her charades and usually involved her assuming multiple screen personae and a number of different suitors among whom Harvey had to choose (e.g., Prinzessin Trulala, 1926; Die keusche Susanne, 1926; Vater werden ist nicht schwer, 1926; Du sollst nicht stehlen. Ein Spiel von Gaunerei und Liebe, 1928). This pattern of joyful confusion, anticipating the American screwball comedy, was further amplified through Harvey's casting in a double role in several films.72 In 1928, Harvey left the Eichberg-Film-G.m.b.H., which had produced her first films, after a legal battle and signed a contract with Ufa guaranteeing her generous compensation and the right to influence the selection of screenplays in which she would star. 73 This union resulted in a solidified paradigmatic story concept for Ufa's use of Harvey to which both parties would stick from then on. To describe her part in Die Drei von der Tankstelle (The Trio from the Gas Station, 1930), one of the most successful Harvey-Fritsch's musical comedies, for instance, Harvey outlined her typical role: "It [The Trio from the Gas Station] points to the rebirth of romantic films and of the carefree, joyful, young heroine. I love such roles. No matter in what time period the story is set, how tight my corset is laced or in what kind of impressive hair-do I appear, I am always the same girl, who is keen to playa prank, cheerful and unencumbered. I have always played such heroines, starring with

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Willy Fritsch, Harry Liedtke and Henri Garat. In Germany, Willy Fritsch has always been my main partner."74 Indeed, Harvey's partnership with Fritsch began as early as 1926 with Die keusche Susanne (Chaste Susanne), which paired Harvey as the morally righteous Susanne with Fritsch as a charming good-for-nothing. While Chaste Susanne ended with Susanne's return to her proper fiance, Ihr dunkler Punkt (Her Dark Secret, 1929) three years later joined the couple in the end, setting a precedent for the majority of the two performers' future productions. The couple's success can be seen to derive from both the contrast and the similarity between them. On the one hand, the physically overpowering Fritsch emphasized Harvey's girlish frailty, while simultaneously giving her self-assured resistance a comical edge. In Ursula Vossen's words, "Fritsch's vital, youthful masculinity that carried paternalistic undertones was most successful next to the doll-like Harvey, whose coquettish girlishness in turn needed the massive Fritsch."75 On the other hand, both players seemed compatible insofar as they suggested a fundamental immaturity; neither fully functioned as a "grown-up" in their joint films, where they shared a tirelessly jolly optimism and-in keeping with the comedy genre-a playful attitude to life that elided a problematized conception of human difficulties. When Fritsch and his two best friends encounter unemployment in The Trio from the Gas Station, for example, they join in a facetious song bemoaning their lost pleasures (drinking champagne, eating oysters), shrug their shoulders, and then quickly fall back on the strength of the male group to open a gas station.76 Lilian (so named in the film), a millionaire's daughter, promptly arrives to get gas from each of the three attendants. She quickly charms the trio, chirping lighthearted melodies and dancing around her expensive automobile, and all fall in love with her without knowing about the others. The resulting plot continues to take on twisted turns: Lilian convinces her wealthy father to employ the group to run a gas station enterprise and hires herself as their secretary. Fritsch (also named Willy in the film) angrily discovers her role in his success. Feeling manipulated, he dictates an outraged letter of resignation, and she types up a marriage contract insteadF In the end, it is Lilian's father, previously helpless against his daughter's pranks (she embarrasses him by calling him Chubby, even in front of his new fiancee), who reconciles the lovers. The

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millionaire's regained paternal authority thus puts an end to the havoc caused by the spoiled Lilian, while the consequences of the depression (the demotion of three dandies to blue-collar workers) are reversed through Willy's union with an heiress. In 1931 the Harvey-Fritsch team starred in the German version of Der Kongrefi tanzt (The Congress Dances), one of the most expensive Ufa productions to date,78 The plot showed them singing and dancing through a few turbulent days during the Congress of Vienna in 1814, enjoying their unlikely union-she is a salesgirl, he is the Russian czar-while the rest of the congress participants discover the joys of ballroom dancing. When Napoleon's troops enter the picture, the frolics on the Danube shore come to a sudden end and all the protagonists return to their official responsibilities, thus reestablishing the order of the earlier status quo. In fact, Karsten Witte sees the film as the embodiment of socially romantic film ideology, the refrain of its theme song ("That was just once, it will never return") paraphrasing the notion of a romanticized yesteryear that "promises the happiness of a status quo ante."79 Viewing the film from a different angle, Anton Kaes further suggests, " ... the more dissonant the everyday became [in the late Weimar years], the more harmonious the world of the cinema. Babelsberg [home of Ufa studios] had caught up to Hollywood and was now entirely in the service of distraction and diversion."so In respect to its two protagonists, Harvey and Fritsch, the film did even more than celebrate the charm of bygone days by performing a nostalgic restaging of the monarchist past made possible through modem technology. "The comedy in the thirties," as Vossen proposes, "frequently realized in its German rendition as fihnic operetta, was the innate battleground of this dream couple [Harvey /Fritsch]."81 The Congress Dances once again presented Harvey in a role that fused her hyperbolized girlhood with the waggishness of a tomboy, combining the vulnerable charm of a fairy with the cheeky drollness of a pixie. "An important characteristic of the women played by Harvey," Vossen points out, "is their independence and capricious stubbornness, which contrasts with her physical appearance in exciting ways."82 The tension that emerged in Harvey's foot-stomping desire for independence, on the one hand, and the striking physical inequality between her and her male partners on the other, thus points to an interesting thematization of gender conflicts. Moreover, the pairing of Harvey and Fritsch often suggested the supposed reconcilia-

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tion of class differences, albeit in a manner that remained much more ambiguous and far less radical than in American screwball comedies of the 1930s: Willy's company makes money even without Lilian in The Trio from the Gas Station, the Czar and the salesgirl do not marry in The Congress Dances, Harvey is not really an heiress in Gliickskinder (Lucky Kids 1936). Without taking recourse to narrative strategies of the social drama, the transformation of Harvey and Fritsch into the German Traumpaar addressed a set of problems that were fundamentally contemporary. Akin to what in Hollywood emerged as the screwball comedy-or its subgenre, the comedy of remarriage-the motor behind this German couple's comedic screen predicaments was the difficulty of gender. As David Shumway has suggested, the ideological function of the screwball comedy, and the comedy of remarriage, can be seen to ultimately affirm the patriarchal status quo through its narrative address and subsequent displacement of gender problems in service of perpetuating the ideology of romance and the mystification of marriage in the larger social sphere. B3 At the same time, however, the screwball comedy's model of couple formation must be seen as revisionist because of the autonomy and agency the genre gave to women. Similarly, despite the fact that it was the inevitable goal of the dream-couple construct to unite both players romantically at the end of the film, the narrative obstacles the Harvey-Fritsch pair encountered earlier depended on playing out the complications of the battle of the sexes which foregrounded Harvey's resistance and independence. The lack of sexual chemistry between Harvey and Fritsch was prominent in most of their films. It often serves as a point of entry for critics seeking to discuss the couple in terms of the Nazis' attempt to deeroticize the German cultural sphere-replacing erotic allure, perceived as dangerous and degenerate, with a supposedly healthy and responsible attitude toward reproduction and comradeship in marriage. However, the state of parity and playful companionship that frequently existed between the two is often ignored. While Harvey's infantilizing pouts set her apart from many of the wise-cracking stars who followed-ranging from Mae West to Rosalind Russell, or even Grete Weiser's Berliner Schnauze (Berlin loudmouth)-Harvey's simultaneous projection of stubborn self-assurance (female emancipation) and immature emotionalism (traditional femininity) spoke to the conflicting ideals of womanhood that had been in circulation since the suffrage

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movement and the subsequent conceptualization of the "new woman." The notion that a more (rather than fully) equal partnership was desirable, which had been suggested in the much-discussed 1928 nonfiction book Die Kameradschaftsehe (Marriage as Friendship and Companionship) and was taken up by Harvey-Fritsch as a bantering film couple, also related to a shift in power relations between the sexes. 64 Thus, in enacting a scenario that negotiated gender relations in a modem context, Harvey's German films described a generic pattern that also constituted an emerging Hollywood paradigm and therefore effected an additional link with the cultural movements of modernity. We must recall here the films starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or the relationship between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, which was virtually remade by Ufa in Lucky Kids after Harvey's return to Germany. In addition, Harvey's Hollywood roles took on the characteristics of her Weimar performances. I Am Suzanne! (Fox, 1934), for instance, literalized Harvey's status as pubescent child and/or a living doll by structuring the plot around Harvey as an immobilized stage performer who becomes competitive with a marionette made in her likeness. Harvey plays the performer Suzanne, the star of a Paris stage show, which is more of an acrobatic circus act featuring an agile child (she builds a snowman at the end of one number) than a glamorous number foregrounding a seductive chanteuse. When her fiance Tony is looking to find a specialist who can mend her legs after a stage accident, he turns to a pediatrician. "A girl?" asks the doctor. "Yes," replies Tony, ''but she is just a child too, really." Harvey in fact never sheds her infantile behavior throughout the film; moreover, it is her physical fragility that is seen to constitute her charm. The continuing narrative appropriately circles around the question of whether or not Harvey /Suzanne has an independent identity of her own. Throughout the film, various men who take control of her life and career exclaim"I am Suzanne!" -simultaneously expressing"queer" notions of cross-gender identification and the patriarchal Pygmalion fantasy that centers on man creating "woman." Only toward the end of the film does she utter the line herself when she breaks free from her controlling fiance. ''You are afraid of everything you can't tie strings on, and pull around any way it pleases you," she accuses Tony, a puppeteer, temporarily ending the relationship by shooting the puppet of herself. The lovers' conflicts are

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finally resolved when I Am Suzanne! concludes with a joint perfonnance of the marionettes, manipulated by Tony, and the real Suzanne. It is the successful combination of both partners' careers that enables the happy ending. Harvey's role in I Am Suzanne! confirms that Hollywood's treatment of the star continued a pattern that Ufa had contrived years earlier. Lilian Harvey's positioning at the juncture of two conflicting discoursesan idealized notion of female helplessness as the source of romantic attraction and the progressive notion of women's independent agencymust therefore be seen as a constant in her screen representations. It is in this context, in particular, that the dialectics played out between Harvey and Fritsch became problematic in the Third Reich. Neither fonns of female subjectivity-physical and emotional immaturity nor gender equality--<:onfonned to the dominant National Socialist model of radical gender division, which promoted two capable adults in clearly delineated fields: the workplace or the battlefield and the domestic space of the home. In addition, many elements of the comedic fonn Harvey's Third Reich films relied on~specially their generic internationalism, the excessive artifice of their presentation and the irreverence of their humor-further complicated their placement in Nazi culture. That is not to say that Ufa did not attempt to integrate Harvey into the changed political environment that now infonned its film production; the results of these efforts however, suggest only questionable success. It was simply impossible to maintain Harvey's star persona and build on the popularity of her genre films and at the same time fully contain or redescribe those elements of her established image that linked her to supposedly outmoded cultural paradigms. Indeed, Paul Martin's Schwarze Rosen (Black Roses, 1935), HarveyFritsch's first film following the actress's literal"comeback," immediately set out to redirect the star couple's previous generic associations. Paul Martin first worked with Lilian Harvey as Erik Charell's assistant on The Congress Dances. They were romantically linked from 1932, when he directed her in Ein blonder Traum (Dream in Blonde). Martin accompanied Harvey to Hollywood, where she unsuccessfully attempted to promote him as her director. Finally, Fox hired Martin to direct Orient Express (Fox, 1934) based on a screenplay by Graham Greene. While the American press rarely reported on Harvey's romance with Martin, speculating about her friendship with Gary Cooper instead, the Gennan media still upheld the notion of a private liaison between Harvey and Fritsch. Har-

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vey later described her relationship with Martin as the determining factor in her decision to return to Gennany: "I made the biggest mistake of my life. I left my American contract because I had fallen in love. My life had become a film romance and its theme had been addressed in countless screenplays: the conflict between career and private life. I chose my private life. But what happened rather unproblematically in my films, was a little more complicated in reality."85 After the couple's return to Nazi Gennany Martin was able to become the Harvey director and worked with her on Black Roses (1935), Lucky Kids (1936), 7 Ohrfeigen (7 Slaps in the Face, 1937), Fanny Eissler (1937), and Woman at the Wheel (1939). Casting both actors against character, Black Roses reintroduced the Harvey-Fritsch duo in a highly ideological tragedy of nationalism: Fritsch is a Finnish rebel struggling against Czarist rule, and Harvey is a famous dancer who forfeits her own romantic fulfillment for the sake of the hero's "higher" causes, resulting in her sacrificial suicide on screen. Despite the familiar homecoming narrative of Harvey's return (often treated in National Socialist Heimkehrer films 86) and the generic shift that was attempted in Black Roses, subsequent Harvey films quickly returned to the comedic styles that had founded the couple's fame. With Lucky Kids, which followed Black Roses and was also directed by Paul Martin, Ufa returned to the more familiar cinematic prototypes established in earlier Harvey-Fritsch vehicles and thus resurrected the old dream couple as fun-loving players engaged in an amusing game between the sexes. It is important to keep in mind here that only six of Harvey's fiftyfive films were made under the Nazis and only two were produced after her second emigration in 1939.B7 This means that it is imperative to look at Harvey's Third Reich films as a partial continuum, which drew on an already established body of work, as well as to extricate those elements that register as an alteration of earlier patterns or even suggest breakage, thus relating these films to their specific conditions of production under Nazi rule.

Gliickskinder (Lucky Kids, Ufa, 1936) "Bravo! Bravo! What the Americans can do, we can do too!"BB An echo of joy running through the press-illustrated here by the emphatic praise of the journal Film-Kurier--expressed the public excitement that accompanied the success of Paul Martin's 1936 comedy. "Maybe no one

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wanted to believe that the German language can compete with the American slang in terms of its dry humor," continued the journal, " ... Lucky Kids proves the opposite." In a number of ways, the film was Ufa's answer to Goebbels's 1935 warning against making too many ideological (weltanschauliche) pictures and took up the suggestion that the majority of German films should play like Frank Capra's It Happened One Night. 89 As mentioned earlier, Lucky Kids approximated the plot of the American original so closely that many critics today even speak of a remake. Goebbels's film policy, although following Promi guidelines, primarily answered to audience desires. The German press-before its official reconstruction into a state-controlled publicity vehicle, which replaced its Filmkritik with the new terminus Filmbetrachtung in 1936--complained that German films seemed "dusty and worn-out" next to their American counter parts.90 In response, Lucky Kids not only quoted-or, if you will, appropriated-the narrative elements of the earlier American screwball comedy, it was also set in New York, directed by a Spielleiter with Hollywood experience, and featured an international star, Lilian Harvey. The film's startling opening sequence instantly involved the audience in an atmosphere of urban excitement and exotic sensationalism. A number of unrelated scenes featuring newsworthy events follow in rapid succession; one shot chases the next, after it has turned into a freeze frame that zooms out to reveal its place as a photograph underneath a catching newspaper headline: "Ship Catastrophe in the Pacific! ... Ohio versus Notre Dame 2-0! ... Niece of Millionaire Jackson Missing after Boxing Match!"91 Conspicuously missing from this world of news, however, were any references to Nazi Germany. Images of swastikas and mass rallies, Nazi politics and Fuhrer cult, which had doubtlessly dominated the newsreel that preceded the Lucky Kids screening, had no place in this "American" news sequence. Although it even depicted a strike scene, its diegetic environment was a Nazi politics-free zone. 92 Whereas the U.s.-produced 1 Am Suzanne! freely referred to the present as inclusive of fascist regimes-Tony, the puppeteer, openly wondered if he should make a puppet of Mussolini to update his show-UIa was careful to avoid reminders of Nazism in their supposedly nonideological films. The fact that characters in Ufa pictures almost always greeted each other with "Good morning" rather than "Heil, Hitler" is often mentioned in this context. Nevertheless, Lucky Kids briefly alluded to American politics in an-

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other scene, where its three male protagonists speculate about who is responsible for triggering the chain of events that led to their unemployment. Roosevelt is the culprit, they decide: his lifting of Prohibition led to a colleague's drunkenness during his evening shift at the magistrate's court, which necessitated the inexperienced reporter Gil Taylor to cover for him. That in turn triggered the narrative complications that would result in the group's joint firing from the Morning Post's staff. The absurdity of their logic of displacement, however-although strangely anticipating the standard postwar response of many Germans, who relied on the figure of Hitler to assume sole responsibility for the crimes of German National Socialism-moved the political into the comical. It is hard to imagine a similar maneuver addressing National Socialist policies that would have survived Nazi censorship. The American locale, beyond providing the mise-en-scene of an exotic elsewhere on which Third Reich films frequently relied, also allowed for a liberal atmosphere in which there was not only still room for political jokes, but for the thematization, albeit flippant, of social problems such as unemployment and homelessness. In rendering film practices, which would hardly have been acceptable had a German context been depicted, as a reflexive comedy that openly declared itself a copy, Lucky Kids managed to maintain its status as a representation of an alternative everyday existence. 93 In casting Harvey and Fritsch in the lead roles, the film furthermore advertised its reliance on earlier cinematic prototypes. The filmic narrative strikingly reproduced plot scenarios between the actors that were familiar from earlier Harvey-Fritsch vehicles. Fritsch's Gil Taylor is a newspaper trainee, but calls himself a lyricist. Astonishingly gullible, he is easily tricked by his colleagues into interpreting a tedious reporting assignment as a signal that his boss has finally learned to appreciate his poems, but will not print them until Taylor proves himself worthy as a reporter in the field. Relieving his scheming colleagues of the unwelcome task of spending the night at the magistrate's court to cover for their drunken friend, Taylor naively takes his position in the court audience. His poetic compassion, however, which easily translates into either immaturity or effeminacy in the film, quickly results in his inability to keep the observer's distance that is crucial to a newspaper man's success, thus rendering him professionally incompetent. 94 When Ann

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Garden, played by Lilian Harvey, is brought in front of the judge for trying to sleep on a park bench, Gil's personal interest is instantly piqued. While exhibiting a meek and docile exterior, Ann does her best to defend herself against the charge of vagrancy. "Is it a crime not to have any money?" she asks the judge. "No, just forbidden," he replies and, probing for a possible solution, asks her if she doesn't have anyone in the city at all. At this point, Gil spontaneously attempts a romantic rescue and declares himself Ann's fiance. His "gallant" intervention prompts the judge to marry the startled strangers on the spot, presumably thinking that matrimony is an instant cure for restless young ladies. The courtroom buzzes with excitement and every reporter present covers the story, except Gil, who is too busy with his new bride to think of filing a notice. The film thereby introduced its protagonists in ways that enable the gender difficulties between them to be worked out in a comedic manner involving equal partners. Gil Taylor is a naive poet, rather than a hardened reporter; a hero, who can't get a break, falls for his friends' setup, lets a judge bully him into marriage, and then fails to capitalize on it by involving his own newspaper, resulting in both he and his friends being fired. In contrast, Ann Garden, who is at the mercy of the system, uses Taylor to gain her freedom, asserts her lack of interest in a sexual relationship with him, and finally sets herself up as the missing millionaire's niece (we recall the opening sequence: "Niece of Millionaire Jackson Missing after Boxing Match!") to help Gil and his buddies get their jobs back. By undermining Gil's adult masculinity and leaving Ann's diegetic background mysterious, Lucky Kids inserted an element of parity into a relationship that might otherwise be entirely oppressive for its female heroine. Ann clearly has no alternative but to accompany Gil to his apartment, but her firm statement that there will be no touching between them leaves a slightly pouting Gil with nothing but the selfaggrandizing retort that he would only ever touch her if she asked him to. And ask, he confidently informs her, she will. The film further parodies its narrative paradigm by letting the characters make fun of what, more often than not, is the inevitable ending of a Harvey-Fritsch vehicle. As the newlyweds lie down on his Murphy bed, dramatically separated by a full-length shelf stacked with cactus plants between them (Fig. 3.3), Gil cynically closes his magazine to exclaim:

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Figure 3.3. Wedding night: Ann Garden and Gil Taylors battle between the sexes is literalized in the prickly bed divider.

G: What kitsch! Here love leads to marriage. Do you think it possible that our marriage will lead to love?

A: Very unlikely. G: But statistically it has been proven that most marriages of convenience end happily. A: Is our marriage convenient? G: No. But it's no love match either. A special case. How do you think it will end? A: In divorce. G: Happily after all.

The lyrics of the diegetic music accompanying this sequence further comment on both the desirability of romantic bliss and its improbability in the reality of everyday life: Miss Nobody loves Mr. So-and-So, She is so happy when he is near;

Lilian Harvey 129 They live in a castle in the air called Nowhere, In the land of dreams near the golden pond; One could be just as happy as this couple, But unfortunately that only happens in fairy tales.

Yet despite its ironic reflexivity, argues Witte, the difference between Lucky Kids' "Germanized Americanism" and its original U.S. model became manifest in a paradigm shift regarding the two film couples' sexuality: "Capra's comedy is based on visual, Martin's Lustspiel on verbal invectives .... Martin de-sexualizes the original model insofar as its sexual aggression, at the point where it surfaced in the image, is pushed off the screen and into the dialogue."95 Instead of Capra's deflowering narrative, Witte concludes, Lucky Kids presented a fantasy of marriage. Indeed, while Fritsch's Gil Taylor repeatedly addresses the fact that the marriage between him and Ann Garden has not yet been consummated, visually there are moments neither of suggested sexual desire nor of interrupted physical contact between them. Gil's cynical comment that Ann, after their second night together, hardly deserves the title "Frau Taylor," moreover assumes her present virginity, while he himself feels the need to proclaim that he is not "innocent" any more. No character in It Happened One Night would ever even have entertained the notion that Clark Gable might still be a virgin. Gil's sexual frustration as a legally married man deprived of his "rights" further results in angry speculations about Ann: "It isn't so much your lack of physical attributes, but your lack of softness of the soul and womanliness that makes one wonder if you are a girl at all." Yet while Gil's paternalistic expressions toward the waif-like Ann initially underline her dependence in an increasingly tense situation, the roles are quickly reversed when she takes charge of presenting herself as the agent behind the entire intrigue. And it is precisely when Ann succeeds in making Gil believe that she is the missing heiress that Gil's perturbed declaration of love to the "former" Ann admits to the equality between the couple: "I was about to fall in love with her, despite her self-assured presentation, or maybe even because of it, and her courageous camaraderie, which I admired." This love confession also suggests that the pair's relationship in Lucky Kids was marked by the same almost presexual friendship that determined the Harvey-Fritsch dyad throughout their career as a dream couple. It is of additional interest to note that although Hitler liked the film,

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the film's nonsensical song numbers caused the Nazis' ideological watchdog, the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps, to complain: 96 "No one can convince us that a Schlager [popular song], which expresses the stirring sentiment 'I wish I was a chicken, I wouldn't have much to do,' is even just a tiny bit better or smarter than the often invoked garbage [of earlier times: jazz]. No, this type of art production bears a distinct resemblance to the behavior of certain companies that while announcing loudly to the world that they are now Aryan still maintain their Jewish methods."97 The target of this tirade was, of course, Ufa who in turn used its publicity materials to defend the validity of its entertainment practices as partaking in the Nazis' cultural reform: ''While this film [Lucky Kids] ... reminds us in a certain sense of the earlier, successful, musical Harvey-Fritsch-films, it is not a 'star film' in the outdated sense, but an excellent ensemble piece ... We have allowed Lilian an emotional detour in the tragic Black Roses and one filmic death, but she doesn't have to die on screen to move us. She is here to give us soaring cheerfulness and bright delight."98 Yet the soaring cheerfulness that was articulated, first and foremost, in the film's central song-and-dance sequence showed many signs of the irreverent anarchy that Nazi hard-liners remonstrated against. Gil wishes he was a chicken, with nothing to do but lay eggs, a rather feminized image; next he wants to be Clark Gable, "the hero of the USA;" Ann wants to be Mickey Mouse, and even satirizes the idea of being a man: I wish I were a man, how great I'd have it then; I wouldn't have a thing to do but to relax. It is a fact, we know, that women have more brains, But would I gladly pass this up, stupidity is no shame.

"That goes too far," protests the male group as a chorus and threatens, "there'll be a fight," upon which Ann revises with no less irony: "I wish I was a man, how happy I'd be then, since only man alone can be the master of creation." "Thank God, Thank God," comments the trio, as the ideological foundations upon which Nazism was erected have begun to shake, even if just for an instant. The film's humor thus primarily derived from its deviation from dominant National Socialist codes; and, according to Witte, any deviation from any code is funny.99 Having fun in the cinema, however, is a far cry from engaging critically with contemporary politics,loo "To say

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that Lucky Kids creates a charming world of illusion," argues Eric Rentschler, "does not prove that the film-and films like it-engaged in ideological sabotage."101 While Rentschler's point certainly applies to most Third Reich comedies, the film stays far away from giving lessons in Nationalist Socialist thinking. Without suggesting that the film's avoidance of political complicity, achieved primarily through its "Germanized Americanism" and its reliance on surviving traditions of the popular, worked as a destabilizing cultural force, we can nevertheless assert that it also didn't help to popularize the ideological messages of National Socialism. This is not to say that the film didn't conform to the rules of patriarchal conservatism. Yes, Lilian Harvey's heavy makeup and plucked eyebrows hardly invoked the wholesomeness of a Kristina Soderbaum, and her back-talking snippiness did not bring to mind the paradigm of a self-sacrificing wife and mother. Moreover, Fritsch's naivete and lanky sportsmanship in tandem with his constant pouting and bickering cannot possibly be seen as advertising the Aryan prototype of Nazi masculinity. Nonetheless Lucky Kids provided an ending that affirmed petit-bourgeois norms. As Ann confronts the real millionaire's niece, played by Harvey in a double role, she finally comes face to face with a true femme fatale, an image reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich in a Sternberg picture (Fig. 3.4). Instead of having been kidnapped, as everyone assumed, this caricature of a "dame" is in complete control of both the situation and her beau, the boxing champion; her low husky voice has an American accent and only she reminds the viewer of sexuality when she strokes her muscular lover's body and calls him ''baby.'' Interestingly, her final emergence in the film-with the invocation of a more authentic Weimar or Hollywood screen image, so to speak-is the catalyst that brings everyone else back in touch with his or her conservative German roots. In other words, when seen next to a "true" femme fatale, Ann Garden's girl-next-door appeal discloses her proximity to the ideal of a cheerfully capable German Hausfrau. As order is restored to the tumultuous narrative, German middleclass values triumph. Unlike Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, Ann is not an heiress, but turns out to be a train engineer's daughter from a family of seven trying to find work in the big city. Not surprisingly, however, Ann will not have to return to work. Gil and his friends, through turning Ann's adventure into their "story," are reestablished in

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Figure 3.4. Gil finds the real heiress and her boxing champion. The image of a true femme fatale leaves Ann Garden looking like an innocuous girl next door.

the newsroom instead. And, of course, once the men retake charge of "writing" the narrative, the marriage is maintained: as mystery turns into normalcy, a trick shot slowly dissolves the cactus shelves separating Ann and Gil to show the couple's first embrace in their joint bed. In accordance with the strategic idealization of romance and marriage serving a family-centered conceptualization of the social, Lucky Kids' happy ending does not consist of a divorce after all,lo2 Eric Rentschler therefore concludes that "[tlhe narrative took an unruly woman off the streets and set her straight, offering a moral fable in the guise of upbeat entertainment. Pseudo-utopias of wishful thinking such as Lucky Kids fostered the belief that the Hitler regime allowed room to move."103 Yet even in this respect The Lucky Kids functions like any other film fantasy, foreign or domestic. While it is imperative to keep in mind the film's cultural production and exhibition context in Nazi Germany, a marked distinction between "utopias" and "pseudoutopias" is hard to draw between the Hollywood blueprint and its Ger-

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man "copy." In many ways, film entertainment and cultural fantasy production always rely on mobilizing the notion of a certain utopian potential, in Fredric Jameson's sense, for the viewer, a utopian potential that is separate from the political and social reality of his/her physical and historical existence. 104 In this respect, Lucky Kids demonstrates that the taming of unruly women in Third Reich films, while attempting to educate women into subordination, also maintained the potential of autonomy for female viewers. Through its very foregrounding of women's rebellious energies, it thereby addressed related predilections in COntemporary women. lOS In addition to looking at Ufa's "Americanized" German films-or as Witte suggests, their "Germanized" American pictures-as part of an efficient scheme, which finally and unequivocally benefited the interests of the National Socialists in power, the more difficult issues of textual polyvalence and historical multidiscursivity-the possibility of a certain kind of pluralism under fascism existing hand-in-hand with an ideologically dominant and repressive form of cultural politics-must be considered. The year 1936 (when Lucky Kids was made) still showed pronounced signs of such coexistence. Indeed, Witte's argument that a significant number of German film productions of the Nazi years COnsisted of "Germanized American pictures" is compelling when we look at the many similarities and continuities between both cinemas. 106 His point is further strengthened by Goebbels's clear indication that certain American productions are to be commended and duplicated and the fact that popular narrative and visual trends that surfaced in the German "imitations" indeed originated in the United States. To complicate things further, it is difficult to maintain that trends that become dominant internationally really constitute a "national cinema" at all, that Hollywood, rather than simply being a trendsetter, is to be seen as an authentically American medium, which is then copied elsewhere in "nationalized" (i.e., Germanized) cinemas. The large influx of stars, directors, and other talent into Hollywood problematizes that distinction, and the question remains whether directors like Martin, who spent time in Hollywood before striking huge success in Germany, or Sierck (aka Sirk), who was well established in 1930s Germany before becoming an Hollywood "auteur" in the 1950s, are to be seen as national directors of either country. Alternatively, one might propose that modernity strongly introduced the notion of an "international culture"

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marked by a consistent flow of ideas and aesthetics that were hard to attribute to anyone nationality and that even Nazi Germany, despite numerous constraints and prohibitions, at least partially continued to deal in the currency of internationalism as well as in its new National Socialist idiom. Only with the beginning of World War II and the increasing cultural isolation of the German nation, were Nazi ideologues able to weed out the American presence and its competition at last. In 1941, Promi finally issued the orders: "In recent times there have been an increasing number of cases where the press has made American films the subject of their discussions. All debates about American films are to be stopped immediately. The German public is only interested in German film."107 The "German" films produced by Ufa, however, never gave up looking to America for inspiration; and Harvey herself, for reasons that were personal rather than political (Paul Martin left Harvey for a young starlet during the making of Woman at the Wheel), was already back in Hollywood.

Capriccio (Ufa, 1938) If Lucky Kids had delighted audiences that included the Nazi leadership and negative responses were limited to a condemnation of the film's musical styles, Capriccio angered both Hitler and Goebbels. Following the film's presentation at his daily screenings, Hitler called the film "particularly bad."l08 Promi issued devastating criticism and reprimanded its director, Karl Ritter, several times. 109 Ritter's unrestrained approach to the material was certainly a surprise for a director whom Karsten Witte sees as more instrumental to the establishment of militant Nazi pictures than Hans Steinhoff or Veit Harlan. 11o Both Ritter's earlier and later films-for instance, Patrioten (Patriots 1937), Pour Ie Meritt? (1938), Urlaub auf Ehrenwort (1938) and Stukas (1941), many of which received the official distinction "of special political value" (staatspo/itisch besonders wertvoll)-were overt propaganda vehicles that frequently celebrated the "heroic death of fascist fighter pilots" and thus represented,111 as the Nazi journal Der Deutsche Film proposed, "filmic tanks belonging at the very fore of the propaganda front."112 Furthermore even coscreenwriter Felix Liitzendorf, who had conceived of Capriccio with Ritter, had been the author of many of Ritter's propaganda pictures, so the script cannot be attributed to a more "independent" source. Nonetheless, the film constituted an astonishing aberration from what

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was otherwise acceptable in Nazi cinema. Its utter lack of respect toward almost any marker of traditional values and its technique of deriving comic energy from ridiculing virtually every public institution not only thoroughly overstepped the limits of the traditional burlesque, but also exhibited a radical farcical anarchy that was fundamentally antiauthoritarian. The film was a provocation, proposes Karsten Witte, not only in its distance from the everyday production standards of 1938, but also in its "flagrant violation of what was considered in good taste, in its overstepping the norm, and ... in its falling short of this norm unpunished."113 What Ritter envisioned in this project was a German film in the style of Rene Clair, with whom he had worked in Paris seven years earlier; he saw Lilian Harvey as especially suitable for the part he had created. In retrospect he wrote: "Lilian Harvey fit the Rene-Clair-style exactly, she was so different from the other romantic heroines, fairy-like, almost unreal, the embodiment of grace and refinement, sprung forth from a playful artist's mood, the born little columbine of the commedia dell' arte, a tiny figurine of the rococo shepherd games, a Botticelli angel of tender, soulful beauty, she was an artwork one could enjoy without erotic desire."114 In Capriccio, Lilian Harvey's role finally fully explored those two dimensions of her persona that had covertly informed her image all along. Not only did she appear as a fragile elf, as Ritter suggested above, but for a significant part of the story she also passed for male, thus pointing back to Kalbus's category of "the woman in pants" who had marked the Weimar years. ll5 Furthermore, Harvey's partner in Capriccio was not Willy Fritsch but Victor Staal, who had been previously seen with Zarah Leander in Detlef Sierck's Zu neuen Ufern (To New Shores, 1936), but did not carry the same star power as Harvey. Thus liberated from the formulaic constraint of giving equal screen time as the male lead, Harvey's job in tl-"e narrative was the negotiation of masculine and feminine impulses md concerns within herself while escaping the externally oppressiv 2 forces of male domination at the same time. The tag line Ufa used to promote the film read: "Capriccio. Leitmotif: I raised a delicate girl as a man" and thus introduced Harvey's first performance in a breeches part. This "newly discovered Lilian Harvey," reads an Ufapamphlet on the film, " ... casts off the shackles of holy traditions and as a knight and a gentleman with a shining sword in her hand fights her way through adventures of love and amusement. ... Next to her nat-

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ural femininity stands adventurous dare-devilishness, next to the sweet charms of a noble lady stands the superior humor of a swaggering ladies' man ... next to elegance, grace and female charm stands aggressiveness, temerity, and the enjoyment of male actions, such as carousing, horseback-riding, fencing, gambling .... Lilian Harvey, more enchanting than ever!"116 As was the case with most of Harvey's films, and most National Socialist comedies in general, the diegesis was set in an ambiguous historical elsewhere, sometime in the last two centuries, somewhere in a generic locale in France.1 17 The film opens with a scene in which Harvey's character Madelone joyfully demonstrates her masculine abilities to a portrait of her recently deceased grandfather, the noble General d'Estroux, who in the absence of a male heir had raised his granddaughter as a man. Rough-housing with her servants on the castle grounds, drinking, fencing, and receiving boxing lessons, Madelone, whose tiny body never convinces the viewer of her effectiveness as a combatant, promises the speaking portrait never to marry. The prompt arrival of her guardian Cesaire, who demands that Madelone become the wife of the local prefect, initiates the narrative conflict. Madelone refuses to comply and thus infuriates the self-serving Cesaire, who had advertised his ward as being a "virginal untouched blossom," smirkingly suggesting deflowering as a special pleasure to the lascivious prefect. In a continued satirical treatment of Gothic tropes, Madelone is instantly imprisoned at a convent, where she finds a community of likeminded female pupils with whom she eventually shares her girlish fantasies. The nuns, however, are represented as oppressive prison guards with gigantic locks and chains who, besides conspiring with the guardian's scheme to cheat Madelone out of her inheritance, seem dedicated to spoiling the young women's fun in every way. As the film depicts the female clergy as the object of intense mockery and caricature, Madelone's vow of chastity-which her promise to her grandfather in conjunction with Harvey's asexual image implies-becomes the obsessive object of the nuns, who attempt to subvert her resolution. Isolated in her room for obstinacy, for instance, Madelone opens the Bible because of her visible boredom rather than spiritual need, only to hear the nun's operatic chorus asking her repeatedly to obey her guardian'S demands to marry emerging from the book. Moreover, as Madelone opens and closes the volume on different pages in rapid suc-

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cession, the music produced becomes a ridiculous staccato of "sampled" voices that derides Catholic practices in ways that only the antireligious censors of National Socialism would have left uncut at the time. Giving up on the Bible, the heroine finally looks at the miniature portrait of her would-be fiance and ... falls in love. Finally, the all-female environment and the appealing (yet false) image of her future husband-who is in reality the prefect's nephew Fernand (played by Victor Staal)-as opposed to her all-male entourage at d'Estreux's castle, trigger Madelone's own femininity and awaken her sexual desire. Madelone's apology to her grandfather for breaking her promise as she takes off to her new home thus exposes her previous "male" identity as having been imposed on her by her patriarch from whom she is now liberated by the introduction of "true love." In the following plot complications, Madelone's dual identities, one stereotypically feminine and the other hypermasculine, are deconstructed and resurrected repeatedly along these lines. Once an enthusiastic Madelone arrives to meet her betrothed and finds in the prefect a repulsive, leering, overweight drunk, she thankfully takes recourse in her earlier training in all things masculine. Unable to rely on public institutions (her official guardian, the prefect, and the church) or private benefactors (her dead grandfather) to protect her, Madelone drugs Cesaire's page and transforms him into the bride. While the groggy man is literally dragged to the altar, where the prefect does indeed marry him, both Madelone in a male disguise and Fernand, who is disgusted by the violation of such a "tiny person," take off on horseback. Madelone d'Estroux henceforth exchanges her female identity for that of a male alter ego, along with a new name: Don Juan di Casanova (Fig. 3.5). In keeping with the traditions of her namesakes, Madelone/ Don Juan's first stop is the convent's dormitory. Having entered through the window like a secret lover, she wakes her girlfriends (in a subtle allusion to lesbian themes), who in turn are thrilled to find a dashing young man in their midst, before discovering her true identity. Fortified by her success as a male object of desire, Madelone/Don Juan now faces the outside world as a man. At a nearby tavern, her insolent comments instantly get her into a fight with the brutish locals, who force her into a strange contest that involves wearing a cock's comb on one's head and hopping on one leg while trying to violently attack each other. This parody of male competitiveness, which mocks the absurdity of rit-

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Figure 3.5. Gender bender: Madelone as Don Juan di Casanova.

ualized demonstrations of masculinity through a cockfight, thus derives its humor from an awareness of the overdetermined strategies of gender construction. One might argue whether it is either surprising or only natural that Ritter, the cinematic master of staging war scenarios that celebrated male fighting prowess, should also be cynically conscious of its artifice. Hopelessly inferior in size, Madelone/Don Juan faces a terrible beating, when Fernand and his friend, who think Madelone is a feisty teenage boy, come to her aid with swords. An aristocratic skill like fencing, how-

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ever, is not the object of the film's derision. Belonging to the masculine world of the upper classes, Femand's world is excluded from Ritter's ridicule. Indeed, Madelone/Don Juan's efforts to belong to this world and her inability to do so convincingly now become the focus of the film's jokes. The trio continues to travel together: three musketeers looking for a good time. In the presence of Femand, however, the man in the photograph, Madelone/Don Juan is reminded of her "female impulses," especially as the narrative begins to concentrate on her sexual body. As the "men" amuse themselves in a bordello, Madelone/Don Juan angrily competes with Femand and orders all the girls to her chamber, barely escaping before having to off take his/her clothes. In another scene, the group visits a duchess who, intent on winning Don Juan as a son-in-law, parades her twin daughters in a parodic singing performance that suggests that femininity is nothing but idiotic chirping and swirling lace (Fig. 3.6). As Madelone/Don Juan retreats in embarrassment while Femand (who has realized she is female) eggs her on, the

Figure 3.6. The boyish charm of Madelone's Don Juan triumphs over the appeal of her male companions. All the women the trio encounters on its journey prefer Madelone in drag to the "real" men in her company.

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duchess finally resorts to accusing Madelone/Don Juan of raping one of her daughters. Stunningly indifferent to the impropriety of making fun of rape--we must recall that in Kristina Soderbaum's case, rape or seduction was frequently a precursor to suicide--the rape charge in Capriccio solely concentrates on the absurdity of a woman being accused of this crime for comedic purposes. The mother's aria in front of the prefect (who also functions as a local judge), which repeats the line ''bru-u-u-utally raped, raped, raped" in Mozartian opera style and triggers the prefect to wink at Madelone/Don Juan asking her excitedly ''brutally raped?" is an additional marker of the film's general lack of deference toward established cultural and legal institutions. As the lawyers literalize the legal battle by fencing with enormous metal paragraph signs representing the law, authority figures such as a judge, serious crimes including rape, or acclaimed cultural icons like Mozart are parodied, reminding us of the com media buffa in which the opera genre is treated as a farce. Consequently, the response of the Nazi authorities to Ritter's film was particularly harsh. The ministry of propaganda did not welcome the inclusion of a bordello scene because "the German woman," despite the film's French location, "is not a whore." According to Ritter's diaries, Goebbels, known in film circles as the "lecher of Babelsberg" for his casting couch practices, found Lilian Harvey's bordello song "immoral" and argued that the whole film did not fit "our heroic times."118 In general, Goebbels made it clear that Capriccio was not what the films of the Third Reich should look like; the party organ Nachrichtenblatt der NSDAP asked the rhetorical question "Is this German Humor?"119; and the Reichsmusikkammer (Chamber of Music) protested against the film's "insult" to Beethoven, because Capriccio's final scene, which unites not only Madelone with Fernand but also the prefect with an equally fullfigured pupil from the nunnery, featured the entire ensemble singing "who has found a fair wife, join in our jubilation" to the melody of Beethoven's ninth symphony performed with big band instrumentation. 120 "A capriccio," explains Karsten Witte, "is a generic musical term that denotes a sound piece of parodic allusion. In 1942 Richard Strauss will thematize the form in his opera 'Capriccio.' ... [This] Capriccio is the high school of wrong tones, that finds no musical distance difficult, be it Mozart-operas, the portrait-aria of Tamino, the register-aria of Leperello, the seduction-aria of Don Giovanni. From Verdi's '11 Trovatore'

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it blares a grandiose fun-aria, Weber's 'Freischiitz' is plundered, Beethoven isn't spared."121 In addition, the two major songs in the film-including Mit Bravour, which Goebbels particularly criticized-further underlined the film's positioning of Harvey between two ostensibly irreconcilable positions vis-a.-vis gender, masculine and feminine, ironically foregrounding dominant gender stereotypes in their hyperbolic treatment in the lyrics. Mit Bravour (With Bravado) advocates a male position of dominance and promiscuity, stating "with bravado I wish to conquer the world, with bravado no girl will be spared, with bravado the favor of all women gained, yesterday brunette, today black, tomorrow blonde .... " Meanwhile, Das Frauenherz (The Woman's Heart) declares, "a woman's heart only beats for the one who loves her tender soul, who does not just desire and lust for what is base, but gives her a touch of his soul," suggesting the female's preference for "true love" over sexual gratification. Yet both songs are performed by Harvey, which at the same time complicates the stability of their respective sentiments. Even if we concede that the film wants us to read Don Juan's song as performance and masquerade aimed at producing a comic effect, while the other song suggests the "truth" about Madelone as a woman, the degree of parodic play that emerges in this contrast marks Capriccio as unusually reflexive in relation to its representation of gender constructs. Furthermore, this parodic strategy is maintained until the end of the film: to enable Madelone's return to traditional womanhood, Don Juan di Casanova is asked to pose as the prefect's missing wife to cover up the embarrassment over her disappearance. In a double twist, Madelone, who pretends to be a man, now plays a man playing a woman, who is in reality herself. While Madelone is finally transformed into what is represented as the embodiment of femininity, a fragile girl enshrined in white ruffles-an image of Harvey familiar from previous films, especially Fanny Eissler (1937)-this femininity is also an overt masquerade. Contemporary feminist scholars have theorized gendered bodies as a site of construction. Costume and performance, in this context, assume a highly significant function for the construction of the female self. Feminist film critics, following Joan Riviere, have taken up this notion of the concept of "masquerade," suggesting that through "masquerading" in various costumes women confuse "male looking even as it pro-

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vides the woman with a way to achieve a certain distance between herself and the sexual identity demanded of her by the patriarchy." Teresa de Lauretis argues that "mask and masquerade are both meant, worn as they are, as weapons of survival. But the former is there to represent a burden, constraining the expression of one's real identity'; the latter is flaunted, or, if not, at least put on like a new dress, which, even when required, does give some pleasure to the wearer."Ill The multiple transformations Madelone undergoes in Capriccio clearly participate in the joyful play of gender the narrative's absurdities enable. It is only the final discovery of Madelone's "true" identity that finnly fixes the film in a conservative context. Hence, as Don Juan di Casanova, Madelone never gets to act out her sexuality-an act too transgressive even for this film-but she visibly enjoys the parity and camaraderie of the male group; whereas as Madelone, she can finally admit to her desire for Fernand and actually kiss him, but is safely reintegrated into the (now benevolent) patriarchal order, especially since the i'Ibervater, General d' Estroux's animated portrait, also gives his blessing in the end. In Nazi comedies, Witte proposes, "[p1ropaganda contents surfaced only covertly.... The means of comedy pursue a double strategy: first they mobilize a deviation from the propaganda line (Le., through ironization of contemporary events), to then immobilize the critical energy released through the comedy."l23 Immobilization, in Witte's sense, was achieved via the comedic form (its venting function of laughter) as well as through the narrative's shifting of the political to the personal. Capriccio, in this respect, must be read as diffusing the viewers' potential aggression against powerful Nazi politicians by making the prefect a ridiculous buffoon at whom one may laugh unpunished or in resolving the political problematic of gender inequality through the individualized romance; in other words, the already outdated notion of an arranged marriage can safely be ridiculed, while the ideal of the love match is perpetuated, "incidentally" making the social modernization of role prescriptives unnecessary. Both strategies are elementary to the generic qualities of comedy in general and to romantic comedy or screwball comedy in particular. 124 Nonetheless, the context of National Socialism cannot be ignored when looking at its cultural productions, because Promi made every attempt to use its entertainment films to further the National Socialist cause. Had Capriccio been assessed as a serious threat toward the system by the propaganda ministry, it would

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surely have been banned; yet the film was released, to Ritter's own surprise, without having undergone any changes by the censors at all. What makes the figure of Lilian Harvey so peculiar in this context is that it is hard to read either one of the two Harvey images the film offered as approximating, let alone promoting, the Nazis' ideal of womanhood. Capriccio exploited Lilian Harvey's star image insofar as it furnished her the possibility to literalize those two personae that had constituted the underlying tension in her star sign throughout her film career. That is to say, Capriccio brought to the surface what had previously been the undercurrent of Harvey's female roles: boyish masculinity versus girlish femininity embodied in a figure that always came across as an androgynous adolescent; in other words, as the antithesis of the well-exercised future child-bearers of the BdM (League of German Girls). Unlike Weimar's role models, which Capriccio's transvestitism clearly picks up on, the female ideal of the Nazi era neither overdressed nor cross-dressed.125 Indeed, Lilian Harvey's characterization in the film spoke to the very notions of gender destabilization that Petro has found in popular addresses to women in Weimar culture. 126 Her asexual generic screen persona was extremely difficult to mobilize for the Nazis' ideological goal of promoting motherhood as women's primary life purpose.

Frau am Steuer (Woman at the Wheel, Ufa, 1939) "She is the fresh and fetching modern girl," explained a star biography on Lilian Harvey in 1932, "who knows no obstacles and who feels just as at home on the golf course and the tennis court as she feels behind the typewriter of a large corporation."127 By 1933, this "new woman" of modernity, simultaneously symbol of active luxury leisure and professional careerism, was no longer desired. Yet despite the Nazis' efforts to keep women at home and hearth, according to a Nazi study conducted in 1937 there were still about 11 million women (5 million of them married) who were employed in the workforce four years after the fascist victory.128 Ufa's film heroines also frequently worked on screen, albeit more often in the glamorous world of the performer than at the factory assembly line of weapons manufacture, which would soon beckon for female labor. Moreover, female stars themselves, married or not, who were already problematic in their signification of excess, were also prominent representatives of the working woman. Consequently, it is not surprising that one of the dominant trends of Nazi

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cinema was to "relieve" women of their profession through offering marriage and a family as the more attractive alternative chosen in the films' narrative resolutions. And Ufa, which needed to satisfy both the Nazis' agenda to use popular media to invisibly shape the public's ideological self-understanding and the public's demand to address its social concerns and utopian desires, attempted to carefully negotiate the "woman question" and the issue of females in the workplace. Die Vier Gesellen (The Four Associates, 1938), for instance (which starred Ingrid Bergman before she continued on in Hollywood), concentrated on a group of young women who venture into the competitive advertising market before each is safely paired with a male mate, thereby turning the female group into four heterosexual couples. 129 One of the most striking examples of those films that articulated gender problems at work, however, was Woman at the Wheel. The German men of Third Reich cinema, argues Ulla Stockl, had lithe task to 'cleanup' women, ... off the stairways into aparhnents, off the streets into houses, out of the professions into the nursery."l30 Nowhere is this move from the office to the nursery more directly literalized than in this German variation on the comedy of remarriage, once again reuniting Lilian Harvey with Willy Fritsch. The film's overt goal may be easily described in Fritsch's repeated suggestion that he has to humble Lilian Harvey or, in a more literal translation, to "make her small" (kleinkriegen). In this, the couple's last film together, we finally encounter a story line that results in Fritsch assuming complete power over Harvey, a narrative move that simultaneously dissolves the tender romance associated with the Harvey-Fritsch dream couple into an excruciating power struggle, which ends in defeat rather than romantic displacement. Directed by Harvey's ex-lover Paul Martin, who also participated in adapting the Paul Barabas play for the screen, Woman at the Wheel met with fierce resistance from Harvey.l31 Having been forced into production Harvey wrote, "[By now] it is pointless to attest that thousands of married couples pursue a professional life in perfect harmony, ... that [the film] treats every problem from a male perspective, offering the completely wrong approach regarding women's psychological viewpoints, and that there is the danger that the female audience will not be won by the film."132 Harvey further stressed that at least minor dialogue changes were necessary, "so that I don't seem miscast and I don't hurt the picture more through my pre-set screen personality than it hurts me." Aside

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from the general story problematic, Harvey didn't like the aggressive tone of the film's dialogue and objected to being cast as an unsympathetic character. 133 Who is actually unsympathetic, however-Harvey's heroine Maria, or Fritsch's Paul-is an open question. The film relies on portraying the male perspective as favorable to justify its systematic undermining of the female protagonist, but its unrestrained articulation of gender inequality and its bias toward male supremacy also leaves sufficient room to allow a counterreading. This becomes an especially viable interpretation because the film failed to function as a convincing romance by foregrounding that the social positions available to women are always scenarios of inescapable entrapment. The film, safely set in Budapest rather than Berlin, introduces Maria in a situation that today's spectators would describe as "sexual harassment." At work at a large bank, Maria's superior, Bordon, enters her office and dismisses her coworker, Annie, to be alone with her. The jocular comments Annie exchanges with the office staff next door suggest that the boss's behavior is meant to playas comedy, but Maria is visibly distressed as she tries to politely fight off the man's advances. Later in the film, when Maria has to admit to Bordon and Paul that she has hidden her marriage, she shouts: "Of a man only his labor is asked, but of a woman considerably more .... With us women, the gentlemen bosses are personally hurt if we love another man and don't only admire them!" The fact that unmarried women receive employment not only to perform professional tasks but also to please their superiors in other ways, however, is never questioned by any of the male characters in the film. Only Maria is angry about this injustice. To Paul, in fact, it is a very natural reason to ask Maria to stop working once they are married. Maria, however, persists in fighting for her career, arguing that she loves her job and wouldn't be happy if she "had to sit at home all day mending socks." Only by threatening to end the relationship does Paul bring about the marriage without resolving the issue. When the couple finally walks down the aisle, Maria thanks Paul for understanding her career choices. To her surprise, he now discloses that as her husband he has the authority to resign for her. For Paul, marital debate ends with the legal clarification of power positions, a process the film will struggle to reachieve for its duration. To put the narrative conflict into action, Paul discovers on returning from his honeymoon that he has been fired

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from his job instead (only married men keep their positions; Paul's marriage comes three days too late). Maria thus not only continues to work but also becomes the sole breadwinner (Fig. 3.7). While audiences see Harvey and Fritsch's dream wedding for the first time, the happily-ever-after of their marriage is promptly deconstructed through role reversal. To heighten the comedic aspects of the story, Paul performs his household duties excellently, managing well with his budget and submissively rejecting Maria's offer to give him more money. Instead of simply suggesting the switching of tasks, the

Figure 3.7. Working woman: Maria is asked to bring the "Auer" files to her boss's office when he wants to flirt with her.

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film further switches gendered behaviors in Paul, thus justifying his consequent resistance to a position of effeminacy as unnatural (Fig. 3.8). Paul's neighbors laugh at him when he goes out for groceries, and the couple's maid complains about being bossed about by a "Sir" rather than a "Madam." "I'm not even a man anymore," Paul complains to Maria, "my whole masculinity is an optical illusion!" Things escalate further when Maria has to keep a date with Bordon who, unaware that she is married, continues to pursue her at work. When Maria's charade is finally uncovered, Bordon, who instantly respects Paul's legal claims on her, withdraws, promising that her marriage won't have a negative effect on her career. Yet Paul, now jealously distrustful, angrily leaves Maria to be taken care of by another more appropriate female figure once again: his mother. In an interesting shift from Maria toward Paul, Bordon subsequently attempts to prevent their divorce by employing Paul at the bank. "You men always stick together," Maria comments when she finds herself having to work in the same room with her estranged husband. But

Figure 3.8. Role reversal: ''I'm not even a man any more. My whole masculinity is an optical illusion!"

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working together, with Paul as Maria's subordinate, is even more of a strain on their disintegrating relationship. "You don't seriously believe that I will work here under your command," he protests, "if anyone may give orders, it should be the man." Maria in turn clearly articulates her position on equality: "Here at the office, it doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman, here you are an employee, and I am your superior." For the male characters in the film, however, it matters very much whether a worker is male or female. Now that the couple's problems are out in the open, Paul, Bordon and the director of the bank form a pact that will reinstate Paul in his "proper" place by promoting him to a position higher than Maria's. Paul promptly summons Maria for dictation and she is forced to type her own letter of dismissal. "I know I'll lose her if I can't bring her down right now," Paul argues to secure the director's pretend signature. Maria falls for the setup and, feeling that she has been beaten, returns to an empty home jobless and alone. Rather than providing the light-hearted banter between equally witty partners that one finds in earlier Harvey-Fritsch vehicles, Maria's often superior arguments evaporate in the diegetic climate of the film. All her attempts to discuss her professional duties with the bank's director, for instance, are rebuffed with the question "Why don't you have children yet?" and Maria's colleague Annie cannot wait to exclaim, "I'm getting married, I'll never have to come to the bank again!" It is therefore consistent with the film's internal logic that Maria shows herself not to be angry but delighted when Paul returns to their home on the very evening of her dismissal, cheerfully content with the new status quo. Now that he has succeeded in "making her small," he can safely propose that both of them work together at the bank assuming equal rank. But even that will not be necessary: Maria renounces the offer admitting to Paul that even if it was fine with him it might not be so with his son. Her admission of pregnancy seals the remarriage and firmly assigns each member his and her "natural" place in the socialorder. "The comedy of remarriage," argues Shumway, "is very likely a response to what was perceived as a crisis of marriage."l34 Moreover, the genre also reacted to women's changing roles in modem society. To strengthen the concept of matrimony, the generic end of these comedies therefore found all obstacles finally overcome through a complete reversal that lacked plausible explanation: "there is no possibility of a post

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coitum triste, but rather the explicit denial of the temporality of satisfaction."l3S What distinguished Woman at the Wheel from the generalities applicable to the comedy of remarriage on the whole, however, was its specific concentration on bringing about the "happy ending" by defeating the female character, rather than "softly" redirecting her rebellious energies through the romance. As a result-and despite the film leaving no doubt about its ideological position, conservatism, and patriarchal conception of women's roles-Woman at the Wheel in many ways took on more than it could deal with. Rather than following the traditions of screwball comedy by neutralizing social problems through their displaced romantic resolutions, Woman at the Wheel seemed to highlight the issue of gender disagreement rather than negate it. Woman at the Wheel's presentation of Harvey in a role in which her attempt at pursuing a successful career as a business executive is systematically undercut by a disgruntled, unemployed Fritsch, who solves the gender conflict by usurping her position and getting her pregnant, further used the conventions associated with the Harvey-Fritsch pair in a fashion that crystallized what had earlier been only alluded to-his tendency to patronize her, her proclivity to resist it-but it did so in a way that was discomforting. If one of the joys in seeing Harvey and Fritsch together was the playful lightness with which gender issues were negotiated and solved in an atmosphere of romantic companionship, here the narrative conflicts all too clearly suggested incompatibility. Lilian Harvey's performance hence emerged as pure angry rebellion, unsoftened by the usual feminine feelings that nonnally balanced her boyish attributes. This inadvertent maintenance of ambiguities vis-a.-vis the film's overt antifeminist propaganda work also surfaced in a number of its subplots. While Grethe Weiser's Annie does act enthusiastic about never having to work in an office again, she is also dominant in her relationship with Paul's friend and will clearly run her timid husband's life. Moreover, shortly before Maria comes home after being "fired," her neighbor angrily complains to the maid that she had to throw her husband out because he was ordering her about in the manner of a slave driver. The assumption that the division of labor produces the hannonious coexistence of men and women, or even promotes romance between them, is therefore undercut by narrative elements contained within the film itself.

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In letting the question of women in the workplace dominate the story line and giving room to the full exploration of the issue, the film can thus be seen as unintentionally working against the antifeminist politics of the Nazi philosophy. The film's final emphasis on the "naturalness" of the gender arrangement achieved does not emerge as natural from the narrative; rather, it seems plotted and forced. In other words, because the textual construction of the film's counterfeminist didactics allows many feminist concerns to be discussed openly and convincingly-Harvey has the stronger arguments, while Fritsch can only rely on essentialist biological determinism to support his position-the narrative has problems in persuasively functioning as a conservative promotion of women's return to the home and hearth. It follows that most of the film's notices spent considerable time foregrounding the professional competence and strength of Harvey's character and found it difficult to incorporate the ending, often resorting to the rhetorical elevation of women's work at home as a profession to solve the apparent discrepancies between the narrative problematic and its unsatisfactory solution. "Here she [Harvey] doesn't playa tender and kind girl, no little doll in need of protection," wrote lIse Werner for the Nazi journal Der Deutsche Film, "but an energetic woman active in professional life, who knows what she wants and how to get it, even if she is-thank God-conquered by the eternal masculine in the end."136 Ufa's own publicity materials further explained: "In a few months, an eager hard-working secretary will tum into an overjoyed young mother and will nonetheless, or rather especially now, with a baby carriage, be the woman behind the wheel."137 The particular tensions that the antiwork position of Woman at the Wheel contained for Third Reich women were most clearly articulated in the comments of another female film "commentator" (film criticism had been banned by this point)-herself, of course, a working woman-Hete Nebel, who spent a significant amount of time discussing women's active role in society before ideologically retreating behind party lines: We should talk about the woman of today, who, through the progress made this century, has been put onto a very different platform [than previous generations of women] and who, aside from her duties regarding household and motherhood, often participates one-hundred percent in earning money, in the struggle for existence. Especially in our times, we have a good number of such brave energetic women and have the daily op-

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portunity to admire these women in our everyday environment. ... However, this circumstance is not always ideal in a marriage and should only exist as a period of transition .... If the husband is a real "man" he will create a foundation upon which a marriage can be built without the woman working. And then the little wife will disappear from the field of vision, she is not any longer "the woman at the wheel"; "He" will take care of that.l 38

One cannot help but sense irony in these writings, suggesting that the film received the same uneasy public reception Harvey had warned about during production. In the everyday of National Socialist culture, the issue of women in the workplace was still debated, especially within profascist women's organizations, and was subject to repeated renegotiation during the Third Reich. By and large, the Nazi state could not afford to dispense with female labor, and once the war effort demanded the increasing participation of all able-bodied men, women's work at the home front was imperative. Hence, it was not surprising that Woman at the Wheel, which had been introduced into circulation in June 1939 and played continuously throughout the Reich, was pulled in 1942. ''The official expatriation of Lilian Harvey as well as the subject itself-women had to increasingly work in factories," explains Boguslaw Drewniak, "motivated the film's prohibition."139 In respect to Lilian Harvey's career as a German movie star, Woman at the Wheel was an astonishing piece of disassembly. While the rebellious components of Harvey's character in her standard narrative were emphasized to serve the story's concentration on unruly femininity, her girlish characteristics, which in the early 1930s had earned her the nickname of "the sweetest girl in the world," all but disappeared. This was also noticeable in her visual appearance. By 1939 Harvey's perpetual girlishness was wearing thin. As a 36-year-old actress, her previously frail look now gave way to a somewhat tired gauntness, which looked out of date when compared to the full-bodied motherly stars (Soderbaum, Leander, Rokk) who were by then gaining prominence in Nazi cinema. And while Woman at the Wheel provides us with a final example of a Harvey text produced during the Third Reich, which fails to convincingly convey the conservative and misogynist message intended, the film also serves to indicate its simultaneous destruction of Harvey as a romantic heroine. Ufa knew that Lilian Harvey would not work with them again; and its new stars, such as the ingenue Kristina SOderbaum who claimed Harvey as one of her girlhood idols, were cut

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from an entirely different cloth of womanhood from Harvey's ambiguous crossover star image. 140 Harvey's public reception in the postwar years poignantly emphasized her link with Hollywood paradigms. After the deadly silence imposed by the Nazi propagandists, and unsuccessful attempts at securing Hollywood employment, Harvey publicly resurfaced in Germany in the 1950s, when she sporadically performed in small theater productions. 142 Yet her comeback was often reviewed as markedly depressing. In interviews Harvey repeatedly referred to being swamped with film offers, while not a single film contract was ever signed. 143 Unlike Fritsch, Leander, or even S6derbaum, who had all worked in Germany throughout the war and continued their careers soon afterward with varying ease, Harvey, unable to secure further film roles, was condemned to the status of a pitiable "has-been."143 Publisher Henri Nannen reported a conversation in which Harvey insisted that she would only appear in a tribute to the old Ufa stars hosted by the Berlin Film Festival if contemporary stars (such as Maria Schell or Romy Schneider) also appeared, because she wanted to avoid the impression that her career was a thing of the past {they didn't comply, but Harvey appeared nonetheless).1 44 Even worse, an article in the same 1960 issue of the German weekly Stern narrated the postwar existence of an aging Harvey by depicting her as Germany's real-life Norma Desmond: She talks, talks, tal~f her wealth ... , of the forty fan letters she receives daily from all over the world, of the 32 television films she will soon shoot, of her own production company, and the countless offers from important theaters. "But I choose my own materials. I can afford to. I don't have to playa madam in a bordello like Zarah Leander. I'm playing The Lady from Heaven, a remake of my film The Congress Dances." The sun shines through the half-drawn curtains. I sit and I listen. I'm thinking of Sunset Boulevard, this great film in which a silent-movie star, the once worshipped and now forgotten, Gloria Swanson, played herself: a star, who has outlived herself, who desperately denies her own aging, who escapes into a dream world which believes in her own magnitude, and who finally has to realize that it is over after all. Over and gone. That's it. Sunset Boulevard in German! I'm on a ghostly island of the past, in the surreal world that Lilian Harvey has created, and in which she lives as if the premiere of her film The Congress Dances was only a few days ago. The reality here is no less disturbing than in this American film.14s

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In addition to this commentary, the photographs illustrating the feature showed Harvey, now in her fifties, swirling around on her terrace dressed in a ballerina gown from the 1937 Ufa film Fanny EIssler (Fig. 3.9), an image that anticipates Bette Davis's performance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) as much as it recalls Gloria Swanson's role in Sunset Boulevard (1950). The story's allusion to Hollywood representations of the aging film star thus firmly connected Harvey to the stereotype of the female ex-star in pathological denial. Cast in this light, however, Lilian Harvey's star text once again articulated contemporary gender descriptions: the ongoing notion that female stardom and physical youth are irrevocably linked. Yet even here, Lilian Harvey's image seemed as if copied from a Hollywood blueprint. In the end, we are left with the unforgiving representation of Harvey as a star sign marked by its own transience, pathetic nostalgia, and the incapacity to comprehend that her "image" now connoted only her likeness on celluloid, while no longer referring to her actual body. This final notion of Harvey as a "star of the past" pointedly harks back to the

Figure 3.9. Lilian Harvey poses for the camera in 1956.

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notion of Harvey as a female paradigm that referred to an ideal of womanhood that, without being free of other ideological determinations, by and large existed outside the realms of Nazi ideology; that even in the mid-thirties, she already belonged to an earlier decade, or at least a political "elsewhere." In other words, Lilian Harvey's popularity in the 1930s testifies to Klaus Kreimeier's contention that in Nazi cinema "[t]he typology of the female star proved itself widely immune to the National Socialist cliche of the /ungmadel, the happily child-bearing mother and the brave life companion."l46 In its place it offered images of femininity that, although deeply embedded in those traditionally patriarchal discourses that also determined the star signs of Hollywood's leading ladies (compulsive heterosexuality and gender inequality), firmly belonged into the cultural arena of international modernity.

4

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander

ZARAH LEANDER was without doubt one of the most popular female star figures of Nazi Germany, arguably even the most popular, male or female, within and beyond the borders of the Third Reich (Fig. 4.1).1 She was known as both an actress and a singer and not only received one of the highest wages paid to an Ufa star at the time, but also, as did Lilian Harvey, sold recordings of her songs in various languages, including French and her native Swedish. Her rise was as sudden as it was orchestrated. In 1936, Ufa signed Leander, a virtually unknown stage performer from Sweden with scarce film experience, to an exclusive three-film contract that promised the future star compensation of approximately 200,000 Reichsmark,2 of which 53 percent was payable to her in Swedish Kroners.3 On renewal, her salary increased even further, and in 1940 Leander entered an agreement with Ufa committing her to star in five to six films, to be produced over the following two years, for a total of 1 million Reichsmark. This salary put the star ahead of every other Ufa employee of either sex, topping such established performers as Emil Jannings, Hans Albers, and Gustav Griindgens, and far surpassing any film director. 4 Her films, with few exceptions, rank among the most popular and profitable in Third Reich film history. Moreover, Leander's popularity did not end when she returned to Sweden in 1943 and consequently fell out of favor with the Nazi propagandists. Instead, she continued her career after World War II, starred in further (but much less popular) films, and successfully traveled the world giving concert tours until her retirement in 1978. Zarah Leander died in 1981, yet she remains an icon in the gay community even today. Popular contemporary performers have recorded new versions of her songs, and her persona is recreated by German drag queens as frequently as is the "Dietrich" or Judy Garland. s Many of Leander's 155

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Figure 4.1. Star portrait: Zarah Leander.

films are regularly aired on German television, especially the Detlef Sierck (later to be known in Hollywood as Douglas Sirk) classics Zu neuen Ufern (To New Shores, 1937) and La Habanera (1937), and even overtly propagandistic texts like Die grofte Liebe (The Great Love, 1941/2) are available on video. There still exists a Zarah Leander fan club in Paris. 6 Leander's career, as did that of Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, began in her native Sweden, where she performed in various stage plays and musical revues and acted in three films. She was first noticed by the German film industry when, in 1936, she starred in her first German lan-

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guage role, the stage musical Axel an der Himmelstiir in Vienna? Her part, a Garbo-parody that had the newcomer proclaim such confident self-announcements as "Would you like to see a star?" introduced Leander to the German-speaking public in the very role that Ufa officials, desperate to replace a Marlene Dietrich in exile were seeking to fill: the role of the diva. 8 Postwar critics, to underline her lack of versatility, frequently noted that Zarah Leander never actually played different parts but perpetually reenacted the same role wearing various costumes. In fact, despite contemporary reports to the contrary, the actress later admitted that she carefully maintained her image by insisting that the roles she played were adapted to her personality and did not demand her imagining herself as another character. 9 Leander made her German-language film debut in 1936 starring in the Austrian production Premiere, again playing a famous revue star, a role that she was to repeat in almost every film she made (Fig. 4.2). The

Figure 4.2. Instant diva: the Austrian revue picture Premiere introduced Leander as a ready-made musical star.

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picture was released in Germany in early 1937, after Leander had declined American offers and her Ufa contract had been signed. to The publicity surrounding the film and Leander's "premiere" was enormous, and the performer was quickly established as a vamplike star with a "dark voice," a characterization that would remain with her for the rest of her career. During Nazi rule Zarah Leander starred in ten Ufa productions, followed by six postwar features, the last in 1966, and one West German television production. In addition, more than forty albums of Leander's songs were produced throughout her lifetime. ll Even posthumously-or, as is the case with many stars, especially then-Leander remains both a cult object and a politically contested figure, whose persona and performances have given rise to numerous heavily antagonistic readings. Surveying Leander's life's work, it becomes clear that her star persona, public image, and various film performances are inextricably linked through an emphasis on a coherent on- and offscreen persona. Film advertisements, narrative plotting, song lyrics, and Leander's "private" star portraits all contributed to synthesize a complex yet consistent image of the star. This persona, however, carried in itself a number of contradictions and inconsistencies, especially in relation to the general image of womanhood that informed National Socialist ideology. Critics often condemn Leander as the quintessential Nazi siren, while fan publications, as do her memoirs, emphasize her apoliticism. 12 On the side of the adversaries, Leander's construction into the star of Third Reich film is frequently described as an excess of artificiality. Friedemann Beyer calls her "a constructed synthetic figure consisting of hairstyles, make-up and the right lighting ... a membrane, which resonates with what millions of mothers, wives and girlfriends felt during wartime: the pain of separation. For this she did not only find the right expression with her unhappily languishing gaze and the cloudy voice, she also ennobled it."13 Her melodramatic persona-who bravely suffered in stunning outfits-is thus read as a paradigm, contrived by Nazi image makers, that was especially designed for German women, who through identification with their heroine more willingly endured the pain that National Socialist reality created for them as a result. Leander's glamour, argues Verena Lueken, remains hollow, whereas Marlene Dietrich, whom she was meant to replace, filled her glamour with content. Dietrich's freedom from convention, which manifests itself

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narratively in the sexual transgressions and liberties taken by her characters in Sternberg films, is not mirrored by Leander's roles. In contrast to Dietrich, Leander's empty form, expressed through external accessories and costumes, "signifies nothing but itself."14 Instead of inviting or stimulating sexual desire in women, her "pseudo-glamour, designed to make Leander seem 'legendary' and 'mystical', does not become effective as a life principle," because Leander's glamour is undone by the nontransgressive narratives of her filmS.IS Nonetheless the ambiguities of Leander's image remain complicated because stars and their images, as Stacey has shown, are not necessarily contained within the narrative structure of their films.I6 Many scholars are quick to point out the many contradictions inherent in Leander's star persona, on- and offscreen. Rentschler sees Zarah Leander's enormous appeal as deriving "from an ability to unite opposites: a tender physiognomy and a thick body, silent suffering and animated expressivity, domestic charm and foreign allure, solemn spirituality and playful sensuality, maternal warmth and vampish sadism; [in sum], she was the eternal female with a masculine voice."17 Helma Sanders-Brahms describes Leander in even more daring terms, linking the actress with the forbidden pleasures associated by the Nazis with "Jewish decadence." 'Was Zarah in the cinema not also sensual, threatening, wealthy, lascivious, elegant, [and] exploitative," she asks, "all that, which was said of the 'Jewish world plague' at the time?" Sanders-Brahms concludes that for the Nazis, Leander functioned as an "enlisted sinner," as the latent image of the very eroticism that Nazism wished to suppress in the everyman of National Socialism; just as the oil canvas picturing a scantily clad gypsy with fiery eyes that decorated the petit-bourgeois couple's bedroom suggested a sexuality that could not be lived, yet was fantasized, by its occupants.I 8 "Leander's performances fueled Nazi culture," suggests Rentschler, "precisely because they appeared to offer alternative points of identification."19 Conversely, Witte maintains that some elements in Leander's performances resist a ready integration into National Socialist propaganda. He claims that "Leander [in The Great Love]-in contrast to the robotics of Marika Rokk and Soderbaum's virginal melodrama-defends her neurotically marked sensuality against all the propagandistic intentions of her stage performances."2o In relation to Leander's personal biography, both the star herself and

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Leander archivist Paul Seiler stress her artistic and social association with composers, writers and directors who have been identified as antifascists, either through open resistance (Max Hansen's Hitler parodies), emigration (Detlef Sierck), or homosexuality (Bruno Balz). Leander's often-cited gay following, and her insistence on maintaining friendships with gay men even after being reprimanded by Nazi officials, are also frequently invoked by Leander's defenders.21 This is done to exonerate Leander personally from any deliberate participation in, or even association with, Nazism and its employment of entertainment as propaganda. Kreimeier, however, reads Leander's reiteration of these details as the ultimate proof of Leander's awareness of exactly what system she helped to support by taking refuge in the myth of apolitical privacy.22 To complicate matters further, Leander was suspect to the Nazi leadership. Hitler's disapproval of Leander surfaced in his persistent refusal to sign her repeated application to be awarded the honorary title "actress of the state";23 and Goebbels's initial dislike of Leander, indicated in his diaries, only softened once the actress broke through as a major star, which in turn reveals that Promi's influence was not all-controlling when it came to star popularity.24 What is at stake here? Leander's complicated image and multilayered construction lends itself to, if not antagonistic, then at least inherently contradictory, interpretations of both her films and songs as well as of her overall star persona. The question of whether Leander, or any other star, did or did not see herself as political, or as somehow participating in politics, is only relevant if we are seeking to make an evaluative judgment about Leander as a human being. Clearly, this is the concern of authors involved in fan research, such as Seiler, who hope to defend Leander as an object worthy of adoration. 25 Yet, personal intention does not exclusively determine whether or not one is acting politically. The complex workings of cultural and political operations in everyday society continuously blur the boundaries between individual action and collective consequence, between public and private. Not surprisingl y, Leander's film narra ti ves readily displa y reactionary subjects, themes, and discourses that can be interpreted as conducive to the fascist project, but even here contradictory continuities and discourses that are not germane to Nazism can be found. Feminist critics such as Heide Schliipmann, Gertrud Koch, and Lueken

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relate fascism to traditions of patriarchy in their analysis of Leander's films, looking at Leander's representation of womanhood to illuminate its configuration from a feminist perspective that is not limited to fascism but is relevant in all patriarchal societies. 26 Their varied analyses find many moments in which Leander's female figures enjoy considerable freedom and independence, but by and large conclude that Leander provided "false images of female autonomy," which in tum greased the wheels of repression by allowing for mere fantasies of freedom within a state of total domination, the essence of escapismP Thus as the most popular heroine of Nazi cinema and as an icon of a forbidden gay subculture at the same time, Leander is an exemplary figure of contradiction and incoherence. As Katharina Sykora has pointed out: Zarah Leander's star-construction presents a dilemma, which is rooted in the specificities of German film, in particular National Socialist film. The model of the Hollywood star functions as an autonomous idol, "which bathes in its own perfection" (Klaus Kreimeier), a quality, which partially resists its appropriation. National Socialist film politics did not want to forgo the powerful effects of a female star of Hollywood dimensions. Yet, the aspects of worldliness, elegance, mysteriousness, and exoticism-necessary for [the creation of] the star's aura-fundamentally conflicted with National Socialism's anti-cosmopolitanism and racism. One must understand Ufa's wooden and didactic attempts to reactivate the terms primadonna and diva for Zarah Leander in this context. 28

Leander, the Nazis' prefabricated screen goddess, thus functioned as a "double" in several ways. On the one hand, she was an "inauthentic" celebrity, one who would never quite surpass her initial ersatz function, and on the other hand she was doubled in and of herself, insofar as she had to appear dangerously seductive and self-sacrificingly pure at the same time. In fact, Zarah Leander's star publicity was marked by a special emphasis on her twofold persona. 29 This "doubled" mode of address, which we have also seen in other female stars of the period, aside from the general problematic many feminist film critics see as inherent in the representation of women in patriarchal society, in many ways derived from tension between the repressive conception of femaleness that Nazi ideology propagated during the Third Reich and the countervailing fantasies and appetites of Third Reich viewers. Once again, we encounter a star sign that was carefully monitored and yet seemed impossible to contain.

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ZARAH LEANDER'S STAR IMAGE: PORTRAITS OF A DOUBLE LIFE

The paratextual representation of Zarah Leander was as a National Socialist star whose image, apart from her films and songs, necessitated continual alignment and revision. This tension surfaced most publicly in the open criticism and the political "exposure" of Leander's duplicity that immediately followed her sudden "departure." Hence it is productive to begin this discussion of Zarah Leander's star image with the end of "Leander" the star, or rather with its suggestion. Leander's last Ufa production, Damals (In the Past) premiered on March 3, 1943. Three weeks later, after the increasing war cost had caused officials to deny her further compensation in Swedish Kroners and her Grunewald villa had been destroyed in an air raid, Zarah Leander secretly returned to Sweden. Soon after her disappearance became public, an article appeared in the newsletter Politischer Dienst for SS and police officers, which unequivocally articulated the contradictions contained within Leander's star persona. Surprisingly, the feature's rhetoric clearly acknowledged ideological problems that the National Socialist press had previously strained to negate. This publication-reminiscent in style of the seething comments of a jilted lover-deserves to be quoted in full: To New Shores We have not seen her for a while: Zarah Leander, the "Uberweib.,,3Q We hardly remember how it was, when she first appeared in German film. Then she stood in the rain and waited for yoU. 31 In actual fact, however, she waited for your sympathy, your enthusiasm, so that she could become famous. A strong erotic tension vibrated within her dark alto voice. She found a new method, derived from the chanson, to drag out her nasal notes and then catapulted pointed and enticing sounds of love-as if shot from a sling-into your sensitive stomach. She dealt in a whole new form of eroticism: a cunning mixture of transparent prudery and trivialized lasciviousness. She divulged to the masses how a "great" woman conquers the hearts of men. Initially, we didn't know if she was a woman, a worldly lady, or a master whore. In any case, she seemed to represent Europe's new edition of Greta Garbo ... and so success didn't stay away. She did not stand in the rain for long, and already she was popular.

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander 163 She delivered what she promised: a new form of love with dark and mysterious undertones in her voice, in her smile and in the way she gave herself [to a manl. "Can Love Really Be a Sin ... ?"32 For her, it was not. And if it was-and this impression one often had in her case-she didn't care, "Yes Sir!" She was never far from being a whore in how she surreptitiously pursued her own happiness. "My Life for Love, Yes Indeed!" "Only Love Makes a Woman Beautiful": a love she easily transformed into fame and fortune. 33 And so on it went---endlessly-in her films. When the war broke out, she switched on a new brand of heroic passion. Again and again she landed on her feet, while she also landed, often and arduously, in suggestive situations. Completely herself and truly at home, however, she was in the bars, in the dancing clubs, in the milieu of the chanson singer, where she could advertise herself and her abilities without inhibition. "I Know One Day a Miracle Will Happen ... " and it did: Zarah played the good housewife and devoted mother and the public was moved to tears in the face of so much selfless womanhood. Meanwhile her honorarium climbed. She played every note of her audience's feelings. Young girls attempted to play the little coquette, if they didn't quite have it in them to mimic Leander's big one. Her subject, however, always remained love-there the most money could be made. If she ever loved, truly and self-sacrificingly, is impossible to say. It seems that for this imported Swede-cool, calculating and cunning as she was-love has never been more than a game, which she played on screen, playing with the confused emotions of an insufficiently educated public; a game that was financially rewarding for years. First she wanted to portray stylish ladies in Germany, and then she increasingly strove to push aside and replace the German woman. We helped her by letting her become great while doing so. Her image has decorated every bunker, and for many infantrymen she was the epitome of femininity. Now, Ivan probably sits in the bunkers and may delight himself with her polished smile. We hope that he enjoys the show! Zarah has vanished. She went away when our meadow of eroticism was grazed off and enough money was made. One can still distribute her, however, and maybe gain hard currency that way, but we are saved from new films, and the German woman can breathe again. Zarah swam off to new shores. "Don't Cry for Love", we don't lament her loss. Was it a letdown? "It's Not the End of the World" is the tune that derisively hums over our belated realization. 34

Ironically, this condemning narrative of Zarah Leander's German career reflects a change in attitude toward Leander's public image that continued in the postwar years. The notion of Leander as a merciless ca-

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reerist who sought to advance herself to gain fame and fortune regardless of who suffered (in postwar years it was not the "German woman" but Leander's immediate family or, indirectly, the victims of the Nazi dictatorship) prevailed as Leander's political function as the star of National Socialism began to attract scrutiny after World War Ips Both the SS press release above and postwar Leander criticism made an attempt to clarify who Zarah Leander really was and/or to expose the "falseness" of her earlier image. More interestingly, however, these image revisions also serve to underline just how much the public discourse struggled with the inconsistencies inherent in Leander's star persona. This warrants a closer look at the construction of Leander's star image, especially at how-if at all-the ideological complications that seemed so readily apparent to SS commentators immediately following Leander's "defection" were contained or concealed earlier. ''Who is Zarah Leander?" An obvious question, used as a catch phrase, introduced Ufa's extensive promotion of "Zarah Leander" in 1936. Carl Opitz, in charge of Ufa publicity, initiated a press campaign in 4000 German newspapers resulting in 80 magazine covers featuring Leander by the time Premiere celebrated its Berlin opening in February 1937.36 The various publications, in keeping with the National Socialist Gleichschaltung and the prohibition of film criticism in 1936,37 endlessly repeated the same preformulated slogans: "Zarah Leander, the great Swedish artist; 'a second Greta Garbo' "; "Zarah Leander; the great film and revue star, a captivating figure as singer and actress"; "Zarah Leander; the woman with the dark voice."38 Within weeks, Ufa's aggressive advertising paid off and "Zarah Leander," Ufa's new diva, had been created. The image of the "diva," however, did not easily fit the dominant paradigms of National Socialist womanhood. As with other actressesin addition to the newspaper captions above, which usually complimented star photographs depicting a glamorous Leander-another kind of reporting quickly augmented Leander's star coverage: "This woman does not know how to pose and does not act the' grande dame', she is of a compelling warmth and a refreshing naturalness. One mustn't believe that this artist, who we have now admired in the most diverse roles, could even possess an ounce of 'star' attitude. She is a woman who has found her happiness and life purpose-aside from in her art-

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander 165

in a happy and harmonious marriage, who loves her home and her family, and who is loved back by them."39 Peculiarly, fan publications and magazine features insisted that Leander could not be further from what contemporary audiences imagined to be a star.40 Similar passages describing a "regular" woman, natural and artless, who is at home in two worlds--one domestic, the other the world of the theater~an be found in most of the printed materials discussing Leander's offscreen personality and private life. 41 Ironically, there can be little doubt that anyone familiar with any of Leander's films, or even a reader who casually glanced over the photographs accompanying the text, must have realized that Leander knew exactly how to strike an affected pose. The inconsistencies that arise indicate that photo reports, such as the one cited above, were caught in an unavoidable dilemma: the star coverage on Leander simply could not help but openly display its twin discourses-the advertisement of a film diva and its simultaneous renunciation. Like no other Ufa star, Zarah Leander embodied the tensions and contradictions of her time. It follows that the German film press, often criticized for their laxity regarding matters of morality, initiated various media maneuvers that sought to contain Leander's star image, which can be traced throughout most publications circulated in Germany at the time. The media coverage that dealt with Zarah Leander as a private person repeatedly focused on a number of distinct discourses, chosen to help integrate Leander's persona into the larger framework of National Socialist ideology: the realm of the family, which included discussions of her ancestry, motherhood and marriage(s); the sphere of artistic expression, in which the artist functioned as an extraordinary and genius like figure; and finally, the field of nature, which served to reconnect the elevated star figure to her earthbound "blood and soil" roots. In his analysis of the American star system, Richard de Cordova has demonstrated how star images frequently function to negotiate issues of morality. To guarantee the impression of "the moral healthiness of the cinema" as an institution, "[t]he star worked to assert that the cinema was, 'at its source', a healthy phenomenon. This healthiness was proven largely through reference to the stars' famiiies."42 This rhetorical mechanism finds its equivalent in Nazi Germany, where star images

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were closely monitored to maintain ideological cohesiveness. Especially film stars like Leander, associated with onscreen promiscuity and the performance of provocative songs, needed to be "cleaned up" through the kind of para textual reporting on the "private" Leander discussed here. Prominent in Leander publicity was the attempt to privilege her "natural talent" over "Hollywood artifice" -an ideological move that was most strongly articulated in Kristina Soderbaum's star construction. The weekly Filmwoche, for instance, introduced the new star as a familial exception: "It is the first time that an artistic nature emerges in her family. That the emphasis should lie on the word nature is proven by the growth of her talent without instruction or art-school training-'plein air' so to speak-which corresponds to the strong physicality of her appearance, the clarity of her face and the elementary fullness of her voice. Over many generations, there were only parsons in her family. Only her brothers broke with that tradition, they all became officers."43 Here, the notions of the "natural" and the "great actor" served as an alternative to the general notion of the Hollywood star, often negatively depicted as an empty and artificial vessel or an arrogant and conceited individual. 44 Consequently, despite Leander's strong typecasting and the uniformity of her roles, Leander was frequently portrayed as desiring to be a great character actress, whose rums depict genuine human stories. 45 Moreover, contemporary articles often identified Leander's "special calling" to the stage as a naturalistic drive. To do justice to her "talent" and become a star, Leander was described as having had to trade in another, perhaps happier life, which she painfully sought to recreate in her spare hours: the life of a housewife and mother.46 A contemporary journal, for example, begins the narrative of Leander's upbringing like this: Who would have told a five-year-old little girl, who is finnly intent on becoming a good housewife: "Child, it's all very well with your cooking and all, but you must join the theater. That is your place?!" No one. [Her father] recognizes that she is a highly gifted child, but deep down he doesn't plan anything else for her future than a good match. When she is six years old, she plays the piano at a small concert in Karlstadt and becomes known as a child prodigy. Her father doesn't like that, for many reasons.

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander 167 But when Zarah ... begins not only to play but to sing, he suspects for the first time what his child is drawn towardF

This passage underlined that it was Leander's idiosyncratic disposition and special talent that overrode her other, more "normal" impulses, which were seen as generally suitable for a woman. Consequently, Leander ceased to be a role model for "ordinary" young girls and entered the realm of those "predestined for greatness." The notion of the star was linked to the similar construction of the genius, whose suffering was the subject of a whole genre of Third Reich pictures. Both paradigms involved an emphasized validation of "specialness" as a prerequisite for public duty and were embodied most strikingly in the persona of the charismatic leader figure. 48 Hence, the reframing of the star concept allowed a star like Leander to gain vast popularity without embarrassing a political system that, at least ideologically, should disapprove of her image. By reformulating obvious discrepancies, National Socialist star reporting tried to integrate Leander's "selfless work" as a film star into an ideological framework that valued human self-sacrifice in service of the (National Socialist) public good beyond anything else. The impression of Leander's complicity in the overall mechanics of National Socialist public life was further emphasized by the star's participation in official events. She regularly supported communal fundraisers and appeared in "request concerts" -live radio shows in which famous star singers performed songs requested mostly by soldiers at the front-that aired all over the Reich. 49 In addition, Leander was frequently depicted attending social functions at the homes of political leaders, which further linked her public persona to the Nazi officials in power. 50 To further underline Leander's dedication, Third Reich star portraits also frequently emphasized her long and exhausting workday, thereby reintegrating film acting into the field of labor. Hence the construction of the star's wholesome offscreen personality and strict work ethic counterbalanced her onscreen image, which represented Leander as a glamorous and seductive performer. Especially Leander's marriage, motherhood and familial origins fulfilled important functions in this counterconstruction. The National Socialist press described Leander, in Ellis's terms, as a living paradox: an ordinary and an extraordinary woman in one. Or rather, it was Leander's ordinariness which she had

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to sacrifice to fulfill the duties for which the "special" have been predestined. And because "normal" women, Nazi doctrine suggested, hoped for nothing but a life as a housewife and mother, carrying the burden of talent that led to movie stardom implied martyrdom. The foregrounding of familial relations in Leander's star discourse was primarily marked by the consistent mention of Leander's motherhood and "Aryan" family background. She was frequently depicted with her children and quoted emphasizing the importance of family. Moreover, Leander's "family portraits" often contained blatant misrepresentations, which included the parentage of her children as well as their physical appearance: "To make the happiness of her loving marriage [to Vidar Forsell] complete, two blond-locked children joined their union over the years. Frau Zarah is a loving, nurturing mother who plays with her children, chasing them through the house and across the yard during every minute that she can spare."51 In fact, Leander's children-neither of them blond-were born much earlier and were fathered by Leander's first husband, Nils Leander, from whom she also took her name. 52 The marriage ended in divorce, a fact that other publications went to great length to justify: "The choice of a very young and child-like girl could no longer withstand the demands of an artist whose spirit and soul had matured. And so two people separated, in friendship and harmony, and in mutual agreement."53 In lieu of a sexual or romantic history that was suitable for producing a clean-cut image, it was Leander's childhood and parentage, as well as the natural environment of her native Sweden, that received significant attention. Her father-described as "one of those Hun-like northerners," "tall and blond"~a real estate agent by profession, was often misrepresented as a parson. 55 Failing that, he was always portrayed as a man with strictly conservative values, whose ancestry, consisting of generations of clergymen, was marked by a deep connection to nature: "Here in the Varmland [an area in central Sweden] they lived, the doughty men of the Hedberg clan, leading a burdensome and arduous, yet wonderful and free life. They chased over the icy roads and frozen moors, if the duties of the ministry demanded it."56 Leander's mother, whose "earthy sense for the practical" countered the "silent spiritual thoughtfulness" of her husband and daughter, was reported to stem from a long line of farmers (a line that also surfaced in Kristina Soderbaum's star coverage).57

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These largely fabricated stories clearly resonated with the ''blood and soil" motif characteristic of Third Reich aesthetics. Offset against the more problematic areas in Leander's biography as well as the complications inherent in her Garboesque image, however, these narratives of origin only appeared to lock Leander into an ideological paradigm that she did not easily fit. The incompatibility of Leander's "two faces," one public and one private, became especially apparent in editorials that foregrounded Leander's lavish styles and fashions-featuring multipage photo spreads of Leander in her latest film costumes, often spectacularly ostentatious evening gowns-while simultaneously justifying such splendor verbally. Here, Leander's conspicuous interest in fashion was either neutralized by the attestation that it derived merely from her artistic desire to maximize her character's "visual impact" (she happens to be playing "a very spoiled and stylish lady");58 or it was naturalized as an instinct intrinsic to all things female (inaccurate biological examples citing the splendid color of female birds were produced to back up this theory).59 What remained nonetheless was the visual image of a "lady", enshrined in silk and satin, whose physical appeal was not lessened but enhanced by the material excess that surrounded her body. The incongruities that so clearly emerge in the star reporting surrounding Zarah Leander's person illustrate the very antagonisms that the articles themselves attempt to counteract and redress. They describe the fundamental tensions, arising out of the conflicting images of womanhood circulating under Nazi rule, that we have repeatedly encountered throughout this book. While National Socialist ideology promoted the homely ideal of "service" in motherhood, the popular media capitalized on the eroticism and worldly allure of the seductive female: an image very familiar from the Weimar period and kept alive through Hollywood imports. The idea of the star as a paradoxical figure, which Ellis has put forward, or Richard Dyer's suggestion that stars negotiate very difficult and often contradictory social elements and discontinuities in their star image, are therefore especially relevant to Leander's star persona. 60 Notwithstanding the political impact that the ideological maneuvers of the National Socialist press might have had, there is something strikingly obvious and forced about Leander's publicity work, which mitigates against the notion that Leander projected a unified and consistent

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star image. In fact, it seems superfluous to undertake symptomatic readings of Zarah Leander's star coverage to uncover what it sought to conceal and neutralize. In keeping with dominant Nazi propaganda stylistics, the issues were plainly spelled out and made explicit in the texts themselves: to undo the "damage" that Leander's sinful vamplike image might inflict, National Socialist star reporting simply resorted to a tactics of formal denial. Many star figures at the time provoked associations that were connected to well-established tropes left over from the Weimar years or circulated by Hollywood. To counter such "regressive" proclivities, audiences/readers were simply told again and again what they might not have guessed otherwise: that Zarah Leander was not what she appeared to be. What then did she appear to be? In contrast to the news features discussing Leander as a private person, the contemporary movie journal Filmwelt analyzed Leander's appeal as a performer in the following terms: She represents the tall, heavy, earthy woman who carries the hot fullness of life inside of her. If she hadn't this translucent, soulful visage, she would appear much more realistic and robust. All the things that move a woman are reflected on this incredibly plastic and perfect face: sadness and pain, love and happiness, melancholia and renouncement. Zarah Leander, in her stance as an actress, is the epitome of "transcendental sensuality". Her inner being is as dark as her wondrous deep alto voice, which so enticingly expresses women's hidden desires. It is hard to reduce to one single formula what makes Zarah Leander so unique: maybe it is the heaviness and restraint of her carriage, the latent force of her passion, the kind of passivity and "indolence" in her disposition. Or maybe it is the continuous yearning for what cannot be fulfilled that she expresses in her chansons. The fact that we cannot tell what it is, is what makes up her individual flair. 61

The sexual allusions present in this commentary were widely paralleled in the many writings on Leander that referred to her film and musical

performances. Leander's onscreen persona characteristically marked a split femininity: her film characters continuously oscillated between the impulse to pursue their own erotic desires and exhibitionist driveswhich were enacted in a radical privileging of the romance-intensive lifestyle of a revue performer-and the ennoblement of self-restraint and sacrifice, which the very intensity of those earlier feelings of passion, either for a child or a lover, might motivate. Yet while National Socialist publications ceaselessly struggled to

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keep alive the idea of Leander as the self-sacrificing artist-mother figure, there is no indication that this conception of Leander's personality in any way prevailed or triumphed as the only, or most authentic, one with the public. Instead, we encounter in Leander the kind of melodramatic identity that, according to Christine Gledhill, is shared by most stars to some degree. Gledhill argues that if melodrama, while confirming the status quo, derives its energy through the villain's transgressiveness, the star system promotes model domestic lives excited by hints of scandal. In Leander's case, scandalous were the deeply cut cleavage that was part of her trademark, her androgynous low singing voice, and her suggestive chanson lyrics. In fact, her very existence as the queen of glamour was strangely provocative in a society that supposedly resented such "Jewish" imagery. Hence, the very presence and immense popularity of a star like Leander exemplifies the ideological inconsistencies that existed in everyday life under Nazi rule. National Socialist doctrine discouraged, and even forbade, careers for women, yet Leander played a successful professional in almost every picture. Women were strongly directed toward marriage and motherhood, but Leander repeatedly experienced the failing of relationships and single motherhood onscreen. German women were encouraged to trade in their made-up and ladylike appearance for a wholesome "natural" look, yet Leander was all glamorous, highly stylized surface. Finally, the role of the actor was to be integrated into the realm of working-class labor, but Leander consistently presented herself as a supreme object of adulation. It was only after her "desertion," as the SS memorandum that began this discussion informed its readers, that the "German woman" could ''breathe'' again. The 1943 article explicitly formulated what prior Third Reich publications had sought to deny: that Zarah Leander's star persona projected an erotic image that operated in direct opposition to the conceptions of womanhood that National Socialist philosophy idealized. In fact, the text implied that contemporary audiences recognized Leander's image as an ideological complication. This thesis is further supported by the public discourse surrounding Leander, which struggled so intensely to both build up and contain the contradictions that her double image produced. Indeed, it is the attempt at reconciling apparent antagonisms-an operation emblematic of the fascist projectwithin which the star figure "Zarah Leander" is caught.

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THE HEROINE OF SACRIFICE? ZARAH LEANDER'S CELLULOID TRIALS

All of the ten Vfa productions starring Zarah Leander-constituting the body of Leander films made in Nazi Germany-carefully used the star and her image to construct a consistent fictional persona defined by recurring character attributes and narrative encodings. The five most prominent narrative features epitomizing a Leander role allude to the character's alternating status of "diva," "independent woman," "martyr," "lover," and "mother." The problematic inherent in a combination of these descriptions distinguishes Leander from other stars of her time, such as Soderbaum and Harvey, whose onscreen personae do not encompass the complicated range of opposing impulses within the narrative framework of their single roles. "Leander," suggests Rentschler, "challenged Nazi prudery; her frank eroticism brought German women a sexual self-understanding beyond that of the domestic slave and deferent spouse ... [The Nazis] would have preferred a more virtuous German woman as their most celebrated heroine."62 According to Sanders-Brahms, Leander even became "the illusionary image of transgression, which made other Vfa stars [such as Kristina Soderbaum and Marika Rokk] look silly" in comparison. 63 In contrast, Lueken argues that Leander's glamorous attributes are simply insubstantial embellishments. "Even though she [Leander's various characters] makes her money in a questionable milieu, she retains a good heart, and maintains her love of her homeland and child."64 Sykora further observed the continuation of this pattern throughout Leander's films. "Especially the sequence of Zarah Leander's ten Vfa pictures shows successively how the initially obvious ambivalence of her expressive range is condensed the more the film themes pick up the racist pattern of National Socialist ideology."65 However, the complications contrived through the narrative were predominantly dependent on Leander's inscription in contradictory discourses. To begin with, Zarah Leander almost always played a star, and stardom was a concept that Nazi ideologues found superfluous, if not counterproductive. In Premiere, Zu neuen Ufern (To New Shores, 1937), Heimat (Home, 1938), Das Lied der Wilste (Desert Song, 1939), Der Weg ins Freie (The Journey to Freedom, 1941), and Die Grofle Liebe (The Great Love, 1941/2), Leander played famous singers; in La Habanera (1937),

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander 173

Der Blaufuchs (Blue Fox, 1938), Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht (It was a Gay Ball Night, 1939), Das Herz der Konigin (The Queen's Heart, 1940), and Damals (In the Past, 1943), Leander, while not a professional, publicly performed songs. Her characters either began the narrative enacting a star or they, at least temporarily, became one. Hence the most dominant image of Leander's onscreen persona was that of the "diva," a grande dame, who was adored by her male admirers and experienced in love. Although this narrative positioning of the heroine tended to serve as the springboard for the conflicts that followed, the incessant repetition of the image in every film indicates its popularity with contemporary audiences. Leander's exoticism invited both male and female viewers, offering visual pleasure and vicarious fantasy fulfillment, as well as provoking sexual desire. Leander's theatricality not only addressed a gay constituency through her stylized performance, which one might read as "camp," but her characterization as "diva" also offered a model that women who opposed the principles of National Socialist femininity could identify with. Leander played "tendentious roles," Claudia Rhode observed, "which were easily exploited for propagandistic purposes, especially because her accent demanded that she played foreigners and this supposed internationality made one belief that there still existed a connection between the Nazi state and the world outside."66 This also means, however, that Leander's generic persona was significantly dependent on audience's fantasies of fame and the performance of glamour, a paradigm that withstood its subsequent deconstruction through the narrative, as its very existence as genre upheld it. Leander's characters typically underwent fundamental changes over the course of the story. Her characters almost always considered giving up their careers to (re)tum to a more domestic life and often chose this path in the end. If this was impossible, as in The Journey to Freedom, the character "liberated" herself through suicide. In addition, the films' resolutions frequently refused to provide satisfying conclusions; their happy endings were consistently ambiguous and riddled with compromise and forfeiture. It almost seems as if Leander's story lines devoted themselves to punishing Leander for the emancipated and indulgent lifestyles her characters were initially associated with. The next narrative trope with which Leander is commonly linked is the role of the "martyr." Leander's characters always suffered. Her regal posture, stately composure, and enduring inertia predisposed her for her reign as the queen of melodrama.

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My previous case studies have shown that melodrama, next to comedy, was a significant generic arena for women in Nazi cinema. But whereas Kristina Soderbaum only acted in melodramas and Lilian Harvey was the star of musical comedy, Zarah Leander fused the most popular elements from both genres and exclusively starred in musical melodramas, which foregrounded her performances as much as they exploited her pain. Her anguish was usually derived from a tension between matters of the heart and career concerns, either Leander's own (To New Shores, Home, The Journey to Freedom, In the Past) or her lovers' (The Blue Fox, It was a Gay Ball Night, The Great Love). The Journey to Freedom, for instance, centers on Leander as a celebrated opera diva who is reluctant to depart from Vienna to join her new husband, an aristocrat nmning a large country estate in East Prussia. Revolutionary upheavals force the singer to fake her own death. Soon her unsuspecting husband remarries, a twist that later enables a blackmailer to threaten his young family with the revelation of his bigamy. Leander's character, guilty of having caused these complications, consequently takes her own life to put things right. In The Journey to Freedom, the female protagonist's investment in her own career concerns is clearly the catalyst for the narrative conflicts that emerge, and the only solution was the tragic end of the heroine. In contrast, the professional difficulties of a young Tchaikovsky in It was a Gay Ball Night cause Leander's Katharina to marry a rich man, whose wealth provides the means for a secret patronage for her young lover while she selflessly forgoes her own chance at emotional fulfillment. Here, similar to Soderbaum's fate in Immensee (made two years later), the professional success of an artistic genius figure occasions Leander's martyrdom. Moreover, if it wasn't Leander's position as "lover," which problematized the narrative, it was her concern as a "mother." Motherhood-a common motif in Third Reich film-was central to the plots of La Habanera, Home, and In the Past and often motivated Leander's heroines to actively pursue a professional career and become "independent women."67 The "fight for the child," as her character, Magda von Schwartze, put it in Home, "is the hardest fight of all," yet the energy released in this struggle also enables the character to rise to international stardom, thereby allowing for a point of contact between self-sacrifice and self-realization. Similarly, the mysterious heroine of In the Past falls in and out of a number of assumed personae, ranging from physician to

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variety singer to murderess, all in an effort to secure a stable upbringing for her daughter; and although the protagonist of La Habanera, Astree, does not take up a career to attain an independent existence for herself and her son, it is nonetheless concern for her child that ultimately prompts her to leave her ill-fated marriage to a local Puerto Rican padron. In all of Leander's films, her protagonists' independence was strongly foregrounded-almost always she was depicted as a working professional whose existence is uprooted through the intervention of a domineering male figure. This tension clearly distinguished Leander from Soderbaum's recurrent representation as a victim, whose attempts at independence and sexual freedom were perpetually doomed to fail. The social tensions in respect to the role of women in Germany's 1930s, which in themselves derived from opposing discursive traditions, thus emerged in the antithetical construction of the Leander narratives. While the emancipated aspects of Leander's strong, sexually active, and economically resourceful female characters referred to the progressive agendas of the earlier German women's movement and the socialist practice of including women as comrades, the simultaneous erection of narrative obstacles and emotional trauma, which Leander's heroines perpetually encountered in their relationships with men, deferred to the reactionary strategies of fascist patriarchy.

Zu neuen Ufern (To New Shores, Ufa, 1937) "It isn't easy to find material for me," Leander reported in 1937 follow-

ing her first successful Ufa production, To New Shores, "1 am supposed to play serious parts and sing chansons-it is hard to combine that."68 This formula, which Leander outlined as Ufa's concept for their use of her as a star, indeed reemerged in all the films that followed. Leander's work with Detlef Sierck laid the groundwork for an onscreen image that was as stable as it was complicated. To New Shores and La Habanera have consequently often been read as the quintessential Leander texts; they not only introduced the star with an already fully developed star persona that did not change significantly afterward, but also are usually regarded as the Leander films that were of the highest artistic quality. This is mostly attributed to Sierck's role as Spielleiter and his subsequent reputation as the Hollywood auteur Douglas Sirk, whose 1950s American melodramas were later canonized as masterpieces of ironic excess and subversive hyperbole, both by academics and New German filmmakers

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in search of film historical roots. 69 "In the films of Sirk," writes Thomas Elsaesser, "an uncompromising, fundamentally innocent energy is gradually turned away from simple, direct fulfillment by the emergence of a conscience, a sense of guilt and responsibility ... a theme which in Sirk is always interpreted in terms of cultural decadence."7o Sirk himself later stressed that his ironic Hollywood narratives, which were marked by striking visual metaphors and emotional pathos, should be searched below the surface "to find complex structures [artificial happy endings and the presence of irony] and their materialization of social critique."71 To take things further, Laura Mulvey writes on Sirk: "Ideological contradiction is the overt mainspring and specific content of melodrama, not a hidden unconscious thread to be picked up on only by special critical processes. No ideology can even pretend to totality: it must provide an outlet for its own inconsistencies."n Whether or not the American Sirk made melodramas that overtly negotiated and/ or covertly undercut the American status quo of the Eisenhower era, the melodramas the German Sierck made with Ufa deserve special attention. Were Sirle's "subversive" techniques also at work in Sierck's Third Reich films, or, as Rentschler suspects, do "the two [Sierck's films and Leander's performances] survive as 'subversive' entities only at the price of understating or even overlooking how their roles became part of larger functions?"73 Kreirneier remarks that in Sierck's German films, "[t]he double character of melodrama revealed itself in the contrary union of the tear-jerker and the virtuoso chamber piece, in the films' reactionary plots and advanced formal awareness, and in their sentimentality and irony-all this primed by Zarah Leander's songs, which prompted large parts of the audience to burst into tears."74 A close analysis of To New Shores and La Habanera clearly establishes continuities between Sierck's Ufa work and his Hollywood oeuvre. Especially apparent is his visual style which emphasized the characters' emotional isolation through spatial barriers such as screens, veils and shadows, and which emerged afterward as Sirk's Hollywood signature of cinematic excess. Also already present is the director's privileging of his female characters' melodramatic suffering or, in Kreimeier's words, his ''basic melody of longing and renunciation."75 Sierck's earlier Third Reich films had already dealt with fallen women and melodramatic fates. In Schlussakkord (Final Accord, 1936), for example, a decadent, childless adulteress is melodramatically contrasted with her

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morally superior rival. Here, an impoverished mother is forced to play nanny to her own child after the boy has been adopted by the wealthy villainess and her estranged husband, a brilliant conductor. Only after the false mother Ibad wife, a figure who recalls the salon lady of the Weimar years, has been eliminated through suicide, are birth mother and child united with the Beethoven-loving widower, thus forming a nuclear family more appropriate for the Nazi era.76 In contrast to Final Accord, however, where the narrative tension was derived through the contrasting of two oppositional heroines, Sierck's subsequent To New Shores united the previous antagonists in the single figure of Zarah Leander. The Sierckian representations of Leander's melodramatic persona firmly locked Leander into a typecast narrative, which was to inform her image throughout her career.77 Leander's work with Sierck thus laid the groundwork for an onscreen image that was as stable as it was complicated. To New Shores is set in England and Australia in the 1840s and follows the downward trajectory of a celebrated London singer via deportation and imprisonment to her final transformation into a farmer's wife in the Australian bush. The film, which catapulted Zarah Leander onto the Alist of Ufa actresses, closely stuck to the narrative blueprint that Ufa had in mind for her: the combination of serious parts and the performance of chansons. It further introduced a narrative pattern that was to become a standard framework for any future Leander film: the systematic destruction---or at least its attempt---of Zarah Leander's screen character's identity as a star and her subsequent reconstruction into a less threatening female, such as a mother, a wife, or even a corpse. The film opens by introducing Leander's romantic partner, Albert, a decadent aristocrat who is in permanent debt (Willy Birgel). This is followed with turmoil at Hyde Park's speaker's comer, where an outraged protester laments the decline of British morals exemplified by Gloria Vane's disreputable performance at a London theater. Finally, we see Leander appear on stage as the performer Gloria Vane, wearing a lavish gown of black lace that shows much of her breasts and back (Fig. 4.3). Under the applause of a leering male audience, punctured by the occasional protest against such indecency, she sings: Man nennst mich Miss Vane die beriihmte, bekannte. Yes Sir! Die nicht sehr beliebte

They call me Miss Vane, well-known and famous. Yes Sir! I'm not very popular with

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Figure 4.3. Glamour couple: The singer Gloria Vane and the aristocratic Albert embody the decadence of bourgeois nineteenth-century Europe.

bei Onkel und Tante. No, Sir! Man filrchtet ich konnt' die behiiteten Neffen im Spielsalon oder im Himmelbett treffen. Ich konnt' sie verfilhren mit tausenden Listen zu etwas was sie vielleicht doch noch nicht wiiflten. Yes Sir!

uncles and aunts. No Sir! They fear I might meet their well-protected nephews in gambling halls or four-poster beds. That I could seduce them with thousands of tricks, to do something that they might not yet have known. Yes, Sir!

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The performance is brief and, aside from the song's lyrics and Leander's lacy gown, little about the nonchalant Miss Vane signifies scandalousness or "loose morals." It almost seems as though the outraged audience's exclamations of "scandalous, scandalous" are there to summon up, rather than comment on, that very impression. Gloria Vane's performance does not resonate with the song lyrics; she does not project that she actually wishes to seduce anyone's nephew. Instead, her erotic attention is firmly focused on Albert, whose imminent departure for Australia, where he is to become an officer, causes her emotional pain. Although the image of Leander as a coquette of questionable morals is used to initially attract cinema audiences, the narrative quickly presents its primary agenda and thereby exposes the earlier presentation as a ruse. Soon after their separation, Albert is discovered to have committed check fraud. To protect him, Gloria admits to the act instead. In her defense, she once more alludes to her erotic star persona, which is otherwise absent from the film: "You see, the new show, all the new costumes ... what's a woman to do if she wants to remain decent?" It is her reputation for indecency, however, that brings about her fall. The attorneys call for an "exemplary ruling against the general corruption of the country's morals," and the Royal Court convicts Gloria to be deported to Australia, where she is to spend seven years in the notorious women's prison Paramatta. Gloria Vane's star existence--her previous life and career, which are responsible for her compromised, yet alluring notoriety-thus remains extra textual; an allusion that simply serves as the narrative springboard for the unfolding of quite a different woman's tale, that of a female martyr in love. Friedemann Beyer recapitulates: To New Shores is an exemplary film because it already contains all dramatic ingredients that return in most of the subsequent Zarah-pictures: 1. She plays herself, a celebrated singing star. 2. She models enchanting, sweeping costumes. 3. She is driven abroad. 4. She suffers; one misfortune follows the next, each one harder than the one before.

Once a prisoner in Paramatta, Gloria is stripped of her previous characterization as star; the change of location also promotes a dramatic

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shift in the heroine's representation. In London, it was she who functioned as the exotic object, as an outsider in a familiar setting; in Australia, it is the country itself-with its prison life, farm sequences, and indigenous extras-that assumes the space of the outlandish, whereas Gloria Vane becomes common, a star reduced to a number. "She was a woman who had a big name," Albert explains to the warden when he visits the prison making anonymous inquiries about his former lover. "Here, she is number 218," the warden retorts. Albert further learns that to free Gloria he would have to marry her. To improve the "birthrate in the colonies" female prisoners are released if they marry a local man. In support of this process, the prison even holds "bridal shows," in which the women are paraded in front of their prospective husbands. Albert, however, does not want to marry a prisoner because it would ruin his military career. In fact, he is already having an affair with the local physician's wife. Furthermore, he is informally betrothed to the "innocent" daughter of Sydney's governor, Mary, even though she bores him sexually. "That was very nice, what the reverend said about marital duties," Mary exclaims on her wedding day later in the film, "but it embarrassed me," a statement that is to be read against Gloria Vane's unabashed chanson lyrics in the beginning. In fact, none of the male characters actually prefers Mary. Moreover, the moral culpability in To New Shores essentially lies with the male lead. Correspondingly, Albert's unprincipled egotism and lack of moral rectitude, which function as a critique of aristocratic decadence vis-a.-vis the honest work ethic of the colonists, finally destroy Gloria's love for him, which in turn prompts his suicide in the end. In addition, Albert is contrasted with a local farmer (played by Victor Staal, Leander's love interest in The Great Love) who catches a glimpse of Gloria on her prison route. Convinced that he can tell from her face that she is not a criminal, he decides to marry her, a choice that shows him to be independent of concerns regarding his social status. This characterization suggests the popular notion that the lower and middle classes, which Gloria encounters in Australia, are comprised of true and unprejudiced human beings, whereas her old entourage of aristocrats and wealthy industrialists are of lower moral character. Later, at the prison's "bridal show," the young farmer reappears among many ragged and unappetizing-looking men as they recite their criteria for prospective wives. "A fat one," one suitor announces, "not a

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skinny, degenerate one." "You're degenerate yourself," jokes another, as the procession of women commences. The use of the word entartet, or "degenerate," in this scene closely recalls the National Socialists' use of vocabulary in respect to culture and race.7B "It becomes apparent," argues Sykora, "that To New Shores in its use of terminology operated at the peak of National Socialist argumentation, especially since the filmic context links the expulsion of 'degenerates' with the notion of "selective breeding."79 Gloria is not yet ready to begin her metamorphosis into an outback farm wife, however. Immediately following her merely strategic acceptance of the farmer's proposal and her subsequent release from prison, Gloria leaves her impromptu fiance, whose physical affections are clearly unwelcome to her, to seek out her former lover. Although the film privileges the image of the middle-class farm owner, whose solid character is positively juxtaposed with Albert's decadence and moral corruption, Gloria's subjectivity never allows for this recognition. The tragedy of her romance with Albert remains the dominant motivation for her experience of melodrama. Thus, when she arrives at Albert's precisely as his engagement to Mary is announced, she falls into even deeper despair. Destitute, she procures an engagement at a second-rate pub, where the owner advises her not to be "timid with her charms." What was an enticing allusion in the beginning of the narrative has now turned into the harsh reality of prospective prostitution. The heroine's insistence on self-sacrificing love ultimately threatens to turn the formerly flirtatious revue star into a working-class whore. Moreover, Gloria's attempt to reinhabit her former persona fails bitterly. Instead, she is further humiliated through her inability to entice the local audience. When she appears on stage, shabbily tarted up in unbecoming and cheap robes, her presentation of the heart-wrenching Ich steh' im Regen (Standing in the Rain), which became an extremely successful standard for Leander, causes her to be heckled off stage. Having arrived, as she puts it, "at the opposite shore," the gap between her former life as a happy and playful coquette and her present state as a woman marked by the experience of disappointment cannot be bridged (Fig. 4.4). Gloria's earlier identity has become entirely erased. Even Albert's ultimate remorse now seems meaningless. "I don't love you anymore," Gloria tells him, "I've been in Paramatta." Emotionally

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Figure 4.4. To New Shores: Gloria's successful adjustment to life "down under" requires her transformation from seductive stage diva to wholesome farm wife.

empty, she voluntarily returns to the prison. There, she is found by the love-stricken young farmer, who repeats his proposal; expressionless, Gloria accepts. The film's last images are of the wedding ceremony, where Gloria-as her new husband visibly displays his happinessglumly gives her hand in marriage avoiding his gaze (Fig. 4.5). To New Shores' happy ending is hardly readable as such, and the film left spectators with a sense of tragedy: "[DetlefSierck makes sure] that Zarah Leander's almost statuesque composure at the end does not come across as expressionless stiffness, but feels like the agonizing spasm of an excoriated soul. There is no happy end (the officers shoots himself), but a new awakening of the woman's will to live-next to the farmer-which leaves room to hope for a mature happiness, full of mild renunciation, that might grow later."so Leander's frozen mask of defeat thus leaves the viewer with a highly ambiguous resolution, a narrative strategy that also characterizes Douglas Sirk's Hollywood melodramas.

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Figure 4.5. Honeymoon: Gloria's enthusiasm for her new life is markedly absent as the newlyweds begin their journey to their home in the Australian outback.

Indeed, Leander's body on screen in many ways strikingly anticipates a later Sirkian object of desire, Rock Hudson, whose masculine body is also a flat surface, a nonthreatening, held pose. "Part of the appeal of Rock Hudson's body," argues Richard Meyer, "was that he seemed somewhat immobile, available as an object of erotic delectation but without the threat of male action."BI Sierck's static shots of a motionless Leander similarly combined the erotic appeal of beauty and glamour with the inertia of a tragic figure. Gertrud Koch goes as far as to argue that Sierck/Sirk is consistent throughout his career in his sadistic treatment of female characters. In the "duplicity" of his filmic texts she finds "a privileging of the authoritarian-sadistic gaze, which subjugates the dissolved emotional world of its converts, and which rewrites the sexual body of the woman into a destructive, deformed fetish, on which an exorcising cleansing needs to be performed."B2

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Elements of this pattern are clearly visible in Sierck's second film with Leander, La Habanera. The film presents the star as a young innocent, Astree, who is visiting Puerto Rico with an elderly aunt. She falls in love with the local padron, Don Pedro, when he skillfully rescues a troubled matador in a bullfight. Ten years later, the romance has died and the alluring sensuality of the island has become a tropical prison for the alienated Astree and her young son. Both long for the coldness and culture of Astree's native Sweden, a country that she had previously found stiff and passionless. The seductiveness of Don Pedro's performance, similar to Gloria Vane's initial London stage act, is thus reinterpreted by the continuing narrative. In both cases, Leander realizes that she fell for the wrong man and that her appreciation of her former lifestyle has changed into its opposite. Yet, while Gloria escapes the decadent frivolity of London society in a newly founded land, Astree flees her new tropical residence, realizing that "paradise is hell" after all. "This way of thinking," argues Lowry, that "everyone should stay where they 'belong,' can be found over and over in National Socialism, among others referring to nations, city and country and to social class."83 Moreover, the transformation from aspiring lover to dedicated mother represents a narrative move that is not only consistent with Sierck's paradigmatic strategy of doubling, but also with National Socialist ideological requirements. The story moves, Gertrud Koch points out, "toward the eradication of (the woman's) erotic desire, their suspension in melancholic resignation. Here applies as well: 'The rebirth of the mother is the death of the sexual woman.'''84 However, Leander's appearance and performance in the second part of the film counter the notion of a total metamorphosis. If anything, Astree, as a more mature and suffering heroine, is more attractive than the naive Swedish tourist she once was. A virtual captive in the lavishly decorated Spanish mansion, Leander appears in striking robes and with immaculate coiffures. Often she is photographed through Sierck's characteristic screens and veils, resulting in images that show her as both mysterious and seductive. Her appeal is further recognized by both her husband, whose possessive love she has stopped returning, and her oldtime sweetheart, Sven Nagel, who visits the island to combat a deadly fever hushed up by Don Pedro to avoid an international quarantine of the island. In addition, Astree's initial position as a spectator is reversed into that of a performer. First, she sings several songs for her son in pri-

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vate. Later, in one of the final scenes, she changes into Spanish costume to publicly present the local favorite "La Habanera"; both times, she makes full use of her characteristically androgynous alto voice. "This ambivalence in the role benefits Zarah Leander," says Lowry, ''because it allows her to revel in melancholy on the one hand, and to sing her 'sensually romantic' habanera ... in an exotic getup on the other."Bs The film's ending, brought about suddenly when Don Pedro dies of the very fever he has tried to ignore, equally contains the kind of ambiguity that critics have frequently attributed to Sierck/Sirk. As Astree and Nagel depart for Sweden, Astree leans over the railing, wistfully listening to the distant sounds of the habanera, suggesting that she is already beginning to once again yearn for the idyll she had experienced as infernal. "La Habanera's heroine," in Rentschler's words, "goes astray and ends adrift, forever unreconciled."66 Likewise, the sadness that the melodramatic experience produced in To New Shores, rather than celebrating the heroine's transformation or purification, indicates an identification with the earlier representation of her person. Gloria Vane's failure in love, combined with the tragic loss of her freedom and independence-quite literally during her prison term, effectually in her subsequent failure to resurrect her singing career, and ultimately through her final dependence on marriage-neither suggests a narrative didacticism (later attempted in The Golden City) nor provides a satisfactory alternative, such as fulfillment in motherhood (which Lilian Harvey finds at the end of Woman at the Wheel). Far from being a moral tale, the film foregrounds its sympathy with the female character, her fantasies of romance, and her desire for everlasting love. Its disillusioning message is the impossibility of their fulfillment. In To New Shores, the combination of melodramatic elements, songs, and exoticism synthesized and produced Zarah Leander's stardom in constructing a star sign which neither denied nor went along with the National Socialists' prescriptions regarding a "woman's place." Its strategy of doubling, expressed in the inversion of the heroine's character, instead offered sublimation and romantic ennoblement. B7 The film raised a number of concerns that integrated it into the ideological framework of National Socialism-through its allusions to genetic selection, its implicit references to class conflict and social degeneracy, and its narrative containment of women's sexual freedom-but Leander's star persona

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itself, in its preoccupation with tragically pointless renunciation, forever elided it, leaving room only for melancholy and escapism.

Heimat (Home, Ufa, 1938) In 1938, Zarah Leander appeared in her first Ufa production that was not under the direction of Detlef Sierck, who had emigrated with his Jewish wife Hilde Jary the same year. But for Leander, there was little change. The emerging stereotype associated with Leander's onscreen persona-an image continuously oscillating between "diva" and "martyr," which had been introduced in the Sierck films-was taken up and continued in the films that followed. Leander's characterization in Home aptly illustrates this pattern. The motif of the singer that Premiere and To New Shores had established and the motherhood thematic foregrounded in La Habanera are combined in the narrative of Home. In Home, set in 1885, Zarah Leander plays an internationally renowned American singer, Maddalena dall' Orto, who visits Ilmingen, a small Eastern Prussian town, to perform at the local festival. Soon, it is revealed that dall' Orto is not an American. In fact, she is Magda von Schwartze, the daughter of a retired Pruss ian colonel, who had run off eight years earlier to rebelliously pursue her career as a singer. The reconciliation between father and daughter becomes the central problematic of the narrative, which is complicated by contrasting moral attitudes and standards of conventional propriety. The conflict culminates when it emerges that Magda has an illegitimate daughter whose recognition she demands (Fig. 4.6). Home, officially labeled "politically (staatspolitisch) and artistically valuable" by the censorship board (Filmpriifstelle), was a favorite of Hitler's and an international success. 88 The film was directed by Carl Froelich, an established Weimar director especially known for his work with actress Henny Porten, who now openly engaged himself for the National Socialist cause. 89 The film is an adaptation of Hermann Sudermann's play of the same title, written in the nineteenth century. Adaptations of his works, most prominently Home and Veit Harlan's The Journey to Tilsit, were extremely popular in the Third Reich. 90 Sudermann's naturalist nineteenth century dramas primarily addressed tragic situations and social problems that could not be solved, thus exhibiting narrative tropes well suited for melodramatic remakes. Moreover, their social criticism connected with the National Socialists' ideological pretenses

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Figure 4.6. Family values: Oberst von Schwartze's moral indignation about Magda's illegitimate child is not tempered by Magda's international success as a singer.

at social change and simultaneously romanticized the values of the "good old days." The homecoming motif, which frames the melodramatic narration, further places Home into the Heimkehrer genre: films that concentrate on Germans returning to the fatherland, heim ins Reich, after a period of emigration. Whereas contemporary homecoming pictures happily reembraced the former emigrants, the nineteenth century setting of the Sudermann model complicated this process. As a period piece, the adaptation allowed for a twofold discourse to coexist in the text, validating the concept of societal renewal and moral reformation on the one hand, while promoting a national conservatism and the repression of individualism and selffulfillment on the other. The film, unsure of its standpoint, perpetually straddles the line between irreconcilable positions and finally avoids an unequivocal conclusion. The positive resolution of the interpersonal conflicts addressed in Home is difficult, if not impossible, because the ossified social structure and the inflexible moral attitudes that originally drove its heroine,

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Magda, to flee her hometown have not really changed and neither has her father. Conversely, we are introduced to Ilmingen's bourgeoisie as they express skepticism about whether an American should be allowed to perform Bach. ''The 'Passion of St. Matthew'," the concerned citizens implore the local prince," must be sung by a German singer." This presumed conflict, however, is quickly resolved through the elimination of national difference. Dall' Orto's big arrival at the station promptly relieves the burgher's fears; dall' Orto is a native German, soon to be revealed as an original daughter of Ilmingen. Later, when Magda's father learns of his daughter's American career and subsequent return, he is reassured that even though Madga arrived with an entourage of staff, none of them are "Negroes." This negation of "foreignness" thus initially smoothes the path for Madga/Maddalena's unproblematic reintegration into Ilmingen's society; her earlier transgression-leaving home on her own-seems to be compensated for by her success and special talent. As a result, Madga/Maddalena relishes in her triumph and repays the stars truck Ilmingers by pushing their tolerance to the limit. At the welcoming party at the princely residence, she provocatively admits to vaudeville touring and shocks her upright audience by singing a suggestive song. Relying on the license that is guaranteed through her star status, she visibly delights in her scandalousness; her eyes gleam with superiority as she winks at her prudish aunt, who is among the guests, while delivering the line "a woman grows beautiful only through love." When she deliberately leans across the piano like a bar singer it seems as though she is daring her fellow townspeople to accept all of her, including her ambiguous sexual history. Madga/Maddalena's strategy seems to be successful. Various gentlemen appear to be taken with the singer, and even Aunt Franze is seen returning home absentmindedly humming one of Magda's show tunes before disapprovingly catching herself in the act. And no lesser than the local prince himself shows the most obvious erotic interest in Magda/Maddalena. Yet, his attention also foreshadows Magda/Maddalena as the object of disrepute. On the one hand, the princely gesture valorizes Magda/Maddalena as her company is now suitable for the nobility; on the other, it also recalls the eighteenth century notion that the decadent aristocracy lacks a bourgeois sense of proper morality and suggests the possibility of perhaps another out-of-wedlock liaison for Magda/Maddalena. 91 Yet for a while, Magda/Maddalena's triumph continues. When she

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returns to Colonel von Schwartze's house, he tearfully embraces his prodigal daughter and reunites her with her sister, Marie. Marie further provides Magda/Maddalena the opportunity to appear as the family's saving grace. She is engaged to a young officer, but cannot marry because the colonel is unable to deposit the large cash bond the Prussian regiment requires before allowing an officer to enter into matrimony. Again, the stiff regulations of Prussian society stand in the way of human needs and desires. Magda/Maddalena rushes to the bank to cash in all her savings to help her sister. And once more, Colonel von Schwartze-the "prototypical representative of patriarchal order," whose motto is "Authority must be! Authority everywhere!"-is countered by the independence of his freethinking daughter. 92 The revelation of her large fortune, however, overturns the happy mood in the house and results in the Colonel's relentless prosecution of Magda throughout the rest of the film. As Magda reassumes her position as daughter, the diva's earlier autonomy collapses. Once she is accepted back into the family fold and its patriarchal foundations, Magda's alter ego, the star persona Maddalena dall' Orto, is severed from the character in speech and demeanor. Maddalena's condition for the family reconciliation was that no questions be asked, but Magda's attempts to avoid scrutiny fail as soon as she abandons her hotel suite and her servants to move back into her father's home. Here, von Schwartze's initially reluctant attempts to quiz Magda about the life she has led become increasingly aggressive (Fig. 4.7). To further reinforce the destruction of the heroine's independence, the film presents an additional element at this point. At the bank, Magda encounters her former lover, von Keller, the father of her child. He begins pursuing Magda, whom he deems rich, feigning romantic feelings. Keller's true motive, however, is Magda's money, which he needs to avoid the discovery of his financial embezzlements at the bank. But Magda has only contempt for the man, who deserted her during her pregnancy. Her father, however, has now learned about the child and insists that she marry its father. As the pressure on Magda to finally submit to the town's strict moral codes increases even further, and Magda is trapped by familial responsibilities, she temporarily agrees to the nuptials. Only when Keller announces his conditions-Madga is to give up her career and deny their common child-does she have a change of heart. Once Magda's child's well-being is threatened, her maternal feel-

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Figure 4.7. Generation gap: Magda's insistence on selffulfillment is countered by Oberst von Schwartze's motto: "Authority must be! Authority everywhere!"

ings prevail and she remains firm (Fig. 4.8): "I was ready to humiliate myself," she exclaims, "sacrifice myself, but my child, never!" In a final effort to impose his will on Magda, her father even pulls out a gun and threatens to kill them both if she will not rectify her compromised state. Magda breaks with her father once again, while Keller, who has lost his last hope to procure the money he needs, kills himself. Now that all other options have been eliminated from the narrative, Magda can reassume her identity as a "star." In the final scene, Magda performs

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Figure 4.8. Motherly love: A recurrent motif in Leander pictures is her willingness to sacrifice herself for her child.

"The Passion of 5t. Matthew" at the local church, where Colonel von 5chwartze has unknowingly taken a seat next to Magda's young daughter. When the little girl climbs onto his lap and explains to him that the singer on stage is her "marna," the Colonel is overwhelmed with love. As he presses his grandchild to his chest, the film cuts to Magda, who stares offscreen, waywardly singing the words "fear and pain." Without offering closure, the film ends with father and daughter spatially separated, yet together, connected by Bach's ode to human suffering. The struggle for tolerance, which motivated Leander's character in the beginning, has shifted into a quest for forgiveness, a matter of accepting things that cannot be undone (the child), rather than fully embracing the notion of true moral and social transformation. Tolerance applies only insofar as the film approves of a talented woman's artistic career and is made especially unproblematic in the form of Magda, a purified diva who performs church music by Bach. The film used the religious implications of "The Passion of 5t. Matthew" to endow its "fallen" heroine with the

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Madonna-like grace that finally enables her father to accept an equally angelic looking granddaughter, even if she is illegitimate. This "triumph" of "modern values" activates the feminist traditions of the women's movement, while simultaneously glorifying women's maternal role. "Here," Katharina Sykora points out, "motherhood is valorized as independent from its embeddedness in marriage-in the spirit of the National Socialist population politics-as a contribution in service of the state." 93 In keeping with dominant National Socialist aesthetics-which, according to Saul Friedlander, privilege the fusion of kitsch and death-the film further ennobled "true human suffering," idolizing individual martyrdom and subordination by elevating its heroine to the realm of the saintly.94 In advertising the notion of "true" character over "false" propriety, the text further integrated itself into the movement of the " new spirit," which suggested the radical overhaul of the nation's moral fabric. Yet, at the same time, contemporary reviews also emphasized that the Sudermann material was outdated. While American critics complained that Sudermann's dramas had outlived their contemporary relevance, the National Socialist press struggled with their unrestrained appeal toward social modernization. The New York Times reported: "Zarah Leander is holding the rapt attention of spectators at the 86th Street Garden Theatre these days. This is in spite of the fact that audiences today don't take the social problem created by the return of a wayward daughter as seriously as their parents did."95 Conversely the journal Filmwelt argued: [The film's 1885 setting] accounts for its strong socially critical tendencies. These are directed against the neglect of communal solidarity. In the past, social prejudices separated the single classes from one other .... [Therefore], Suderrnann constructed this conflict very differently from how we would like to look at it today. In his time, the oppositions were exhausted in the juxtaposition of strong, willful natures vis-a-vis societal prejudice, which led to the overvaluation of individualistic elements .... Magda, the officer's daughter in Suderrnann's Home, shows some of these egotisticalindividualistic characteristics.96

In contrast to the American review, the National Socialist publication revealed an agenda that went beyond emphasizing contemporary society's modernity. In fact, its main move was exactly the opposite, insofar as the text implicitly criticized Leander's character's "unrestrained licen tiousness. "97

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While National Socialist politics wished to pretend that it succeeded in restructuring Germany's class system by invoking its "new spirit," the traditional discourses regarding duty and social obligation, and especially prohibitive moral codes governing women's sexual behavior and reproductive responsibilities, were not considered out of date. Even if ''National Socialist ideology saw biological motherhood as a woman's first duty and primary fulfillment, and therefore even courted unwed mothers," as Gertrud Koch has argued, the moral attitudes of the nineteenth century still held. 98 In fact, women were supposed to keep their bodies pure. For instance, the women's journal NS-Frauenwarte warned young girls: ''The enjoyment of a single moment can ruin your health and genotype, resulting in a curse for yourself, your children and your grandchildren."99 For the Nazis, illegitimacy and promiscuity were not so much problems of propriety; instead, they presented the uncertainty of race. The proclaimed anachronism of Froelich's Home thus applied only to the play's attitude toward rigid class distinctions, whereas its central problematic-women's sexual freedom-remained a contested issue under Nazi rule. In The Golden City, for instance, made four years after Home, Kristina Soderbaum's character Anna is rejected by her father when she returns home pregnant after a doomed escape to Prague and an ill-fated affair with her Czech cousin. As a result of Goebbels's intervention in the script, which had initially suggested reconciliation, the film further culminates in the annihilation of its protagonist. Anna finally takes her life, an ending motivated by Goebbels's refusal to allow the characters to embrace the racial "impurity" of Anna's baby. Yet although Home problematized similar issues, the film also acknowledged the changes in social attitude toward the role of women that arose with modernity: trends that involved women as potentially independent earners. Indeed, the image of women as active participants in the public sphere even emerged in the notion of "woman as comrade," a socialist concept that, although contested, survived in Nazi ideology and existed alongside its counterimage of "woman as subordinate." Magda, unlike Anna, is quite capable of surviving on her own. In fact, she succeeds in turning her rebellious energy into international celebrity. Throughout the narrative, the character remains a highly sympathetic lead, whose desire for independence is acknowledged as a legitimate motivation for her feelings of tragic entrapment. In Home, Koch argues, "rebellion and subordination dance arm in

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arm to a higher purpose" signifying simultaneously "an authoritarian gesture and pleasurable submission." Beyond its fascist objectives, the film represents as an additional interest "the patriarchal submission of the woman."l00 However, the film's sadistic torture of its heroine does not result in her total submission. Magda finally refuses her father twice, while the narrative makes the resolution he demands both undesirable (Keller is a cad) and impossible (Keller is dead). Instead of abandoning her career and marrying her child's unappealing father, a partial resolution is achieved only through the Colonel's final embrace of his granddaughter, while Magda's career continues on stage. Magda's image as star, however, is recast through the church performance, suggesting the transformation of a frivolous coquette into a serious artist; a deepening of Magda's artistic talent has been achieved through her emotional pain. Yet, by forsaking the figure of Maddalena dalI' Orto-the exotic American-in the end, the earlier image is not entirely erased. The familiar trope of Leander enchanting and teasing a repressed audience with her suggestive songs constitutes an important part of the narrative; its ongoing repetition in Leander films suggests the image's strong audience appeal. Leander's character in Home must be read as ambiguous and multilayered. Magda's maternity and martyrdom are stable components of her character, her strong impulses toward self-realization, independence, and autonomy-in National Socialist terms, her "egotistical-individualistic characteristics" -persist simultaneously. An ideologically inconsistent work, Home proffers a multitude of contradictory ideas that are impossible to unite and concurrently celebrates Zarah Leander as the object of spectacle and performance.

Die grofie Liebe (The Great Love, Ufa, 1941/2) In 1942 the journal Filmkurier reported an all-time high for box office records, with millions of visitors flocking to the movie theaters every week. 101 The Great Love, released that year, was among those films that drew audiences by the millions. By the end of 1944 the film ranked fourth on a list of the 280 most successful Ufa films and had been seen by 27.8 million people, making it one of the most successful Ufa films of the entire Third Reich period.1 02 Directed by Rolf Hansen, the film again coupled Zarah Leander and Victor Staal, who had previously starred together in To New Shores. 103 This time, however, Staal is not the devoted suitor for whom Leander

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must ultimately settle; on the contrary, as air force lieutenant Paul Wendlandt, Staal emerges as a dashing man in uniform, and Leander, once hooked, will pine away for him throughout the film. Publicity articles announced that in The Great Love, Leander was different from the exotic historical characters she had frequently portrayed in earlier films: that she had turned into a "woman of today."l04 Her narrative "ordinariness," however, was restricted to limitations that even a "star" had to endure in wartime Germany: air raids, ersatz coffee, unreliable restaurant service, the limited supply of taxi cabs, and above all the separation from a lover engaged at the front. Otherwise, The Great Love introduced Leander's character, the Danish Hanna Holberg, in a manner that by then was an integral part of her star image: as a famous chansonette appearing in a successful variety show. It is here that air force pilot Paul Wendlandt, on leave in Berlin for only twentyfour hours, first sees Hanna and instantly decides to pursue her. "Situation report?" he asks his Wehrmacht comrade who accompanies him to the theater, wondering about his chances with the woman onstage. "No chance," is the military-style reply, as an apparatus on stage magically lifts the singer above a chorus of sixty men in tuxedos, "superior enemy forces."105 In this initial stage sequence Leander's image alludes to Hollywood's Mae West: she is wearing a blond wig and exposes deep cleavage, her eyelids slowly lowering into suggestive winks as she sings a popular chanson. In Heide Schliipmann's words: "She is the woman who represents masculinity and potency as her gender ... When at the end of the song-"My Life for Love" -she jerkily throws back her head, the impression of an erection is perfect."l06 Yet as in her earlier films, this image is almost entirely limited to the opening sequence. As Stephen Lowry observes, "[iln To New Shores and in Home she [Leanderl had already played the part of a woman who, in her initial performances and songs, seemed to be frivolous and sexually active, almost a vamp, only to later reveal herself as decent inside."lo7 On her way home, contrary to the impression she gave on stage, Hanna seems helpless-unaccompanied and unaccustomed to using public transport (car traffic is limited owing to nightly air raids on Berlin)-when she is literally stalked by Wendlandt, who in tum has changed into civilian clothing to avoid relying on his "impressive" uniform for his sexual success (Fig. 4.9). In this scenario, the inviting declarations of Hanna's previous song lyrics

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Figure 4.9. Incognito: Wendtland pursues Hanna without relying on his "impressive" Luftwaffe uniform to ensure a successful seduction.

now give way to a mask of frozen reserve, while Wendlandt's suggestive chatter reverses the power relations between them. He follows her to a party and Hanna, charmed by his confident persistence, finally allows him to take her home, where an air raid forces her to invite him up to her apartment. "Beautiful," Wendlandt exclaims looking over the darkened city, "almost like in a fairy tale." "But this is not a fairy tale," Hanna explains, "this is reality, and in reality, there are flak splinters and bombs." Wendlandt's enthusiasm cannot be dampened: "But isn't this what makes reality even more beautiful than a fairy tale? Even if there are dangers? Maybe, especially because there are dangers!" The next sequence in the basement further serves to integrate Hanna into the shared experience of wartime community. Following the nonchalant lead of Wendlandt, the Luftwaffe lieutenant incognito, Hanna is forced to mix with the

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common crowd, "all these horrible people" as she calls them. Of course, she ultimately ends up enjoying playing with the neighbors' children and sharing real coffee, a precious wartime gift from another admirer, with the crowd. This experience sets up the trajectory for the rest of the film: over the course of the narrative, Hanna Holberg, the star, slowly realizes the meaning of communal solidarity through becoming a woman who truly loves. In addition, both Hanna and Wendlandt turn out not to be as sexually lenient as her song or his pursuit of a one-night stand on leave might at first have suggested. As Helmut Regel has pointed out, "their roles as vamp and harum-scarum are only external roles, which they will abandon to expose their true core."108 Of course, this element is not new to Zarah Leander's films; in the case of The Great Love, however, it is most directly linked to a propagandistic redescription of values necessary to sustain the war effort at the home front. A contemporary review freely summarized the film's political message as an advertisement for the citizen's full absorption into the communal spirit of National Socialist politics: "[The film's] deeper message: to show how character is built through higher purposes and duties; how, out of the egotistical longing for private happiness, the will to orient one's life toward the loftier goal of each single person's integration into the Volksgemeinschaft [the people's community] emerges."l09 The ensuing romance between Hanna and Wendlandt thus closely relates the melodramatic components essential to the woman's picture to the acute political and social conditions of wartime reality. "What ties all the plots and all the homefront films together," writes Schulte-Sasse, "is a thematization of desire vis-a-vis collective need characteristic of what Polan calls 'war-affirmative' narratives."110 Moreover, whereas erotic desire and the prioritization of private relationships are expressed through the female character, whose concerns must subsequently be suppressed, "collective need is coded male."111 In The Great Love this dichotomization of the public and private is expressed through the narrative conflict between the lovers. After their initial encounter, Hanna, who is now obsessively in love with Wendlandt, does not hear from him for several weeks. Rudnitzky, Hanna's songwriter and musical director who is also in love with her, tries to convince her that she can hardly be in love with a stranger who treats her badly, but to no avail. In contrast to Wendlandt, Rudnitzky is

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a caring and empathetic character, who, in his own words, must watch out not to become "a tragic figure, or worse: a comical figure." Rudnitzky's artistic "feminized" sensitivities therefore primarily serve to foreground the superior masculine qualities of Wendland's fighter pilot in action, whereas his stance as competitor is never taken seriously, either by Hanna or the film itself. As soon as Wendlandt reappears and finally reveals his status as Luftwaffe lieutenant to Hanna, she is allforgiving and the couple decides to marry. Yet this realization of their private happiness is made impossible by the subsequent plot points. After a brief period of togetherness, of which the audience only learns retrospectively, the couple's attempts to see each other are repeatedly made impossible by unpredictable war events. Both parties travel to exotic locations all over Europe to continue their relationship, but their encounters are doomed nonetheless. Hanna appears at a "request concert" in Paris because Wendlandt is stationed in France, just as he makes a surprise visit at her Berlin flat. Later, the couple has to cancel their wedding because Wendlandt is ordered to the front the day before. Finally, Wendlandt voluntarily retreats from their vacation in Rome because he has heard that his squadron might need him, which leads to the breakup of the romance. Hanna's initial attempts to accommodate Wendlandt's responsibilities leave her increasingly unhappy, and when Wendlandt prioritizes his professional responsibilities beyond the call of duty, Hanna is incapable of understanding (Fig. 4.10). As Dora Traudisch points out: "While the selfish Hanna is dedicated only to her personal interests, her career success and a happy relationship, her lover directs his efforts and emotions toward goals that are considered much higher in the National Socialist sense." m In The Great Love, argues Karsten Witte, "[t]he redirected eroticism of the engagement at the front must further impose the deferment of erotic drives at home." 113 From 1942 onward, following the Wehrmacht's invasion of the Soviet Union-the event that motivates Wendlandt's departure from Rome in the film-the German public had to relinquish all hope for a brief war, while at the same time internal opinion polls suggested that by 1941/42, the desire for peace emerged as the dominant concern of the general public. 114 The Great Love must be seen as an immediate reaction to these political events and the public's pessimistic response to them. 11s The increase in public rhetoric advocating the value of sacrifice and the postponement of private happiness that accompanied the

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Figure 4.10. Duty calls: Wendlandt and Hanna postpone their wedding when he is ordered back to the front.

expanding war effort thus established the melodramatic conflicts driving the story. As Heide Schliipmann puts it: "Now, the issue was the integration of the war effort at home, the psychic stabilization of the soldiers to enable them to pull through [durchhalten). Both concerned women; it was their responsibility."116 The functioning of the basic mechanisms that mark National Socialist entertainment films during this period thus consisted in "the rousing, diversion, and re-containment of desires and impulses, which threatened ideological conformity in any possible way."m The Great Love is the only Leander film that attempted to use her image for specifically propagandistic purposes. Not only does Hanna Holberg eventually abandon her career, thereby deferring to the demands of patriarchy, she does so without the alternative promise of ensuing marital bliss, thus conceding the additional requirements of war. Rather, the narrative teaches Hanna to accept pain and suffering as an inevitable burden, which must be carried with a sense of optimism and the deter-

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mination to "keep on going" no matter what: for the plot to achieve its (un)happy resolution, the responsibility to change rests on Hanna alone. On learning that it was the war with the "Soviets" that caused Wendlandt's sudden departure, Hanna, who finally understands, immediately begins to write her lover conciliatory letters. Wendlandt, however, whose priorities lie elsewhere, remains firm in his argument that without emotional ties "it's easier to jump in [the fighter plane]." Only after an air battle injury forces him to spend three weeks in recovery does he agree to resume his romantic relationship with a now docile Hanna. The happy ending is ambiguous. "Three weeks together!" Wendlandt exclaims. "And then?" asks Hanna. Her question is answered by his upward gaze, followed by a shot of an air squadron shooting through the clouds. The final image shows both Wendlandt's and Hanna's serious faces gazing toward the uncertain skies. To affect this shift in Hanna's character, the film puts her through a series of learning steps, which ultimately result in the transformation of her image from "vamp to Madonna."ltS This trajectory becomes most strikingly apparent in the film's musical numbers. Initially, the star Hanna Holberg fulfills all the relevant criteria necessary to make her a figure alluring enough to convincingly attract both Wendlandt in the film and the spectator at the box office. lt9 "The function of the star appearance," explain Jens Thiele and Fred Ritzel, "is doubled: the star Hanna Holberg alias Zarah Leander is effectively introduced on both a musical and visual level, in the style of the dream factory, but in terms of the assignation of values, this stage star belongs to the wrong camp, she has not yet understood the demands of the 'new era,' that is to say, of the war."120 Hanna's second performance at the Wehrmacht request concert in Paris, however, significantly changes Hanna's star image. Instead of performing in an elaborate revue, Hanna now sings into a simple microphone. Modestly dressed, she is wearing neither a wig nor heavy makeup, thus creating the impression of an ordinary woman who is there to cheer up the boys rather than appearing like a seductive stage goddess (Fig. 4.11). In addition, her song does not address her own desires, as did "My Life for Love," rather it offers an optimistic motto for war usage: "It's Not the End of the World!" Where a chorus of 60 elegant men had earlier swooned around a glamorous Hanna, a battalion of 500 hundred soldiers in the audience now links arms and cheerfully

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Figure 4.11. Request Concert: Hanna is less of a seductress and more of a comrade in arms serving at the home front as she encourages the troops to sing that "it's not the end of the world."

join in the singing, thus creating an atmosphere of community and solidarity. Hanna's last stage appearance in Rome finally shows her in an ethereal dimension. "I Know One Day a Miracle Will Happen" is almost a fervent prayer for relief, an adjuration directed at sublime powers and intended to bring about the virtually impossible, an incantation. Hanna, dressed in white, is elevated on a stage of the same color, the image of heaven, revue theater style (Fig. 4.12). As she performs her song, she no longer makes eye contact with the audience, there is no longer a wink or an encouraging smile. Instead she gazes upward, Madonna-like, anticipating the final shot of Wendlandt and herself gazing skyward, thus putting their fate into larger hands. Eroticism has given way to transfiguration, prayer is substituted for desire.

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Figure 4.12. Stairway to heaven: Hanna's final number is neither a love song nor a Durchhaltelied ("keep-on-going" song) but a prayer for a miracle.

In the end, happiness cannot be found on stage at all. Oblivious to the raging applause, Hanna rushes off to join the injured Wendlandt. Rudnitzky's mournful question, "When are you coming back?" is answered with a resolute "Never!" "Happiness in the German film," Witte observes, "is life as the highest form of art, which then issues the command to abandon the lower, expressive arts." If American musicals, such as Me and My Gal, typically show "the beginning of a great career, even a shared career, giving up a career stands at the end of The Great Love."121 Even the abandonment of "selfish" professional ambitions in The Great Love does not bring about private compensation. The happy ending remains an uncertain promise. In its place, the film advocates an attitude of patience and endurance at the home front, a conclusion that cannot be read as fully satisfying. The ambiguity of this ending, in tandem with the film's use of

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Leander's star image, further points to the same insoluble contradictions we have encountered in earlier films. There can be no doubt as to the film's ideological determination, but many of the elements that mark Leander as a contradictory figure still hold up. Instead of promoting the war effort in purely ideological terms, the text bows to the concerns of the women's film. According to Lowry, the film adjusted both its image of the ideal soldier and its engagement with female desires to the changing situation of wartime reality.122 The war needs to be fought, was its message, but primarily to reopen the way for private happiness. 123 Further, the film's ideological coherence functions differently along gender lines. As we have seen, the images of repressed masculinity propagated by the male protagonist are in keeping with Nazi philosophy, while the image of woman cannot be easily contained. Hanna's desirability and lust for life can never be positively integrated into National Socialist discourse without either creating an element of contradiction or narrative disappointment for the spectator. The restrained endings of almost all Leander films strongly illustrate this dilemma. To initially attract the spectator, even forbidden wishes and desires must be engaged, resulting in their latent invocation and ambivalent textual meanings. 124 "How resistant these images are against their transformation and domestication," Lowry emphasizes, is difficult to ascertain. "[T]he processes in the text, however, unequivocally strive toward their containment."l25 This leads to difficult questions. To firmly position The Great Love in the realm of propaganda films, are we to overlook one of the film's most appealing features, the citation of the "diva" image? The fact that the film's driving force is the heroine's obsessive privileging of personal romance over communal warfare, and the film's final inability to satisfy the viewer through its National Socialist rhetoric? The vast amount of critical postwar attention the film has received speaks to the difficulty of negotiating these problems. In its combination of melodramatic elements, songs, and exoticism, The Great Love successfully exploited Zarah Leander's existing star image, while narratively undoing its previous construction. However, the film's stealth ideologism could not harness the emotional aspects of its dramatic unfolding, just as National Socialist doctrine in general never could positively contain the image of woman.

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THE CHANSONETTE: A MASCULINE VOICE WITH FEMININE PASSIONS

Above all else, it was the power of Leander's songs that was responsible for rescuing her postwar career; their lasting dynamism and popularity assured Leander a continuing role in German culture as a performer of "classic standards." The star herself later asserted that her films were in fact only "pretexts for her songs" and-given that her roles in Third Reich film narratives were often condemned as propagandistic in postwar Germany---expressed the hope "that it was the music and the songs of my films that attracted the public."126 Both on- and offscreen Zarah Leander always impersonated a performer or, more specifically, a singer. In her films, her music and performative talent were an integral part of the narrative. Offscreen it was Leander's voice that echoed over the airways, crooning some of the period's most popular romance tunes or winkingly disclosing some of its most frivolous erotic confessions. In either case, the term "impersonator" fit her description, albeit in radically contrary ways. The paratextual star coverage surrounding Leander often attempted to create the counterimage of a private persona, whose character lived up to the standards imposed on the "ideal" National Socialist woman, thereby suggesting that Leander's performances were just that: an act that was wholly separate from the real person behind the mask, with Leander's performances disguising a more "natural" woman. Still, Zarah Leander's deep voice, husky body, and wide angular features also allowed her to be read as resembling a female impersonator in drag. In contrast to the impression desired by the National Socialist media, this scenario did not suggest that there was a motherly female hiding behind the stage diva, but a gay man. Remarkably, even contemporary film journals occasionally referred to these cases of mistaken identity and, as the following Stern magazine excerpt illustrates, camouflaged their occurrence as amusing errors: "Dear Herr Leander, I own all your wonderful gramophone recordings. Please, send me your autograph. A self-addressed stamped envelope is included." Such a letter by a music enthusiast, addressed to Zarah Leander, shows that art often blinds its disciples and worshippers. Otherwise the sender of the note should have read-if he couldn't hear it-that Zarah Leander is a woman after all. Zarah's voice is, as you readers can tell, a chapter of its own. It tends to inspire two types of reaction: surprise

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander 205 and admiration. Surprise that such a deep voice emanates from a woman's throat, admiration that such an "externally" tmfeminine voice can produce such harmony, such fine nuance, and contain a charm so enchantingly female. 127

Interestingly, it is precisely what this text attempts to gloss over-the fact that it was Herr Leander's "female charms" that inspired the admiration of the male fan who is humored in the text-that indicates that Leander's large gay following preceded the postwar era. 128 Introducing a camp reading practice here, however, suggests a radical departure from an ideological analysis that, at least partly, manages to absorb Leander into the propagandistic framework of National Socialist cultural politics and thus offers a distinctly controversial perspective. It would be wrong to propose that Leander should only be approached from either angle. Yet, it would be equally limiting to easily dismiss the fact that an underground discourse existed, even under Nazi rule. Moreover, Nazi aesthetics themselves have been frequently linked to an underlying, if suppressed, homo-eroticism that in itself contradicted the repressive moral framework of National Socialist ideology but was concealed by its excessive homophobia resulting in the political persecution of gays and lesbians. In fact, the boot and leather fashions of the 55, reminiscent of dress styles now associated with sadomasochistic fetishism and the Nazis' ideological privileging of male group dynamics over heterosexual union, which Theweleit has traced through protofascist literature, dominate the mental image of Nazi culture in today's popular (film) memory.129 "Were the Nazis gay?" asks Sanders-Brahms, "[t]herefore, did they fall for Zarah, since gay men have to fall for her?" 130 This question is best left as the provocation it sets out to be, but the relationship between Leander and her gay following becomes clearer if we look at Leander's songs and performances in isolation. In support of this notion, SandersBrahms argues: "Gays love Zarah because she is almost not a woman anymore, and close to a drag queen in the effort that it takes [her] to be a woman after all, just as drag queens are the better women in a way, the more glamorous ones at least."131 Leander's "masculine" voice sang songs about the men s/he loved and the emotional hardship s/he endured because of her exuberant passions; and while the narrative endings of Leander's films often reestablished her characters as wives and mothers, in her chansons Zarah/(Herr) Leander defiantly defended

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her /his right to pursue her/his amorous pleasures, even if society's moral codes would not condone them. "Every little Babbit makes my life a torture," she teases in the very popular Can Love Be a Sin? "when he continually talks of morals." She continues the song asserting that even if love were a sin she wouldn't care, since she'd "rather be a sinner than without love."132 The key to understanding Leander as a gay icon lies here, in a reading practice that separates Leander's star persona, and especially her song lyrics, from the narrative construction in which these might be embedded. The autonomy of these texts and images-regardless of whether, as Schliipmann has argued, they ultimately prove to be "false"-is what accounts for Zarah Leander's appeal to a community that was persistently tyrannized under Nazi rule.133 The image of Leander as a seductive lounge singer, whose only concern is her romantic and erotic fulfillment, and whose body is feasted upon by her male audience's desiring eyes-if taken by itself-allowed both female and gay audiences to identify with the character in a situation that is difficult to integrate into the normative framework of National Socialism. The critical"exposure" of Leander as being "truly at home ... in the bars, in the dancing clubs, in the milieu of the chanson singer," which Nazi ideologues attempted in retrospect, further supports this contention. l34 A close analysis of the librettos of Leander's titles (she recorded 192 numbers altogether) conveys that Leander's dominant thematic motif is love.Bs According to Ulrike Sanders, the songs' lyrics can be divided into four major categories, which present the singer as: (1) "a woman who is happily in love" ("A woman only becomes beautiful through love"),136 (2) one that is "unhappily in love" ("I'm standing in the rain waiting for you"),137 (3) a "woman who is being courted" ("Clever women only say 'maybe' "),136 or (4) a "woman who is erotically provocative." 139 Yet, especially the latter group of songs reveals Leander's work as particularly ambiguous in relation to the National Socialist model of womanhood. Let's take a closer look at the lyrics of Heut' abend lad ich mir die Liebe ein ("Tonight I'll Invite Love") from the film Desert Song: In mir tobt's wie ein Vulkan, wie im Sturm der Ozean. Hoppla-das ist me in Blut.

A volcano rages inside me, just like an ocean in a storm. Hoopla-that is my blood.

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Meine Glut braucht ein Ventil, wenn einer heute mir gefiel, Hoppla-der hat' es gut.

My burning fire needs a vent, If a guy should appeal today,

Hoopla-he'd do good.

REFRAIN:

Heut' abend lad ich mir die Liebe ein, heut' will ich gliicklich sein, die ganze Nacht. Es gibt sonst nichts was ich sonst wissen will, weil ich nur kiissen will, die ganze Nacht.

Tonight I'll invite love, Tonight I want to be happy, All night long. I want to know of nothing else tonight, Since I only want to kiss tonight. All night long.

Oft hat mir ein Mund die Seligkeit und Vergessenheit gebracht. 'drum lad ich mir heut' die Liebe ein, heut' will ich gliicklich sein, die ganze Nacht.

A mouth has often given me bliss and helped me to forget. Therefore I'll invite love,

Weil mir diese Leidenschaft immer wieder Freude macht, Hoppla-so hab' ich's gem, Hab' ich niemals "no" gesagt, denn mein Typ ist sehr gefragt, Hoppla-bei vielen Herren.

Because time and again, this passion gives me joy. Hoopla, that's how I like it. I have never said "no," since my type is very popular. Hoopla-with many men.

Tonight I want to be happy, All night long.

The suggestive lyrics of "Tonight" clearly position Leander in the role of the hot-blooded sexpot, who brazenly declares her sexual drives as the justification for a promiscuous lifestyle. The song's jazzed-up mazurka rhythm further animated the number's cheerful enthusiasm for its audacious sexual message. Notwithstanding the superficial provocation of some of Leander's song lyrics, however, Sanders maintains that either the textual content of the songs themselves or the filmic context in which they functioned presented an image of womanhood that centered on the idea of love as a woman's life purpose. Even if Leander occasionally sang lines that seemed to suggest promiscuity, their overt meanings were neutralized by the narrative framing of the song's presentation. For example, in In the Past Leander's character sings a suggestive song solely to push away a man who loves her. Her action is motivated by her desire to spare him

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the pain of seeing her leave their variety show existence for her daughter's sake. The song therefore does not reveal the "truth" about the character; rather, it is a deliberate deception that serves a noble, morally unquestionable purpose. Nonetheless, Leander's radical foregrounding of private concerns over public matters, her privileging of personal fulfillment and pleasure, though it was expressed in a tearful lament over its denial, must also be seen in relation to a public sphere that demanded substantial personal sacrifices, even from women. Presuming that Leander's songs put into words the suffering and disappointment of her various listeners vis-a.-vis an everyday life that was marked by the dissolution of private happiness and thus operated as a form of cultural sublimation, we nevertheless cannot assume that those listeners were brought closer to the party line, and especially its patriarchal and homophobic components, as a result. Although Leander's songs clearly functioned to create a spirit that encouraged the listener to keep on going even when times were rough---especially because Leander performed them at the ideologically loaded request concerts of the German Wehrmacht, which later led them to be categorized under the rubric of Durchhaltelieder ("hold-out songs")l40-they did not necessarily encourage only Nazis to keep their chins up. Seiler even reports of gay Leander fans who found comfort in humming Leander's infamous refrain "I know one day a miracle will happen"-which concludes the highly propagandistic Leanderfilm The Great Love (Die grofie Liebe, Ufa, 1941/2)-while being incarcerated as Jews in a German concentration camp.141 Bruno Balz, who wrote the lyrics, later defended his work, emphasizing that he conceived of the film's various song texts after being brutally interrogated by the SS for his homosexuality.1 42 Of course, it is without question that the Nazis attempted to use Leander's songs as Durchhaltelieder. Especially Davon geht die Welt nicht unter (It Isn't the End of the World), from Die Grofie Liebe, was used on the radio to boost public morale. But secret situation reports of the SS also relate that this effort had the opposite effect once the strategy became transparent: "It is regrettable that radio shows that have proven themselves to be popular are replayed so frequently that the initial approval [of the public] turns into its opposite. Especially the incessant playing of Zarah Leander's It isn't the End of the World should be remembered here." 143 In fact, the propagandistic use of Leander songs

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander 209

became the source of jokes that circulated behind closed doors. The SS-Sicherheitsdienst, which covertly investigated public opinion, reported the following joke: Zarah Leander is commanded to a permanent engagement at the Fiihrerhauptquartier (Hitler's headquarters), where she must sing for Hitler the song: "1 Know One Day a Miracle will Happen."l44 Many parodic elements in the songs themselves must not be ignored. Leander's song Er heisst Waldemar (His name is Waldemar), composed in 1940 by Michael Jary with lyrics by Balz, provides a good example of Leander's more contradictory work. Like many other Leander recordings, the song was distributed on record and played on the radio, yet it was never performed in any of Leander's films or otherwise connected to a film narrative. Er heisst Waldemar nevertheless quickly became a popular tune. Its fast patter musical style and cheerful vocal delivery further underlined the singer's enthusiastic embrace of the song's love object, Waldemar. The lyrics introduce Leander's beloved as followS: 145 Mein Ideal auf dieser Welt, das ist [iir mich der kiihne Held, der grof3e blonde Mann. Er kommt aus einem Miirchenland und reicht mir seine starke Hand, die mich zerdriicken leann.

My ideal in this world, for me that is the brave hero, the tall, blond man. He comes from a fairy land and offers me his strong hand, which could easily crush me.

So sieht der Mann meiner Triiume aus, sein Name ist Ralph oder Peer, die Wirklichkeit sieht aber anders aus, bitte horen Sie mal her:

That's what the man of my dreams looks like, his name might be Ralph or Peer, but the reality looks rather different, please listen for a moment:

REFRAIN:

Er heif3t Waldemar, und hat schwarzes Haar, er ist weder stolz noch kuhn, aber ich lieber ihn. Er heif3t Waldemar, und er ist kein Star, seine Heimat ist Berlin, aber ich liebe ihn.

His name is Waldemar and he has black hair, he is neither proud nor brave, but I love him. His name is Waldemar, and he's not a star, his home is Berlin, but I love him.

Der Junge ist das Gegenteil von meinem Ideal,

The boy's the total opposite to what is my ideal,

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Ich werd' nun nicht mehr schlau aus mir, doch das ist mir egal.

I cannot quite believe myself, but neither do I care.

REFRAIN:

Er heif1t Waldemar und sein Geld ist rar, nie krieg' ich 'nen Hermelin aber ich liebe ihn.

His name is Waldemar and his cash is scarce, I'll never get an ermine coat, but I love him.

Sanders reads this text as a "declaration of love to the commoner," as another example of Leander's "ironic hyperbolization of what constitutes the main purpose in a woman's life: love for a man."l46 But the song also offers irony, even parody, in yet another sense. The lyrics openly contrast Leander's chosen object-a black-haired man from Berlin, who is neither "proud nor brave"-with the very image of masculinity that National Socialist thought particularly idealized. In summarizing the attributes of the Nazis' male ideal-the blond, brave hero with strong hands-and appropriately locating his origins in the fantasy land of mythology, Balz's libretto playfully exposes this construction of masculinity as fictitious, while substituting in its place a real person whose poverty, "Jewishness" (the image of black hair was considered "nonAryan"), and lack of heroic daring was compensated for by his qualities as a lover. "His name is Waldemar," the song concludes, "and he kisses wonderfully, oh, this man is my ruin, but I love him." Aside from Leander's song lyrics, the musical style of her numbers provides another point of interest. According to Nazi ideologues, the organizing principle behind all of radio programming was politics; it was part of the National Socialist party program to utilize all of entertainment as propaganda. 147 As a rule, this was to be achieved through the presentation of only "German" music, a policy that included the prohibition of "un-German" programming. For instance, so-called niggerjazz was forbidden in 1935. 148 Yet at the same time, Kreimeier points out, "the regime silently tolerated the younger generation's preference ... for swing and jazz; [which], while it was occasionally impeded, was not massively suppressed."149 Leander's songs provide further evidence for this assessment. A musical analysis of Leander's songs shows that-highly indebted to Broadway/Hollywood compositional styles-Leander tunes frequently borrowed swing and jazz elements. In addition, the exotic film

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander 211

locations, which allowed for Leander's 'foreign' eroticism on screen, also encouraged the use of non-'German' musical components such as the Cuban-Spanish habanera, Hungarian gypsy rhythms like the czardas, Bohemian polka beats, or Argentinean tango cadences. Likewise, the instrumentation included many instruments that did not grow out of the "German" tradition, for instance, the balalaika, castanets, and drums. ISO Hence Leander's songs, both on a semantic and on a musical level, are complex and contradictory in relation to their political environment and social function. The inherent complication that arises when closely investigating these Schlager, many of which were among the most popular tunes of the era, led critics such as Karena Niehoff to wonder in retrospect: "How were those-at times truly sophisticated, saucy, emancipated-songs [and] her [Leander's] sometimes yearning, dapper dragging melodies even integrated into the oppressive world of the Nazis, who usually were so honor-obsessed, petit-bourgeois, blue-eyed and rigid?"15I It appears that Leander's songs, in their exclusive concentration on human emotions, bridged a gap between listeners who otherwise shared little; Leander, as a singer who attracted women, gay and straight men alike, managed to tap the unrealized fantasies and unfulfilled desires of her fans, perhaps inevitably administering National Socialism's kiss of the Spiderwoman. As early as 1938, the journal Filmwelt interpreted the appeal of Leander songs as deriving from their ability to unite Germans all over the world: " . . . this voice is a bridge across worlds and oceans, it lets people's hearts listen up and brings tears to their eyes. Everyone knows those dreamy melodies and has their sweet sound humming in his ears, through daily haste and working plans. This dark voice, which comes out of the depth of human longing, lifts us above the melancholy of the heart."152 Leander's appeal derived from such dreamy sadness on the one hand, and from dissenting, yet politically innocuous, sexual provocation on the other. In combination, these elements worked together to sublimate the feelings of contemporary audiences and thereby contrived the formula for Zarah Leander's enormous success. The ambiguous messages that Leander, quite literally, broadcast as a chansonette can neither be fixed to constitute an alternative or subversive discourse, nor firmly be placed within the Nazi box of propaganda tricks. Instead, they exhibit the same contradictions and discursive gaps we encounter in Leander's

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"doubled" star image, thus pointing to a multiplicity of interpretative possibilities including counter readings for their audience. Yet, maybe for that very reason, Leander chansons managed to form a solid fixture in the realm of cultural experiences available under Nazi rule. Zarah Leander's star persona, public image, and various film performances were inextricably linked through an emphasis on a coherent, yet "doubled" on- and offscreen persona. Film advertisements, narrative plotting, song lyrics, and Leander's "private" star portraits all contributed to synthesize a complex, yet highly formulaic image for the star, whose persona carried in itself a number of ideological contradictions. The social tensions respecting the role of women in Germany's 1930s, which in themselves derived from opposing discursive traditions, thus emerged in the antithetical construction of a "Sierckian" Leander narrative. The emancipated aspects of Leander's strong, sexually active, and economically resourceful female characters and star image referred to the progressive agendas of the earlier German women's movement and the socialist practice of including women as comrades. Conversely, the simultaneous erection of narrative obstacles and emotional traumas, which Leander's heroines perpetually encountered in their relationships with men, deferred to the reactionary strategies of fascist patriarchy. Yet to presume that all the various components that we have isolated also add up to one fascist "whole" in the does not acknowledge that choosing exactly what to "see" remained the prerogative of the viewer. In 1944, the Nazi press publicly exposed Leander as a "friend of the Jews."lS3 Audiences were confused and SS war reporters even wrote letters from the front requesting clarification.1 54 Yet, Leander's songs remained on the radio play lists, and her films were still screening in many locations. Leander's enduring popularity, especially abroad, continued to ensure hard currency.1SS A few months later, the Nazi dictatorship ended and "die Leander," as she was often called, reemerged as a different kind of star: an aging singer, with a large gay following, whose melancholic expressivity and melodramatic stage styles now gave voice to the sentiments of a people who, maybe more than ever, identified with her languishing desire to have known, as Leander had repeatedly professed in The Great Love, that one day a miracle would happen.

5

Conclusion

"To ACT in films," the National Socialist writer Gerd Eckert declared in a 1938 publication, "our casting department should choose people like you and me, just like those we are familiar with from our reallives."l The female stars of Nazi cinema, however-unless we are celebrities ourselves-were never people like "you and me." In fact, scholars in star studies have told us repeatedly that movie stars per se are never fully perceived as "ordinary" people, even when they typically play them. Moreover, if Nazi film culture departed from its ideological delineations by perpetuating stardom, it did so doubly in predominantly building up its female performers, because women in particular were ideologically relegated to a fundamentally subordinate status in Nazi thought. Despite the National Socialist state's numerous control mechanisms and firm ideological orientation, culture in Nazi Germany was hardly homogenous. Instead it was marked by fragmentation and a somewhat idiosyncratic diversity, which in turn often produced cultural artifacts that operated in contradiction to one another. This tension emerged most prominently in the field of popular culture. Whereas the "high" arts were subject to intense Nazi censorship-culminating in the infamous book burning of 1933 or art exhibits such as Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) in 1937, which ridiculed modernist forms of expression as "demented" -"low" art forms of entertainment received less consistent ideological attention. Rather, here we come across a split between theory and practice: the same "philosophical" principles applied, but they were not necessarily enforced when it came to popular art production. Nazi cinema communicated many National Socialist messages, but it also exhibited contents that were hard to reconcile with Nazi doctrine. With respect to mass culture consumption, Goebbels and his associates at the Ministry of Propaganda were frequently torn between their impulse toward overt political indoctrination and theoretical dogma and the less 213

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ideologically concordant, pragmatic strategy of "giving the people what they want," albeit in a rather restricted way. Although they often justified this system as an ingenious way of "invisible" mass manipulation, in many cases this grandiose self-assessment simply does not sustain the scrutiny of close cultural analysis. The question we must inevitably ask is, why? Even if the Nazis saw entertainment culture as a means of either wrapping ideological contents into a seemingly innocuous package or deliberately counteracting the public's frustration with overt indoctrination by allowing the relief of escapism, it is still unclear why popular products (including films) contained as many countervailing elements as they did. In other words-in a state that was otherwise marked by strict rules of ideological governance and control-why didn't Nazi propagandists limit cultural production to modes of entertainment practice that were in close accord with National Socialist philosophy? To answer this question fully, I believe we must tum away from Nazi rhetoric and toward consumers and audiences. Yet if we follow this logic and look at the Nazi strategy to allow for cultural contradiction as a strategy of economic survival, as a cultural! economic concession to the many residual tastes and preferences of Third Reich viewers/ consumers that connected with nonsynchronous discourses of diverse cultural origins, we must further inquire into the dynamics underlying these consumer practices. In terms of the cinema, this means that we must tum toward Third Reich viewers' potentially "problematic" spectatorship. The framing of this project clearly does not allow for an allencompassing analysis of Nazi viewership, but my investigation of female star signs in relation to contemporary female audiences and the Nazi ideal of womanhood is part of such an inquiry. In the context of Nazi culture as one marked by contradiction and inconsistency, women emerge as particularly complicated figures: femininity was a problem in the National Socialist ideological domain. Although it is not unthinkable to conceive of a kind of fascism that is void of patriarchal influences, Nazism's fusion with patriarchy-and the resulting oppression of women, derived from the reductive role prescriptions of Nazi ideology-was simply too much to be handled within the context of the international environment of advanced modernity. Women's emancipation, the foregrounding of individualism that was expressed in women's privileging of private concerns, and the increasing collapse of traditional family structures were not halted by the advent of German

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fascism. As these developments continued, all the Nazis could do was enforce repressive measures and produce ideological propaganda. Within the realm of entertainment culture, however, the economic underpinnings of the Nazi state demanded substantial compromises. Female (and male) viewers were paying customers at the box office whose spectatorial desires exceeded the flat stereotypes advanced by Nazi ideologues. Although Tim Mason has described "the oppression of women in Nazi Germany ... [as] the most extreme case of antifeminism in the twentieth century," the female star signs of the Nazi era nevertheless invoked a number of feminist discourses, both in their films and in their star images, that shared little with the Nazi ideal of womanhood. 2 Nazi cinema attempted to incorporate its own theoretical conceptualization of femininity into its films as well as into its female star signs. This effort frequently proved extremely difficult, however, and required narrative strategies in the films that were not necessarily successful as well as rhetorical maneuvers in the star publicity that seemed extremely transparent. That is to say that both Nazi cinema and its female star signs revealed the influence of fascist doctrine, but they also exhibited many elements that addressed subjects that related to the actual desires and conflicts many German women experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. Although female film characters' rebellious energies were often defused through the films' narrative endings, female film stars, despite the National Socialist star publicity's repeated redemptive retractions, ontologically belonged to a category that was undesirable in Nazi women. Nazi film divas therefore assumed a highly oxymoronic position in the overall cultural system. They were the most popular women in the country, fulfilling a model function by virtue of their visibility and prominence as well as through the strategic use of their images in many Third Reich film narratives (not all Third Reich films advertised an idealized Nazi female, but moves toward such a prototype were made in most National Socialist productions). Yet as stars, they were also the opposite of the Nazi ideal of the invisible Hausfrau who gives herself up in service to the family and the state. Hence, the complicated machinations that surround the construction and perception of star images, namely the tensions between the perceived "authenticity" and "construction" of the star persona, emerge as especially relevant when discussing Third Reich stars. 3 Whereas film

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heroines often appeared glamorous on screen, features on their home lives "exposed" their glamour as "work," thus authenticating the "private" star as fitting the paradigm of Nazi womanhood. Press coverage on their families additionally neutralized the stars' problematic status as career women by underlining their motherhood; another dogma that National Socialism sought to impose on German women. 4 At the same time, however, the film industry's star publicity also upheld the exotic image that often surrounded the female star on screen, thus confirming the star's authentic exceptionality. In fact, in pointing to the very tensions between female eroticism and performance (contained in the image of the glamour star) and the National Socialist model of womanhood (which favored "natural," "unconstructed" beauty in women and demanded their devotion to the larger purpose of serving their country), the state-controlled print features on female stars involuntarily confirmed the very contradictions that many of the stars' film roles already implied. Of course, beyond their obvious status as stars-which connected prominent Nazi actresses to notions of privilege, glamour, and professionalism-Nazi cinema used its performers to cover a wide range of female representations. It would be difficult to formulate a standardized type for Third Reich heroines, yet a number of recurring characterizations can be found. Kristina Soderbaum's case, for instance, points to a number of discourses related to the Nazi concept of ''blood and soil," thus linking her star sign to the notion of land and nature as inscribed in the figure of the woman. These motifs further reappear with varying prominence in the star texts of Lilian Harvey and Zarah Leander, as well as in most other actresses' star images at the time, which indicates that the National Socialist media made a concerted effort to insert Nazi elements into its popular representations of women. Soderbaum's star sign further introduced us to the prominence of melodrama in Nazi hit films, a generic preference that divulged similar ideological maneuvers but also revealed Nazi cinema's symptomatic inability to address female spectators in an ideologically "sound," yet positive and optimistic manner. The films' tragic narratives and melodramatic excess proved unsuitable to activate the fascist tropes of perpetual renunciation, sacrifice, and death as part of a desirable model for female lives. Instead, they underlined that the position of women in Nazi culture was embedded in negatives.

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In contrast, Lilian Harvey's description as a star of musical comedy suggested an affirmative embrace of life as an exciting playground for women involved in intrigue and romance. To achieve the uplifting mood in her comedies, however, Harvey narratives relied heavily on Hollywood blueprints. The playful articulation of gender conflicts, which permeated Harvey's "screwball comedies," thus pointed to an arena of international culture that was difficult to reconcile with Nazi beliefs. Moreover, Harvey's star history-which included Weimar stardom, numerous multiple language productions, and a short stint in Hollywood-was difficult to integrate into the Nazis' "reformed" concept of stardom, which sought to downplay the aspects of privilege and glamour previously associated with movie star status. The case of Harvey's Nazi stardom therefore testifies to the numerous continuities and nonsychronicities that surfaced in many areas of Nazi culture, particularly with respect to women. Zarah Leander's star text in turn illustrates how the popular media tried to resolve some of these tensions. In combining the alluring qualities of a Hollywoodlike diva with the melodramatic components of Nazi tragedy, Leander appears as one of Nazi cinema's most contradictory figures. As a glamorous performer and a tragic heroine in one, Leander perpetually negotiated the opposing models of womanhood circulating in the popular arena during the Nazi era. This was further intensified by her extrafilmic career as a singing star, whose suggestive songs addressed female desires incompatible with the Nazi ideal and were the foundation for Leander's postwar gay constituency. In the end, female movie stars must in many ways be seen as the antithesis of the prototypical Nazi female. The popular image of the female star performer in itself, regardless of the subject of her performance, speaks to the incongruence of the Nazis' philosophical ideal of womanhood and the cultural practices that informed, but also derived from, contemporary women's own hermeneutic self-conceptions (as well as from contemporary men's conceptions of them). Female star images hence consistently indicated irreconcilable difficulties at the same time as they were being used to entertain and educate the public in an ideologically conformist way. Perhaps it was this complex form of address, rather than their reliance on a given set of National Socialist formulas, that made them so attractive to Third Reich viewers. Nazi film divas were figures that circulated with astounding ease between systems of political opposition. More significantly, their star

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signs attest to the nonsynchronicity of the interdiscursive relationships that informed the popular during National Socialism: its reliance on Hollywood models, Weimar traditions, and the historical context of modernity. While the Ministry of Propaganda clearly strove to adopt the strategies of Hollywood's popular culture for its own propagandistic ends, Goebbels and his consorts also seem to have fallen under the spell of this model's very own ideological operations. In other words, the promises that Hollywood cinema made to its spectators-its consumerist glamour and utopian illusionism-in tum shaped the Ufa's conceptualization of what was desirable in their stars and film productions. And although Third Reich films, as well as the public image the National Socialist star coverage tried to produce for their actresses, clearly showed traces of the regime's ideological propaganda workthereby speaking to the Nazis' persistent need to address and contain the "woman question" -the female stars of the period emerge as star personae whose modem negotiations of contemporary gender conflicts simultaneously articulated German women's continuing interest in supposedly outmoded antagonisms. In playing out, as Dennis Bingham has put it elsewhere, "the dialectics of stable gender identity (and its counterpart, the movie star persona) and the multiplicities that belie it," womanhood becomes visible as an area of contestation in Nazi culture. 5 Furthermore, the emphasis on commodity consumption and the invocation of a set number of female stereotypes that marked the standard narratives of the National Socialist woman's film carried over seamlessly into the German postwar era. 6 The Heimatfilme (homeland pictures) of the 1950s took up the opposing images of womanhood (woman/lady) that had characterized Third Reich heroines: the natural country girl previously embodied by Soderbaum (which Nazi ideology attempted to foreground) and the elegant city woman engaged in commodity consumption represented in Nazi cinema by both Harvey and Leander? The continuities and legacies that informed female star signs of the Nazi period thus also reached beyond German fascism, addressing female viewers and their concerns and fantasies, in the ongoing economic space of international capitalism. Altogether, then, we can look at Nazi star culture from a number of perspectives. On the one hand, the Nazis' treatment of stars confirms that it was part of their political program to mobilize an array of different cultural means to ensure their ongoing popularity, even if that

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meant the embrace of contradictions and inconsistencies vis-a.-vis their political philosophy. "Optimism simply belongs to warfare," Goebbels noted in his diary in 1942, "you don't win battles by hanging your head or by philosophizing. That's why it is necessary to keep our people in a good mood and to strengthen the moral power of resistance of the masses."B This means that in all its variety, Nazi culture was part of the system. As Rentschler has suggested, "one might speak of Nazi Germany's irrepressible image makers as postmodernity's secret sharers, as grasping entrepreneurs who profited from industrialized means of enchantment, as master showmen who staged extravagant spectacles as the ultimate political manifestations."9 To return to Goebbels's own words: "We must operate from the standpoint that the darker the street, the brighter must be the shining light of our theaters and cinema halls, and luminous art must raise itself to comfort the human soul."lO On the other hand, we can also mount the reverse argument: that the Nazis' oxymoronic or schizophrenic usage of cultural signifiers exposes the fact that they couldn't rule without them. That is to say, the consistent references to cultural tropes that were not ideologically contained within the philosophical framework of National Socialism-even if political measures were taken to appropriate and infuse these referents with National Socialist meanings-indicate the German public's persistent desire to identify with nonfascist traditions ranging from hurnanistidealist to modern expressions. The ambiguity of Third Reich popular culture therefore points to problems that were unresolved in the social sphere of Nazi Germany, suggesting a national adherence to cultural forms that resisted Nazi philosophy, just as Nazi image makers attempted to appropriate these very proclivities to bolster the functioning of their state. In many respects, then, Nazi culture emerges as a culture of fragmentation and heterogeneity that could be held together only by a totalitarian power structure and its leaders' total commitment to fundamental hypocrisy. We may wonder if the Nazi state was really as solid at its core as Hitler and Goebbels liked to think; there are many indices that the system was unable to contain the divergent interests the German public articulated in part through their "problematic" consumption. If the problems surrounding the representation of women in Nazi star discourse are any indication, the Nazi state perpetually needed to confront internal conflicts that surfaced in seemingly apolitical contexts.

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Yet attempts to investigate Third Reich culture as productive of "other meanings," as Norbert Grob put it, are often seen as smacking of redemptive revisionism. l l "Films of the Nazi era," warns Rentschler, "are easy to enlist in campaigns to normalize and neutralize the Nazi legacy."12 A complex approach to culture under Nazi rule, however, does not necessarily only produce apologist interpretations. Instead, it may lead us to revise the Nazis' self-proclaimed assertions about the very functionality of their system, without rescuing "the people" from their potential complicity in Nazi crimes. It is important to point to the particular weaknesses of systems of totalitarian domination in terms of both their operational practices and their ideological foundations, but there is no need to hand out medals to "ordinary" Germans for their schizophrenic involvement in antithetical meanings: their engagement in countervailing discourses does not exonerate them from the accusation of failed political responsibility. The talent for appropriation that marked German fascism became particularly visible in its synthesis of various reactionary tendencies under one "philosophical" umbrella. Nevertheless, Nazi culture exhibited an opportunist tolerance of the ideologically suspect in its entertainment practices, sleeping with the cultural enemy, so to speak, in the interest of maintaining power at all cost.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. "MuB das sein?" NS-Frauenwarte, no. 17 (March 1938), 536. AU translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 2. "Wiinsche, die wir an den Film haben," NS-Frauenwarte, no. 17 (March 1938),532. 3. See, for example, Bertolt Brecht, "Briefe urn Deutschland," Gesammelte Werke, 20 vols. (Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), 20: 234, cited in Linda SchulteSasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: fllusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996), 17. 4. See Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1963), 44. 5. A number of semantic problems occur in the writing of this work. Both the terms "German" and "woman" take on specific meaning within the National Socialist framework. Within this discourse, "German" is generally meant to suggest a racially determined heritage (Le. German Jews would not fall under this category). Likewise, "woman" or "women" is used to the exclusion of those women who would not qualify as "German" in the Nazi sense. In this work, I have sometimes adopted this language, for lack of alternatives, when describing Nazi attitudes. However, when I talk about spectators, again talking about "men" and "women" or "Germans," I do not exclude any kind of spectator per se. National Socialist films not only played successfully abroad, but certainly German-Jewish spectators, at least up until a certain time, still also were members of the German audience. I hope the context of my writing will make clear what I mean to describe in each instance, because I feel that a detailed qualification each time would be a tedious exercise for both the writer of this text and its readers. 6. A number of historians of Nazi cinema argue that the Nazis deliberately allowed popular culture to include elements that seemed apolitical or even somewhat incompatible with National Socialist ideology to create the illusion that the system allowed room to move. See, in particular, Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 7. Stephen Greenblatt, cited in Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London, New York: Routledge, 1993),98. 8. Catherine Gallagher, cited in Mayne 1993, 100. 9. See Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets. Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Andreas

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Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," After the Great Divide: Modernism Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44-62. 10. Andrew Hewitt has shown that it is not always possible to posit modernist fonns in opposition to populist fascism, but that in the works of modernist writers such as Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, Ezra Pound, and Gottfried Benn, fascism is compatible with avant-garde fonns, which have in tum been read as a masculine discourse vis-a.-vis "feminine" mass culture. Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism. Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 11. In addition to Petro, see Miriam Hansen, "Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?" New German Critique, no. 29 (Spring-Summer 1983),147-84; and "Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship," Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (Summer 1986), 6-32. 12. See Huyssen. 13. Ufa is the acronym for Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft, the most venerable and internationally renowned German film studio. 14. Rentschler introduces his notion of Nazi cinema as a Gesamtkunstwerk, arguing that "if the Nazi state became a grand aesthetic construction in which 'the political itself is instituted and constituted (and regularly re-grounds itself) in and as work of art: then it is clear that this Gesamtkunstwerk involved a pastiche in which politics and entertainment were inextricably bound" (21).

CHAPTER 1 1. Goebbels, speech from March 28, 1933, cited in Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1969),441. 2. Bertolt Brecht, "Briefe urn Deutschland," Gesammelte Werke, 20 vols. (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp), 20: 234. 3. Walter Benjamin, 44. 4. Wilfried Bredow and Rolf Zurek, eds., Film und Gesellschaft in Deutschland. Dokumente und Materialien (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1975), 139, cited in Hans Gerd Happel, Der historische Spielfilm im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1984), 14. On Goebbels, also see Felix Moeller, Der Filmminister (Berlin: Henschel, 1998). 5. Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik; eine soziologische Untersuchung iiber die Spielfilme des Dritten Reichs (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1969),439. 6. Goebbels, speech delivered on February 15,1941, cited in Albrecht, 468. 7. See Albrecht, 97. 8. Anton Kaes, "Film in der Weimarer Republik," in Wolfgang Jacobson, Anton Kaes, Hans Helmut Prinzler, Geschichte des deutschen Films (Stuttgart/Weimer: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1993) 98. 9. Happel, 15. 10. Albrecht, 20; Happel, 16. 11. Klaus Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story: Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1992),268.

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12. Licht-Bild-Biihne, February 3,1934. 13. For instance, one aesthetic criterion favored by Reichsfilmdramaturg, Fritz Hippler, was realism and the appearance of naturalness. However, Nazi cinema by and large did not live up (or down) to this standard and displayed as many elements of "artificiality" as other international cinemas of the era. See Betrachtungen zum Filmschaffen (Mit einem Vorwort von Prof. Carl Froehlich und einem Geleitwort von Emil Jannings) (Schriftenreihe der Reichsfilmkammer, Band 8) (Berlin: Max Hesse Verlag, 1943). 14. Film critics frequently criticized the quality of German films or compared them negatively to their American competitors. "The official decree of 27 November 1936 banning criticism," argues Eric Rentschler, "undoubtedly intended to neutralize detractors and boost enthusiasm for domestic films." Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996),104. 15. Albrecht, 275. 16. Kreimeier, 317. Kreimeier points out that in some instances audiences still expressed their discontent by hooting and laughing at the newsreel propaganda during the screenings. 17. Stephen Lowry, Pathos und Politik: Jdeologie in Spielfilmen des Nationalsozialismus (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1991), 13. For a more detailed history of this process, see Kreimeier, 258-267. 18. Only 24 of the 1094 German films produced between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945 were prohibited by the censors, three of which were released abroad. 605 foreign film, including 273 American productions, were approved by the censorship board. Lowry,16. 19. Cf. Kreimeier, 280-281. 20. Although the National Socialist press was closely monitored for treading the party line, the NSDAP's own publications often felt free to push for a more rigorous implementation of Nazi ideals; the earlier example of the National Socialist journal Frauenwache calling the representation of women in the contemporary media "Jewish" in 1938, cited at the beginning of the introduction, can be explained by this rationale. 21. Gerd Eckert, "Filmtendenz und Tendenzfilm," Wille und Macht. Fiihrerorgan der nationalsozialistischen Jugend 6.4 (February 15, 1938): 19-25, cited in Rentschler, 19. [Rentschler'S translation] 22. Cf. Rentschler, 7. 23. See Albrecht. One of the frequent critiques of Albrecht's method is that he seemingly uncritically reintroduced the labels "propagandistic" and "nonpolitical" for films that the Reichsfilmkammer had assessed the same way thirty years earlier. 24. Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema, trans. Gertrud Mander and David Wilson (New York: Collier, 1975). 25. Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933-1945 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995); David Welsh, The Third Reich. Politics and Propaganda (London: Routledge, 1993). 26. Karsten Witte, "Film im Nationalsozialismus," in Geschichte des deutschen

224 NOTES

Films, Wolfgang Jacobson, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, eds. (Stuttgart/ Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1993), 1190, my translation. 27. Detlev Peukert, Volksgenossen und Gemeinschaftsfreude. Anpassung, Ausmerze und Aufbegehren unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Koln: Bund-Verlag, 1982), 232. 28. See, for instance, Saul Friedlander, Kitsch und Tod. Der Widerschein des Nazismus (Munich: Hanser, 1984). 29. Arthur Maria Rabenalt, Film im Zwielicht (Hildesheim, N.Y.: Olms Presse, 1978). For a reading that foregrounds the German film industry as a center that attracted resistant energies, also see David Stuart Hull, Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Gerd T Albrecht's adoption of the National Socialist categories, political and nonpolitical, points to the idea that he largely sees the majority of National Socialist cinema as void of a strong political dimension. 30. Cf. Kreimeier, 355. 31. Zarah Leander, Es war so wunderbar! Mein Leben (Hamburg: Hoffman & Campe, 1973); Kristina SOderbaum, Nichts bleibt immer so. Riickblenden auf ein Leben vor und hinter der Kamera (Bayreuth: Hestia, 1983); Hans Borgelt, Das siifteste Madel der Welt. Die Lilian Harvey Story (Bayreuth: Hestia, 1974). 32. Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996), 17. 33. Schulte-Sasse, 43. 34. Schulte-Sasse, 4. 35. Hans Dieter Schafer, Das gespaltene Bewufttsein. Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933-45 (Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1984). Also see Kreimeier, 167-290; Rentschler, 103-112. 36. Kreimeier, 281. 37. Kreimeier,331. 38. Georg Lukacs, Die Zerstorung der Vernunft, Werke, Bd. 9 (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1974), 622. 39. Theodor Adorno, Einleitungen in die Musiksoziologie. ZWOlf theoretische Vorlesungen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1975),71, cited in Lowry, 33. 40. For an overview of National Socialist ideology and its use of traditional ideologies, see Lowry, 32-35. Also see Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1962), 127. 41. Detlef Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 79. 42. Rhetorical strategies that seek to justify or smooth out apparent contradictions between National Socialist theory and practice consistently surface in all major National Socialist publications. 43. The concept that Nazism drew on various reactionary tendencies already present in German culture is contained in the writing of National Socialist contemporaries, such as Lukacs and Bloch, among others. In addition, also see Rainer Stollmann, "Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art: Tendencies of

NOTES

225

Aesthetization of Political Life in National Socialism," New German Critique, no. 14 (Spring 1978),41-61. 44. See Witte, "Film im Nationalsozialismus," 1190. 45. Rentschler, 21. 46. Sabine Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 22. 47. Markus Spieker, Hollywood unterm Hakenkreuz. Der amerilamische Spielfilm im Dritten Reich (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1999). 48. Rentschler, 16. 49. Theories of mass culture in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and Althusserian concepts of ideology serve well to account for fascist tactics of manipulation, but Foucauldian discourse theory, Baktin's notion of the inherent dialogism in texts, feminist theory, and the populist approaches advanced by the Birmingham School additionally inform my methodology to account for individual phenomena, such as select film narratives or individual star signs. See, for instance, Louis Althusser, '1deology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971); Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (New York: Semiotexte[e), 1989); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); and Robert Starn, ''Michael Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique," in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and Its Discontents (London: Verso, 1988). 50. Eggebrecht argues that "film in the Nazi state had to a great extent nothing to do with Nazi Cinema." Axel Eggebrecht, Der halbe Weg, Zwischenbilanz einer Epoche (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1975),308, cited in Rentschler, 118. 51. William Shirer, 20th Century Journey: The Nightmare Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 137, cited in Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 223. 52. Klaus Theweleit has demonstrated that this ideology can be read as a pathological function of patriarchy in which protofascist soldiers "kill in order to externalize the dissolution of the self they fear." See Klaus Theweleit's twovolume study Miinnerphantasien (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). 53. For a discussion of the trope of male crisis in Weimar society, see for instance, Petro, xvii-xxiv. 54. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1935),483. 55. Shirer, 137. 56. For an overview of National Socialist doctrine vis-a-vis women and the women's movement, see, for instance, Renate Wiggershaus, Frauen unterm Nationalsozialismus (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1984) 15-34. 57. Joseph Goebbels, speech given at the opening of an exhibition entitled "Die Frau, "March 18, 1933. 58. We must concede, however, that the options of men were also severely curtailed under the Nazi dictatorship, and open elections were not held at all. 59. Wiggershaus, 54. Also see Irmgard Weyrather, "Numerus Clausus fur Frauen-Studentinnen im Nationalsozialismus," in Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung, ed., Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch. Zur Geschichte der Frauen in der

226

NOTES

Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt/M., 1981), 131-162; and Jacques R. Pauwels, Women, Nazis, and Universities: Female University Students in the Third Reich, 1933-1945 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984). 60. Married female state employees were released as soon as 1933, when a state ordinance to that effect passed on June 30. See Una Stockl, "Appell an Wiinsche und Traumbilder," in Helga Belach, ed., Wir tanzen um die Welt (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979),99-100. 61. See Ulrike Eichborn, "Ehestandsdarlehen. Oem Mann der Arbeitsplatz, der Frau Heim, Herd und Kinder" in Annette Kuhn, ed., Frauenleben im NS AI/tag (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1994), 48--64. 62. For a detailed discussion on the persecution of women in the Third Reich, see, for example, Wiggershaus, 115-148; Kuhn, 217-363. 63. Dr. med. Johanna Haarer, "Von wahrer und falscher Schonheitspflege," NS-Frauenwarte, 13 (1938): 407. 64. Haarer,407. 65. Das Schwarze Corps, 10 December 1936, cited in Liliane Crips, "Modeschopfung und Frauenbild am Beispiel von zwei nationalsozialistischen Zeitschriften, Die Dame versus Die deutsche Mutter," in Frauen und Faschismus in Europa, Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewilz and Gerda Stucklik, eds. (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1990),230. 66. Rosenberg, Mythos, 293-295. 67. For a detailed discussion of women's voting behavior in the 1933 elections, see Annemarie Troger, "Die Do1chstoBlegende der Linken: 'Frauen haben Hitler an die Macht gebracht: Thesen zur Geschichte am Vorabend des Dritten Reichs" in Frauen und Wissenschaft. Beitriige zur Berliner Sommeruniversitiit fUr Frauen (Berlin: 1977),324-355. 68. On the National Socialist image of women and its precursors in the women's movements of the 1920s, see Christine Wittrock, Weiblichkeitsmythen: das Frauenbild im Faschismus und seine Vorliiufer in der Frauenbewegung der 20er Jahre (Frankfurt am Main: Sendler, 1983). 69. Reichsparteitag Niirnberg 1934, Berlin 1934. 70. Haarer, 407. These awards, however, were not always taken seriously. A joke circulating in secret in the Third Reich, for instance, referred to the Mutterkreuz as the "rabbit medal." 71. Die deutsche Kiimpferin was officially banned by the Gestapo in 1937. 72. Wittrock, 173, 179. 73. Articles that specifically addressed the changes required of National Socialist women can be traced through the Nazi part organ NS-Frauenwarte, which was published throughout National Socialist Rule. 74. For an overview of the historical research regarding women in the Third Reich, see Petra Schomburg, "Frauen im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Uberblick iiber die historische Frauenforschung und die feministiche Diskussion urn Verantwortung und Beteiligung von Frauen an Nationalsozialismus," in Ortrun Neithammer, ed., Frauen und Nationalsozialismus: Historische und kulturgeschichtliche Positionen (Osnabrock: Universitiitsverlag Rasch, 1996),42-56.

NOTES

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75. Schomburg, 43. 76. Huyssen argues that in the traditional dichotomy of the modem age "mass culture appears as monolithic, engulfing, totalitarian, and on the side of regression and the feminine ('totalitarianism appeals to the desire to return to the womb,' said T. S. Eliot) and modernism appears as progressive, dynamic and indicative of male superiority in culture" (Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in After the Great Divide [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986],58). 77. Female scholars, such as Trager, subsequently protested against the portrayal of women as witless cattle, pointing to women's particular social situation in Weimar Germany to explain their political choices. Trager argues that various economic and social pressures, as well as the lack of an economic base for emancipatory efforts, led women to desire the stabilization of traditional familial life promised by the National Socialists. Correspondingly, feminist studies of fascism and gender reacted to the previous condemnation of women as ignorant supporters of fascist totalitarianism by foregrounding women as victims of the patriarchal Nazi state instead. This led to a privileged positioning of women vis-a-vis official National Socialist politics and a concentration on subjects that related the two, such as the Nazis' ideal of woman and motherhood, women's place in the workforce, the treatment of foreign women, race genetics, and reproduction laws. Gisela Bock's study of forced sterilization, for instance, showed that the flip side of the Nazis' supposed pronatalism was an enforced antinatalism that targeted women whose race or social behavior didn't conform to National Socialist standards (Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rtzssenpolitik und Frauenpolitik [Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986]). Feminist historians-in accordance with the general trends in women's studies of the 1970s and 1980s-further offered a variety of case studies and biographical histories that addressed the impact of Nazi politics on various aspects of women's everyday lives. See, for example, Annette Kuhn, ed., Frauenleben im NS Alltag (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1994); see also, Annette Kuhn, Valentine Rothe, Frauen im deutschen

Faschismus: eine Quellensammlung mit fachwissenschaftlichen und fachdidnktischen Kommentaren (Diisseldorf: Schwann, 1983). Altogether-as the title of Christina Burghardt's 1978 book, The German Woman-Kitchen Milid, Breeder Sow and Serf in the Third Reich: History or Present? pointedly indicated-women were largely described as enduring a state of oppression in National Socialist Germany (Christina Burghardt, Die deutsche Frau-Kiichenmagd, Zuchtsau, Leibeigene im Dritten Reich: Geschichte oder Gegenwart? [Miinster: 1978]). 78. Joseph Goebbels, speech given on February 18, 1943. 79. See Petro, 3-36; Tania Modleski, "Femininity as mas(s)querade: A feminist approach to mass culture," in Colin MacCabe, ed., High Culture/Low Theory, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). 80. Cited in Koonz, 223. 81. Louis A. Montrose, "The Poetics and Politics of Culture," in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism, (New York: Routledge, 1989), 22. 82. Fritz Hippler, Betrachtungen zum Filmschaffen (Berlin: Hesse, 1942), 102.

228 NOTES 83. Anita Loos, A Girl Like I (New York: Viking, 1966), 128. 84. For a detailed discussion of the representation of gender in Weimar cinema, see Petro, Joyless Streets. 85. Oskar Kalbus, "Das stille Madel," Yom Werden deutscher Filmkunst, vol. 1 (Altona-Bahrenfeld: Cigaretten-Bilderdienst, 1935), 120-133. 86. Karen Ellwanger and Eva-Maria Warth, "Die Frau meiner Traume," Frauen und Film, no. 38 (1985), 64. 87. Ellie Tschauner, "Tapfere, kleine Frau," Filmwelt, no. 4 (January 14, 1941), 85. 88. Hermann Gressieker, "MufS ein Filmstar begabt sein?" Der Deutsche Film, no. 2 (1937): 47. 89. Walter Benjamin, for instance, argued that the collapse of the aura of the actors caused the film industry to engage in an "artificial build-up of the personality outside of the studio," that is, the production of film stars. Hannah Arendt, ed., fl/uminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),221. 90. Erik Kriines, "Das Star-Unwesen im Film," in Richard Kolb and Heinrich Siekrneier, eds., Rundfunk und Film im Dienste nationaler Kultur (DUsseldorf: Friedrich Floeder Verlag, 1933),386. 91. Erwin Leiser explains that for Dr. Fritz Hippler, the Reich's script advisor, "the great man of history is the embodiment of a 'life giving ideal' and as such must be 'inestimable in human terms.' Third Reich historical films were consistently geared to the times in which their audience lived. The great poets, painters, sculptors, scientists, explorers, politicians and generals honoured in the Third Reich cinema were all projections of the FUhrer, himself exalted in propaganda as a great general, supreme politician, artist and architect of genius." Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), 106. Also see Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich, 92-202. 92. John Ellis, "Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon," Star Texts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991),304. 93. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1979),34-37. 94. S. N. Eisenstadt, "Introduction" to Max Weber, Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), cited in Dyer, 35. 95. Dyer, 35. 96. Ute Bechdolf, Wunsch-Bilder? Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Unterhaltungsfilm (Tiibingen: Tiibinger Vereinigung fur Volkskunde, 1992),39. 97. Bechdolf,114. 98. Bechdolf, 112. 99. Bechdolf, 113. 100. Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994). 101. Kalbus, 100. In respect to his biography, Albers emerges as a deeply contradictory figure: a star who simultaneously embodied certain characteristics welcomed by the Nazis, while refusing the Nazis' racism by living with his Jewish girlfriend on a private level. Hansi Burg, Albers' companion, eventually emigrated to London and returned to him after World War II.

NOTES

229

102. Kreimeier, 348. 103. Rentschler, 159. 104. Cf. Kreimeier, 349. While many of Hollywood's male romantic leads played World War II soldiers who engage in romances (with the nurse, on leave, etc.), few National Socialist films have similar plots. Correspondingly, the general Theweleitian notion of the protofascist soldier is not romantic. His hardened exterior and commitment to the male group and its nationalist idealism forbid a "feminizing" romance to take hold of him. The conflicts between soldierly qualities and romance surface directly in Die grope Liebe (The Great Love, 1941/2). 105. Kreimeier, 343. 106. Veit Harlan in fact pointed to the fan letters Marian received for Iud Sup in his defense of the film. Cf. Rentschler, 158. 107. Friedemann Beyer, Die UF A-Stars im Dritten Reich. Frauen fUr Deutschland (Munich: Heyne, 1991),30. Beyer points out that Hitler and Goebbels often laughed at the male characters of German cinema, calling them "tired film wimps." 108. Beyer, 3~31. 109. "K6nnen Sie ein Star sein?" Stern, no. 5 (October 18, 1938), 128. 110. H. E. Weinschenk, Wie wir Schauspieler wurden (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag, 1943). 111. Griesieker, 41-47; Otto Bergholz, 'Wunderland Hollywood," Reihe der Filmschriften, no. 8 (Berlin: Verlag Robert M6lich, n.d.) 112. Kalbus, 128. 113. Beyer, 10. 114. Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich (New York: Sarpedon, 1992), 57, 68. 115. Kreimeier, 349. 116. See Beyer, 51. 117. Rentschler, 159. 118. Charlotte Cornelia Herzog and Jane Marie Gaines, "Puffed Sleeves before Tea-Time," in Christine Gledhill, ed., Stardom: Industry of Desire, (London: Routledge, 1989) 87. 119. Kerstin-Luise Neumann, "Idolfrauen oder Idealfrauen?" in Thomas Koebner, ed., !dole des deutschen Films (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1997),243.

CHAPTER 2

1. Aorian Kienzl, "Kristina SOderbaum, das Naturtalent," Text- und Bildinformationen zu dem Ufa Film 'Die goldene Stadt' (Berlin: Ufa Informationen, n.d.). 2. Romani, 84. 3. Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 482. 4. Siegfried Zielinski, Veit Harlan. Analysen und Milterialien zur Auseinander-

230 NOTES

setzung mit einem Film-Regisseur des deutschen Faschismus (Frankfurt/M.: R.G. Fischer, 1981),43. 5. Sepp Ebelseder, "Eine Witwe knipst sich durchs Leben," Stern, no. 44 (October 23,1969). 6. Stephen Lowry argues that The Golden City made 10 million Reichsmark at the most. Lowry, 57. 7. Drewniak lists SOderbaum's 1944 salary as 60 000 Reichsmark per film (Drewniak, 192). Leander's 1936 contract guaranteed her 10,909,09 per month (Drewniak, 153). See Boguslaw Drewniak, Der Deutsche Film, 1938-1945. Ein Gesamtiiberblick (DUsseldorf: Droste, 1987). 8. The trial of Veit Harlan began on March 3, 1948. The prosecution accused Harlan of "crimes against humanity" according to allied control law No. 10, which specified that all actions that could be regarded as "having aided the murder, genocide, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, rape and other inhumane acts against the civil population" be included under this rubric. The prosecution argued that Harlan had assisted the Holocaust by directing the antiSemitic propaganda film Jud Sup. Harlan was acquitted twice, both in the initial trial and in the appeal. The controversial rulings were based on the assertion that it was impossible to ascertain Harlan's sole responsibility for the ideological content of the film and that the film could furthennore not be causally linked to the mass deportations and murder of Jews directly. See Zielinski 42-225. 9. Regine Mihal Friedman, "Mein Tag mit Kristina," Frauen und Film, no. 44/45, October (1988), 106. 10. Charlotte Kohn-Behrens, "Deutsche Kiinstler fanden zum Nationalsozialismus," Beiblatt zum Volkischen Beobachter, May 5,1933. 11. Mitteilungsblatt der Deutschen Friedensgesellschaft und der W.R.I. Internationale Kriegsgegner, Ortsgruppe Hanover, March 1961. 12. The newspaper Neues Deutschland wrote on April 29, 1949: ''Veit Harlan is a mass murderer." 13. Siegfried Krause, "Ihr liebster Film ist 'Opfergang,'" Rheinische Post, September 2,1977. 14. The "female historians debate" (Historikerinnenstreit) between Claudia Koonz and Gisela Bock that followed consequently focused on questions of essentialism and women's political accountability in patriarchal culture. Bock argued for the supposition of gender difference-the conceptual placement of women outside phallocentric logic-as imperative for the study of women's National Socialist history, whereas Koonz asserted that women were not contained in a separate female sphere of difference but, "[f]ar from remaining untouched by Nazi evil, ... operated at its very center." Koonz's move away from the Nazis' prescriptive definitions of women's identities, or the state's forced regulation of women's reproductive capabilities (as outlined in Bock's study) to women's function in the everyday world, hence redefined women as accountable collaborators essential to fascism's overall system. See Koonz, xxxv; Gisela Bock, "Ein Historikerinnenstreit?" Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18 (1992), 400-404. 15. Hickethier points out that in the 1920s Gennan actors often assumed for-

NOTES

231

eign names to advance their careers. The Swabian actor Ferdinand Bonn, for instance, was pronounced Swedish to create a mental association between him and the Danish Nielsen in the spectator. Knut Hickethier, "Vom Theaterstar zum Filmstar," Der Star (Munich: Fink, 1997), eds., Werner Faulstich and Helmut Korte, 45. 16. Lowry, 61. 17. See Gabriele Lange, Das Kino als moralische Anstalt (Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1994),134. 18. Ulrich Gregor on Riefenstahl's The Blue Light, "A Comeback for Leni Riefenstahl?" Film Comment, vol. 3, no. 1 (1965),25. 19. Herbert Marcuse, ''The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State," Negations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968),6. 20. Julian Petley, Capital and Culture. German Cinema 1933-1945 (London: bfi, 1979),130-1. 21. Lowry, 61. 22. Kreimeier, 285. 23. See Klaus Theweleit's two-volume study Mtlnnerphantasien (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). 24. Schafer, 131. 25. Erich Liith, cited in Zielinski, 34. 26. Bechdolf, 109. 27. "Scandal and Haute Couture" was the title of Cecil B. De Mille's post1918 specials through which he hoped to introduce new stars. 28. Ellis, 303. 29. See Ellis, 303. 30. See, for instance, H. E. Weinschenk, Wie wir Schauspieler wurden, (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert Verlag, 1943),204-18. 31. See, for instance, "Kristina SOderbaum," 1m Scheinwerfer, Beilage zur Filmwelt, no. 19 (May 12, 1939); also see, Hilde Lest, ''Weil das Taschengeld nicht ausreichte," Berliner Morgen (November 23, 1940). 32. Both of SOderbaum's parents died during her teens, leaving her free and financially able to pursue an acting career in Berlin. 33. Ingrid Bergman worked for Ufa on one production, Die vier Gesellen (Froelich, 1938), after achieving stardom in her native Sweden and before continuing her career in Hollywood. 34. Hans Karbe, "Brief an eine junge Schauspielerin," Der Deutsche Film, no. 1 (July 1938), 13. 35. Kristina SOderbaum, "1m Vertrauen gesagt," Der Angriff (March 28, 1938). 36. Edith Hamann, ''Das neue Filmgesicht," NS-Frauenwarte, no. 17 (1938), 532. 37. See, for instance, Dietrich Helm, "Ich mochte ein richtiger Bauer sein," Licht-Bild-Biihne (June 12,1938). 38. Otto Bergholz, "Nordische Filmsterne," Reihe der Filmschriften (Berlin: Franz Winter, n.d.) 11. 39. See Helm. 40. Bergholz, 3.

232 NOTES 41. The term Jungmade/ ("young girl") also designated a certain age group within the female Hitler youth. 42. Bergholz, 13. 43. In postwar years, Harlan/SOderbaum's marriage was often described in detail and frequently focused on Harlan's cruelty toward SOderbaum as well as his former wives. 44. Kohn-Behrens, 184. 45. Charlott Serda, Prominente privat (Berlin: Landsmann-Verlag Gustav Langenscheidt Junior, n.d.), 51. 46. See, for instance, "Kristina spielt mit Kristian," Filmwelt, no. 1 (January 3, 1941) 18. 47. E. von Csiasaky, "Besuch bei Kristina SOderbaum und Veit Harlan," Publicity notes for Der grope Konig (The Great King, 1942), archives of the Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin. 48. "Die Filmkiinstlerin als Kiichenfee," Filmwelt, no. 14, January (1940), 10. 49. Erika. Die frohe Zeitung fUr Front und Heimat, no. 51 (December 1940), 74S-9. 50. Die schOne Frau, no. 1 (Bielefeld: Verlag Gustav Thomas, 1940). 51. Neale argues that locating the effects of propaganda can never be achieved by merely analyzing the signifiers available through the film. "What has to be identified is the use to which a particular text is put, to its function within a particular situation, to its place within cinema conceived as social practice." Stephen Neale, "Propaganda," Screen, vol. 18, no. 3 (1977),39. Cf. PeHey, 96. 52. Licht-Bild-Buhne (August 31,1938) referring to "Begegnung in der hellen Nacht," Mein Film (September 9,1938). 53. Richard de Cordova, "The Emergence of the Star System in America," in Stardom. Industry of Desire, 27. 54. Serda, 52. 55. Christine Gledhill, "Signs of Melodrama," Stardom: Industry of Desire, also edited by Christine Gledhill (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) 226. CF. Dyer, Stars, 35. 56. Ernst Bloch, "Die Frau im Dritten Reich" (1937) cited in Witte, "Film im Nationalsozialismus," Geschichte des deutschen Films, 143. 57. Witte, "Film im Nationalsozialismus," 139. 58. Cf. Lowry, Pathos and Politics. From the mid-1930s onward, Ufa used the term Spielleiter instead of Regisseur. "The shift in appellation reflected the official attempts to cleanse the German language of foreign words. But the change of title also corresponded to a change in job description, rendering the film director an organizer of onscreen activities whose task was to keep things moving while holding back his own personality." (Rentschler, 130). 59. Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Vintage, 1981),91. 60. Rentschler, 22. 61. A large body of literature exists on Jew Suss. The following examples provide some of the most detailed and insightful analysis: Linda Schulte-Sasse,

NOTES

233

"Courtier, Vampire or Vermin? /I?W Suss's Contradictory Effort to Render the 'Jew' Other," Entertaining the Third Reich, 47-91; Eric Rentschler, "The Elective Other: /I?W Suss," The Ministry of Illusion, 149-69; Dora Traudisch, Mutterschaft, 53-83; Dorothea Hollstein, 'Iud Suss' und die Deutschen (Frankfurt am Main: 00stein, 1983); David S. Hull, Film in the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema (New York: Macmillan, 1974); Pierre Cadars and Francis Courtade, Geschichte des Films im dritten Reich (Munich: Hanser, 1975); David Welsh, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933--45 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). 62. See Schulte-Sasse, 47-91. 63. Schulte-Sasse, 55-67. 64. Schulte-Sasse, 57. 65. See Mihal Friedman, "Miinnlicher Blick und weibliche Reaktion," Frauen und Film, no. 41 (December 1986), 50--64. 66. Traudisch, 78. 67. Harlan later emphasized Marian's popularity following /I?W Suss to argue that he had deliberately refrained from drawing an overly racist picture to resist Goebbels's forced propaganda effort. However, an SS report asserted that many spectators did show the intended increase in anti-Semitic opinions after viewing the film. See Traudisch 81-2. 68. Friedman, 62. Cf. Traudisch, 82. 69. The Great King belongs to the German subgenre of Fridericus Rex films, usually starring Otto Gebiihr, which focus on the military and social accomplishments of Germany's most fetishized historical leader figure. On representations of Prussia, especially of Frederick the Great, see Axel Marquardt and Heinz Rathsack, Preussen im Film (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981). Also see Schulte-Sasse, 92-125. 70. Goebbels's diary entry for February 19, 1942, quoted in Welsh, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933--45, 176. 71. Schulte-Sasse, 119. 72. Cited in Kreimeier,409. 73. See Kreimeier, 409-13. 74. Kreimeier, 412; Beyer, 236. 75. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 13. 76. Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury," in Film Genre Reader, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995),353. 77. Elsaesser, 363. 78. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1981),594. 79. Gledhill,212. 80. Robert Lang, American Film Melodrama (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989),8. 81. Youth was a filmic adaptation of Max Halbe's play of the same name, which had been a great stage success at the tum of the century. Its adaptation in the late 1930s rendered the content strangely anachronistic, yet the play's confrontation of "belief in life" with "dogma," its "struggle of Weltanschauungen,"

234

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as the Tobis publicity materials put it, at the same time connected with the National Socialists' refonnist view of themselves: "But even today we encounter here and there the shadow of this world, whose relentless rigidity and coldness of heart destroys Annchen." Tobis publicity materials, archive of the Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin. The Catholic Church protested the representation of the clergy in the film, arguing that the film confused morals with dogma. Katholisches Kirchenblatt (June 19, 1938). 82. In Verwehte Spuren SOderbaum played a young girl visiting the World Fair in Paris in 1867 who cannot find her mother, whose death of the plague is covered up by the officials to protect the success of the exhibit. S6derbaum's "lack of orientation" in the film, argues Friedemann Beyer, "is that of a child who has lost its guardian." Beyer, 206. 83. Das unsterbliche Herz shows S6derbaum as the unhappy wife of a much older man obsessed with his work. Unable to attract him sexually (she even strips in front of him), she falls in love with his younger partner. On his deathbed, her husband gives the young couple his blessing. 84. Tobis's film publicity attempted to give the narrative an ideological bent that saved the drama from its self-destructive components and advised theater owners to emphasize parenthood as the main motif of the film: "When decorating the theater walls the motif of the 'child as the inseverable link in the marital union of destiny' must be presented effectively .... This will emotionally appeal to spectators the most and instantly lends a certain standard to the film, which audiences demand" (Tobis film publicity, archive of the Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin). What this text implies, of course, is that without the ideological message centering on the child, the film is in danger of being perceived as base and amoral. 85. Frank Noack, "Starke kleine Frau," Filmklappe no. 4 (September 1997), 3-5. 86. Lowry, 58. 87. Drewniak,631. 88. Information according to polling conducted by the American military in Bavaria in October 1945 (Lowry 58). A 1963 press poll equally showed continuing interest in SOderbaum and the film. 89. Beyer, 227. 90. Witte, "Der barocke Faschist: Veit Harlan und seine Filme," in Intellektuelle im Bann des Nationalsozi£llismus, Karl Corino, ed. (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1980), 150; also cited in Lowry, 63. 91. Lowry, 63. 92. Cf. Lowry, 99. 93. Harlan himself pointed out that it was important to him to make the moor look harmless: "The danger of the moor consists of the fact that it doesn't look dark and demonic, but that it resembles a lovely landscape of meadows and woods. The danger would cease if it was clearly visible." Veit Harlan, "Farbfilm," Statt Autogramme. Kiinstler griiflen Soldaten, (Neustadt a. d. Weinstrasse: Weshnark, 1944),54.

NOTES

235

94. Lowry, 91-2. 95. The publicity further underlined the rustic element of the film. See "Bauerliche Szene in der 'Goldenen Stadt,'" Filmwoche, no. 53 (1941). 96. The SS and police leader in Belgrade cautioned against the screening of the film in his territory, because the film showed "how German blood is destroyed through a Czech influence and how a Czech rogue succeeds in ruining a peasant girl who is German at least through her father's line." Cited in Joseph Wulff, ed., Theater und Film im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1983),351. Goebbels indeed ordered a rewritten ending because Anna's rescue would have led to her giving birth to a "Czech bastard." The official assessment of the film through Prof. Walter Hagemann in 1953, however, absolved the film from this reading because of polling that showed spectators were confused when the issue was raised, not having read some of the characters as more Czech or more German than others. (All characters speak German with different local accents.) Historical spectators had read the actors' differently, as Bohemian and Viennese, not making an antiethnic connection. The film also played very successfully in Eastern Europe. See Lowry, 66-9. I personally did not read the film as anti-Czech on first viewing and was pointed to this perspective only by critical literature on the film. See, for instance, Traudisch, 83-100. 97. Many critics have argued that the film cautions against the population's increasing move to the city. Petley argues, "Prague in general, though its architectural beauty is stressed, is represented as a web of intrigue and sensuality, one of the clearest examples of what Goebbels called the 'asphalt culture,'" (Petley, 133). Similar arguments are made in Courtade/Cadars, 263. In contrast, Lowry counters that Harlan's images aestheticize both city and country, and we can find positive as well as negative figures in both locales. (Lowry, 69). 98. Cf. Traudisch, 90-1. 99. Lowry sees in this image a modified fusion of the film's "blood and soil" and its modern impulses. Lowry, 114. 100. Cf. Lowry, 103. 101. Lowry, 101-2. 102. Cf. Lowry, 70. 103. Use Wehner, for instance, wrote in Der Deutsche Film that it was the father's strict anxiousness that led to his daughter's demise (cited in Lowry, 70). Other notices underlined the tragic inevitability of the narrative progression of events. See, for example, Joachim Rheydt, "Ein Bauernschadel aus Granit," Text- und Bildinformationen zu dem Ufa Film 'Die goldene Stadt' (Berlin: Ufa Informationen, n.d.). 104. Petley, 134. 105. Many NS films present positive images of unwed motherhood, for instance, Detlef Sierck's Das Mtidchen vom Moorhof, Home with Zarah Leander, and Harlan's The Sacrifice with S6derbaum. A strong pronatalist discourse further informed Nazi politics. The infamous Lebensborn institutions, for instance, supported unmarried German girls in giving up their (Aryan) infants for adoption.

236

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106. Veit Harlan, 1m Schatten meiner Filme (Giitersloh: Siegbert Mohn Verlag, 1966),95. 107. The journal Filmwelt summarized the plot-ta-be in 1942: "And while the moor will claim its victim by the end of the night [the father], we still find here a new, meaningful beginning. Thus the filmic fiction ends in a life-affirming manner." "Ein Madchen geht in die Stadt," Filmwelt, no. 35/36 (September 3, 1941),775. 108. Cf. Hartmut Redottee, "Versuch iiber Harlan," Die Ufa-das deutsche Bilderimperium, Ufa-Magazin no. 20 (Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1992),9. 109. Cf. Redottee, 10. 110. Also see Richard J. Rundell, "Literary Nazis? Adapting Nineteenth Century German Novellas for the Screen: Der Schimmelreiter, Kleider machen Leute, and Immensee," in Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens, ed. Robert Reimer (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000). 111. Redottee, 11. 112. Ufa-Werbetexte: Immensee: "Melodie einer Jugend," 3. 113. Petley, 134. 114. Redottee, 12. 115. Redottee, 12. 116. Kristina SOderbaum cites this conversation in her memoirs, Nichts bleibt immer so, cited in Gabriele Lange, Das Kino als moralische Anstalt (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 1994), 134. 117. Harlan,lm Schatten meiner Filme, 164. 118. Magda Goebbels reportedly left the film's premiere because the narrative reminded her negatively of her husband's passionate affair with the Czech Ufa starlet Lida Baarova, which was forcibly dissolved by Hitler by sending Baarova back to Prague. 119. In Switzerland, for instance, 50,000 spectators saw the film in the first three weeks. Beyer, 235. 120. See Siegfried Krause, "Ihr liebster Film ist 'Opfergang: " Rheinische Post (September 2,1977). 121. Dr. Richard Biedrzynski, "Liebe, Leid und Luxus," Volkischer Beobachter (Berlin, December 31,1944). 122. Frieda Grafe (Begleitbroschiire zum Farbfilmfest, Berlinale 1988, Hans Helmut Prinzler, ed.), cited in Bock, Toteberg, Das Ufa-Buch, 455. 123. See Traudisch's inclusive analysis of the film, 150-86. 124. Beyer, 196. 125. Biedrzynski, "Liebe, Leid und Luxus." 126. Norbert Grob's redemptive reading of Harlan criticizes the simplistic identification of certain filmic allusions with firm political Nazi positions. "Just because a dog is put to sleep in Opfergang, do we need to scream 'euthanasia'?" Rentschler counters this view by suggesting that Harlan's film must be seen in relation to the political context of its time. That notwithstanding, I believe it can be said that the attitude expressed by Aels transcends the affirmation of "life-

NOTES

237

worthy" (lebenswert) life the Nazis' foregrounded and does speak to a life philosophy that is shared by many people, in particular the terminally ill, who do not embrace fascist beliefs of any kind. As a recent example, we might remember the debates surrounding gay lifestyles under the threat of AIDS. See Norbert Grob, "Veit Harlan," in CineGraph, installment 15 (Munich: edition text+kritik, 1989), E4; cited in Rentschler, 167. On a more tangential note, we might recall that both Hitler and Goebbels, in addition to their wives and families, included their dogs in their suicides. 127. Biedrzynski, "Liebe, Leid und Luxus." 128. Traudisch,171. 129. Rentschler, 144. 130. Romani,87. 131. Petley, 137. 132. Petley points out that Nazi imagery often featured male and female nudity, best exemplified by the nude athletes in Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad. He further cites the debates about a 1935 farming calendar, which ultraconservatives criticized for the depiction of female nudes, to which the SS responded that reading such images as "erotic" suggested perversion in the spectator, not the image (Petley, 136). I would like to caution, however, that Nazi statements concerning matters of eroticism were often merely rhetorical; many cultural phenomena in the National Socialist media can be understood only if we see them as attempts to package eroticism in such an ambiguous way that it could pass the censors without losing its enticing effect. 133. Petley, 135. 134. Cf. Petley, 136. 135. Redottee, 10. 136. Swiss newspapers, for instance, which published uncensored reviews, found The Sacrifice "unrealistic," "overly sentimental," "superficial," and "anesthetizing." Swedish reviews also adopted an ironic tone when discussing the film (Drewniak, 677). This contemporary response suggests that the film was read as excessive in terms of story and style, pointing to the possibility of similar reading by German spectators. 137. Michael Althen, "Totentanz," Siiddeutsche Zeitung (Munich, June 29, 1995). 138. Fritz Gi:ittler, "Die Frau des Verfemten. Kristina SOderbaum wird 80," Siiddeutsche Zeitung (September 6, 1992). 139. SOderbaum's memoirs, Nichts bleibt immer so, were instrumental in creating this impression. In Regine Mihal Friedman's interview with the actress, "Mein Tag mit Kristina," she also points to her role as an innocent caught in a bad marriage and a political system she didn't understand. 140. SOderbaum firmly stood by her husband in the postwar years. She testified on his behalf in the Harlan trial and further rejected all offers to return to Sweden without him to resume her film career. Only after Harlan's death did SOderbaum begin to publicly voice her criticism of him and describe the often oppressive relationship she experienced as his wife.

238

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CHAPTER) 1. Reported in Hans Borgelt, Das susseste Madel der Welt (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1976), 164. 2. Documented in Joseph Wulf, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1983),346. 3. Harvey's career went through a number of distinct stages. Weimar: 1924-1933 (thirty-seven films, including several multiple language versions); Hollywood: 1933-1935 (four films); England: 1935 (one film); Nazi Germany: 193~1939 (eleven films, including several multiple language versions); France: 1940 (two films). 4. Witte, "Film in Nationalsozialismus" Geschichte des deutschen Films, 159. 5. Witte, 132. 6. Witte, 122. 7. See, for example, Kreimeier, 241-257, 277-290. Also see Karsten Witte, Lachende Erben, Toller Tag. Filmkomodie im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Vorwerk 8,1995), 42-48; and Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 16-24. 8. On Harvey's return to Germany the charge of Reichsflucht implied a substantial tax penalty. After Harvey personally complained to Goebbels, the state's financial charges were withdrawn. See Christiane Habich, ed., Lilian Harvey (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1990),49. 9. Habich, 39. 10. In 1932, Harvey entered a seven-year contract with Fox (beginning in 1933) that guaranteed $3000 a week for the first fifty-two weeks. Afterward this amount was further increased by $500 a week every six months. See Habich, 35. Harvey canceled her contract in January 1934 after completing three films, My Lips Betray (1933), My Weakness (1933), and I Am Suzanne (1934), but she was committed to one more production with Fox (The Hollywood Reporter, January 7, 1934). Fox loaned Harvey to Columbia for this film, where she made Let's Live Tonight, which premiered in March 1935. 11. Licht-Bild-Buhne, no. 1 (January 1, 1933) cited in Habich, 39. 12. Harvey's parentage was subject to some speculation. Her insistence that she was entirely British irritated Nazi officials, who argued that her father, Walter Bruno Pape, was German and had simply been naturalized as a British citizen. Harvey also later indulged the suggestion that she was conceived during her mother's extramarital affair with an Englishman, but her all-British origin can be neither confirmed nor refuted. Harvey did however maintain life-long contact with her paternal German grandparents. 13. Liebeswalzer (1930), Hokuspokus (1930), Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930), Der Kongref3 tanzt (1931), and Ein blonder Traum (1932) are among the films that were produced as multiple-language versions. 14. Documented in Kinematograph, no. 13 (January 20,1932) cited in Habich, 33. 15. Witte, Lachende Erben, 133. 16. Witte, Lachende Erben, 112.

NOTES

239

17. Willy Fritsch had been known in Germany since 1921 and was considered a "handsome leading man" and "charming boy next door." Harvey and Fritsch starred together in Weimar films made after 1926, including Die keusche Susanne (1926), Liebeswalzer (1930), Hokuspokus (1930), Einbrecher. Eine Musikalische Ehekomodie (1930), Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930), Der Kongrep tanzt (1931), and Ein blonder Traum (1932). See: Anton Kaes, "Film in der Weimarer Republik," in Geschichte des deutschen Films, 98. 18. Ernst Bloch, ''Die Frau im Dritten Reich," Die Neue Weltbiihne (April 2, 1937) cited in Witte, "Film im Nationaisozialismus," Geschichte des deutschen Films, 143. 19. H. M., "Lilian Harvey filmt wieder in Berlin," in Feuilletons fUr Schwarze Rosen, I. Feuilletonistisches, II. Historisches (Berlin: Ufa, n.d.). 20. On Harvey, see Kreimeier 220. On Fritsch, see Neueste Nachrichten. Das Blatt der Berliner Gesellschajt, no. 3 (1932), 1. (Archive materials, Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt/ M.) 21. Rentschler, 122. 22. Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag, p. 16. Witte's references to a "dream in blonde" and "lucky kid" refer to Harvey's film titles, Ein Blonde Traum and Lucky Kids. [Myemphasisl. 23. The Tiller girls were a British dance troupe who successfully toured Europe in the 1920s. They were enormously successful and inspired the German copy-cat act, the Hiller girls. See Siegfried Kracauer's discussion of the Tiller girls in, Das Ornament der Masse (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M., 1963),50-63. On Busby Berkeley, see for instance, Rick Altman, ed., The Musical (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987); and Martin Rubin, Showstoppers. Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of the Spectacle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 24. Ellie Tschauner, "Tapfere kleine Frau. 'Filmheldinnen'-gestem und heute," Filmwelt, no. 4 (1941), 84. 25. Anton Kaes, "Film in der Weimarer Republik. Motor der Modeme," in

Geschichte des deutschen Films, 98. 26. Thomas Elsaesser, "Hollywood-Berlin," Sight and Sound (November 1997), 16. 27. Kreimeier, 340. 28. Hans Dieter Schafer, Das gespaltene Bewuptsein. Dber deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933-45 (Frankfurt/M.: Uilstein, 1984), 184. Cited in Rentschler, 107. [Rentschler's translation]. [Rentschler's additionl. 29. Rentschler, 12l. 30. Kaes, 98. 31. Elsa esser, 16. 32. Winfried Giinther, "Willi dalberte urn Lilian," in Habich, 178. 33. John Ellis, "Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon," Star Texts, John Ellis, ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991),304. 34. Erik Kriines, "Das Star-Unwesen im Film," Rundfunk und Film im Dienste nationaler Kultur, Richard Kolb, Heinrich Siekmeier, eds. (DUsseldorf: Friedrich Roeder Verlag, 1933),386.

240 NOTES 35. Ellie Tschauner, ''Tapfere kleine Frau. 'Filmheldinnen'-gestern und heute," Filmwelt, no. 4 (January 14, 1941), 84. 36. Lilian Harvey, Der Film, 10 ]g., no. 34 (August 23,1925). 37. Lilian Harvey, Deutsche Filmwoche, no. 6 (February 11, 1927). 38. Rudolph Arnheim, however, wrote in 1932 that "it is no secret that the chats, which magazines or newspapers publish in the name of film artists, have been mostly composed by the film companies' press officers. Overall we shouldn't be concerned about that, because whether or not the rendition of an amusing anecdote that occurred on set was really written by Lilian Harvey or by the lyricist of her company, it should end up being pretty much the same thing." Cited in Habich, 7. Christiane Habich, however, points out that regardless of the origins of these writings, seen together they all show significant similarities and thus illuminate the image Ufa constructed for their star. Habich, 7. 39. Lilian Harvey, "Gesprache mit rnir selbst," Filmland, no. 6 (April 1925). 40. Lilian Harvey, "Ich mocht' ein Abenteuer erleben," Mein Film, no. 214 (1930). 41. Harvey later claimed to have had a relationship with Fritsch for several years, while Fritsch denied these claims up until his death. 42. Edith Hamann, "Lilian und Willy erklaren," Die Filmwoche, 8 ]g., no. 16 (April 16, 1930). 43. Neueste Nachrichten. Das Blatt der Berliner GeselischaJt, no. 3 (1932), 1. 44. See: "Apachentanz," Deutsche Filmwoche, 3 ]g., no. 2 (January 14, 1927); "Charleston," Die Filmbiihne, 1 ]g., no. 1 (April 1927); "Der schonste Sport," Die Filmwoche, 6 ]g., no. 5 (February 1, 1928); "Tonfilm-Moden," reprinted in Mein Film, no. 214 (1930). 45. See: Charles Eckert, ''The Carole Lombard in Macy's Window," in Gledhill, Stardom: Industry of Desire. 46. Harvey's contract with Fox further specified that she receive a new wardrobe consisting of sixty new items, including a long ermine coat with a silver fox collar, a mink coat, a mink cape, and an evening gown with a mink trim. Habich,38. 47. Virginia Sinclair, "Lilian Drives 'Em Wild!" Screen Play (May 1933), 33, 58. 48. Fox publicity release for exhibitors, Nachlass Lilian Harvey, Filmmuseum Frankfurt/M. 49. My Lips Betray was made earlier than My Weakness. Initially the film was only released in England. Fox wanted to introduce Harvey with a more successful vehicle to American audiences and consequently held back the release of My Lips Betray in the United States. 50. Paul Ickes, Filmwoche, no. 2 (January 10, 1934). 51. Ufa memorandum, issued by the "Ufa Theater-Betrieb GmbH" on 24 April 1934; film documents available at the Archiv der Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin. 52. Edith Hamann, Lilian Harvey. Ein Leben fiir den Film (Berlin: Verlag Herman Wendt, n.d.) 32-3. 53. See ''Mit Gary Cooper in der Ufastadt," Filmwelt, no. 49 (1938).

NOTES

241

54. See, for example, Edith Hamann, Lilian Haroey, 32-3. 55. See: Die Filmkritik, Orig. s.:4.3-89/3, [VAR], [Ill, 37, 79, Archiv der Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin; and Habich, 51. 56. "Filrn-Ieicht geschiirzt," Die grilne Post, no. 32 (August 6,1939). 57. According to Christiane Habich, the film was approximately made between 1935 and 1938. Filmstars privat. Lilian Haroey, Vierzehntausend Meter OZAPHAN-FILM rollen ab ... , Verlag Imprimatur G.m.b.H., Frankfurt/M., n.d. 58. The notion that glamour stars privately abhor their ostentatious styles was of course also widely circulated in Hollywood at the time, serving as a mechanism that upheld the glamour star as female fantasy while naturalizing or humanizing its referent, thus making the star more suitable for identification. However, in the context of Nazism it is interesting to note that Harvey invokes this trope precisely at the point in her career when Harvey's star image needs to undergo a transformation toward shedding the overdetermined markers of Hollywood stardom in favor of a more National Socialism-specific star description. 59. Edith Hamann, Lilian Haroey. Ein Leben fUr den Film, 8-9. 60. U. Konstantin, "'Lilian' oder der Wunschtraum," Der Deutsche Film, no. 1,1 Jg. (August 1937), 45. [Myemphasisl. 61. Otto Bergholz, ed., Gefilmter Tanz, no. 1, Reihe der Filmschriften (Berlin: Robert M6lich, n.d.), 7. 62. Dyer, 136. 63. Konstantin, 45. 64. Julius Streicher, Address to Hitler Youth Women, Berlin, November 1937, quoted in Romani, 26. 65. Elsaesser, "Hollywood-Berlin," 17. 66. See: Charlotte Cornelia Herzog and Jane Marie Gaines, "Puffed Sleeves before Tea-Time," in Stardom. Industry of Desire, 87. Herzog and Gaines use Joan Crawford's example to suggest that the Crawford success story was geared to inspire similar hopes in women as long as they followed the same disciplines of beauty and style. 67. Romani, 26. 68. Liliane Crips, ''Modesch6pfung und Frauenbild am Beispiel von zwei nationalsozialistischen Zeitschriften, Die Dame versus Die deutsche Mutter" in Frauen und Faschismus in Europa, 181-235. 69. See Die Dame: lllustrierte Modezeitschrijt [Ausziigel (Berlin: Ulistein, 1912/43) (1980). 70. Press orders dated October 9,1942, documented in Joseph Wulf, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt/M.: Uilstein, 1983),346. 71. An additional element accounting for the difference in response to the departure of either actress must be seen in the time of their departure. Harvey left before the advent of World War II, when Germany was still trying to suggest that its film industry was competitive in, if not leading, the international market. When Leander left in 1943, Germany was already engaged in Goebbels's "total war," which suggested that anybody's departure, especially that of a star like Leander, equaled treason. Moreover, the rhetoric of condemnation that fol-

242

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lowed Leander's return to Sweden, which might have been received with suspicion in peace times, is much more likely to have been successful with the public in a situation where they themselves were suffering tremendously and were unable to abandon ship, so to speak, themselves. 72. Harvey plays a double role in Die Tolle Lola (1927), Ihr dunkler Punkt (1929), and Glackskinder (Lucky Kids, 1936). 73. Ufa guaranteed Harvey the amount of 180,000 Mark per year for three films. This amount increased from year to year, to 220,000, to 280,000 to 360,000 Mark. She further received paid vacations, which Ufa could buy back from her (and always did) and the right to participate in the selection of her material. See Habich,19. 74. Lilian Harvey, ''Wiedergeburt des romantischen Films," Tages-Post, Linz (June 13, 1932). 75. Ursula Vossen, ''Vom Happy-End zum Leiden an der Liebe," !dole des deutschen Films, ed. Thomas Koebner (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1997), 175. 76. Cf. Kaes, 98. 77. Ursula Vossen points out that both Harvey and Fritsch had their own first names as screen characters (in Ihr dunkler Punkt, Ein blonder Traum, and Die Drei von der Tankstelle), which supports the idea that Ufa deliberately sought to blur the boundaries between the couple's fictional relationship on screen and their private relations in reality. In addition, naming also connotes "accessibility" and the idea that the "real person" is just like the character the actor plays. Vossen, 169. 78. Der Kongress tanzt, like various other Harvey vehicles, was produced as a multiple-language version. Each starred Harvey, but only the Gennan version paired her with Fritsch. The English (Congress Dances) and French (Le Congres s'amuse) versions featured Henri Garat as Czar Alexander. 79. Karsten Witte, Lachende Erben, 16. 80. Kaes, 98. [My additions] 81. Vossen, 170. 82. Vossen, 175. 83. On the American screwball comedy and the comedy of remarriage, see, for instance: David R. Shumway, "Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage," in Film Genre Reader, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995),381-401. Also see, Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) and Kristine Kamick and Henry Jenkins, eds., Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge, 1995). 84. Both Kaes and Vossen draw on Die Kameradschaftsehe to discuss the screen relationships between Fritsch and Harvey. Cf. Kaes, 98; and Vossen, 177. 85. Die Lilian Harvey Story: Die Geschichte eines Filmsterns, erziihlt von Lilian Harvey, Radio DRS (Radio Studio BaseD, aired on May 20,1961, cited in Habich, 48. 86. The "Heimkehrer" genre is marked by an emphasis on Germans whose return "home" is motivated by the realization that their fantasies concerning the life and work conditions in the countries they have emigrated to, particularly the United States, have not been fulfilled. The characters finally understand that

NOTES

243

they cannot transcend "who" they are (Germans, Bavarians, Tirolians, etc.) or ignore where they "belong." Frequently, this realization is coupled with the hope that the negative circumstances in Germany (for instance, Weimar politics, old-fashioned traditionalism, rigid class system) that drove the character away in the first place are now being remedied. This renewed sense of optimism is implicitly linked to the National Socialist victory in 1933. For a discussion of other filmic examples, see: Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, part II, "Foreign Affairs," 73-145. 87. The two productions Harvey made in France after leaving Germany were Serenade (1940) and Miquette (1940). 88. "S-k" in Film-Kurier, no. 220 (September 19, 1936). Reprinted in Ulrich Kurowski, ed., Deutsche Spie/filme 1933-1945. Materialien III, 2nd rev. ed., (Munich: Stadtmuseum Miinchen and Miinchner Fiirnzentrum, 1978), 167. 89. See Licht-Bild-Biihne, no. 294 (December 16, 1936). Cf. Jerzy Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films 1934-39 (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1982),27. 90. Rentschler, 104. 91. Orson Welles, argues Rainer Rother, drew on similar techniques four years later in Citizen Kane. See, Rainer Rother, "Kom6die mit Vorbild," UfaMagazin, no. 13 (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1992),2. Of course, the headline sequences in both Lucky Kids and Citizen Kane also have literary precedents (i.e., in John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy) and were an established B-movie trope by the time the film was made. 92. Cf. Witte, Lachende Erben, 112-3. 93. Rainer Rother sees Martin's use of reflexivity and citation as a strategy of entertainment that is more crucial to the film's success than its plotting. The charm of the story, he argues, "derives more from the elements of citation and self-parody than from the way the story moves. Paul Martin ... uses American genres (and the contemporary audience's familiarity with them) to unmask the imitation via citation. There continues to be displacement that guarantees that the copy is recognized as such, and that its difference creates an entertaining function." Rother, 5. 94. See Cary Nathenson, "Fear of Flying: Education to Manhood in Nazi Film Comedies: Glackskinder and Quax, der Bruchpilot," in Cultural History

through a National Socialist Lens, 84-108. 95. Witte, Lachende Erben, 110. One of Witte's theses regarding Third Reich comedies is that "[tlhe forms of aesthetic appropriation of materials are determined by a specific structural production ideology. The imitation of the American comedy is dominated by the exclusion of sexuality, which may only be allowed in its repressed forms. The original model is Germanized accordingly. The humor of visual montage is shifted to the verbal joke." Another of Witte's theses suggests that "[tlhe structure of comedy is based on diverse topoi-such as mistaken identities or plot confusions, illusions of social climbing, the promise of happiness, class reconciliation-which are processed into the standardized solutions of serial production. Class distinctions, the battle of the sexes, and the image of masculine and feminine are rigorously reinforced." Witte, 46--7.

244

NOTES

96. Cf. Drewniak, 633. 97. "'Ich wollt', ich war ein Huhn ... ," Das Schwarze Korps (November 26, 1936) reprinted in Ulrich Kurowski, ed., Deutsche Spielfilme 1933-1945, 172-7. 98. Hamann, Lilian Harvey. Ein Leben fUr den Film, 40-1. 99. Witte, Lachende Erben, 106. 100. In contrast to what is often said about Hollywood comedy as a genre that thrives with dissonance and critique, Witte suggests that in general there is a structural relation between Nazi propaganda films and Third Reich comedies, insofar as neither genre inspires the viewer to think critically. Lachende Erben, 45. 101. Rentschler, 118. 102. This ending, however, is not by any means uniquely descriptive of Nazi romances, but also constitutes one of the most dominant Hollywood conventions. As David Shumway points out: "There are a number of different accounts of romantic ideology as expressed in different cultures and artifacts. The version that seems most common in Hollywood film holds the 'bliss of genitality' to the end of the narrative," "Screwball Comedies," 385. 103. Rentschler, 122. 104. See Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text, no. 1 (Winter 1979), 130-48. 105. Ute Bechdolf makes a similar argument in her discussion of the representation of women in two other Third Reich films, Die gottliche Jette and Capriolen, arguing that despite the films' conservative plot developments, "counterimages to the National Socialist ideology of womanhood are included in these film as a potential." See Bechdolf, 113. 106. Witte, Lachende Erben, 106. 107. Press orders issued on October 10,1941. [Myemphasisl. 108. Cited in Beyer, 16. Before the war, Hitler saw an average of three films a day. During World War II, he abandoned his viewing habits declaring his renunciation of the cinema an act of solidarity with the soldiers at the front. 109. Karl Ritter's diaries, cited in Borgelt, 183--5. 110. Witte, Lachende Erben, 18. 111. Witte, Lachende Erben, 18. 112. Der Deutsche Film (n. d.); cited in Kreimeier, 324. 113. Witte, Lachende Erben, 153. 114. Karl Ritter in a letter from his home in Buenos Aires to Hans Borgelt in postwar years, cited in Borgelt, 181. 115. See Kalbus 120-33. 116. uta Filmblatt, archival materials on Lilian Harvey, Deutsches Filrninstitut, Frankfurt/M. (n. d.). 117. In his study of Third Reich comedy, Witte isolates the fact that "with few exceptions, comedies are set in spaces far removed from reality, in high-society circles, in costume histories, revue and variety milieus, ... The entertainment business thus presents its own locale to the audience as a valuable visual source." Lachende Erben, 47. 118. Karl Ritter's diaries cited in Borgelt, 184-5.

NOTES 245

119. "1st das der deutsche Humor," Nachrichtenblatt der NSDAP, cited in Gabriele Lange, Das Kino als moralische Anstalt, Hans Gunter Hockerts and Gerhard A. Richter (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang Verlag, 1994). [My emphasis) 120. Karl Ritter's diary cited in Borgelt, 184. [My emphasis) 121. Witte, Lachende Erben, 153-4. 122. See, Teresa de Lauretis, "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms and Contexts," Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, Teresa de Lauretis, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 17. Teresa de Lauretis, Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, 17; and Gaylyn Studlar, "Masochism, Masquerade, and the Erotic Metamorphoses of Marlene Dietrich," in Fabrications, Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, eds. (London: Routledge, 1989), 244. 123. Witte, Lachende Erben, 45. 124. Cf. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 16; Wes D. Gehring, Screwball Comedy: A Genre of Mndcap Romance (New York: Greenwood, 1986),3-12; Thomas Schatz, Old Hollywood/New Hollywood: Ritual, Art and Industry (Ann Arbor: OMI, 1983),94-7, 158--63; James Harvey, Romantic Comedy: Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges (New York: Knopf, 1987), xi-xii. 125. On Weimar androgyny, see Petro, 107-10. Also, Kalbus, 120-33. 126. Petro, 103-10. 127. Aros (Alfred Rosenthal), Lilian Harvey. Ein Querschnitt durch ihr Leben und Wirken (Berlin: Verlag Scherl, 1932). 128. Richard Paikow, "Die gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Stellung der deutschen Frau von heute," Doctoral Dissertation, 1937. This overtly National Socialist work is available today in the National Library of Paris, cited in Stockl, 100. 129. Cf. Verena Lueken, "Die unmogliche Frau. Ingrid Bergman in Die Vier Gesellen," Frauen und Film, no. 44/45 (October 1988), 90-102. 130. StOckl, 101. 131. The private relationship between Harvey and Martin, both Martin's treatment of Harvey's role, which literally deconstructs her previously rebellious star persona and forces her into submission, and her desperate, if unsuccessful resistance to this material, suggests an interesting extra textual, if speculative, component to the film. Martin had been dependent on Harvey throughout his career; to her insistence on him as her director he owed his success. Once his career was solidified with the success of Schwarze Rosen, Gliickskinder, and Sieben Ohrfeigen, he pursued films without Harvey in order not to be regarded as a Harvey director only. Harvey, who had invested large parts of her fortune in a large manor in Martin's native Hungary, learned of his new connection with ingenue Frauke Lauterbach returning from a vacation in 1938. Harvey, who had returned from Hollywood largely on Martin's accord, immediately canceled her Ufa contract, wishing to leave Germany at once. Only after being threatened with a penalty of 1.5 million Reichsmark by Ufa, Harvey returned to make one last film, Woman at the Wheel; she never spoke to Martin privately throughout production. Habich, 57.

246

NOTES

132. Lilian Harvey, statement regarding script submission of Woman at the Wheel, unpublished typescript, cited in Habich, 148. 133. In Habich, 14S-50. 134. Shumway, 382. 135. Shumway, 393. 136. Use Wehner, Der deutsche Film, no. 2 (August 1939),55. 137. Paul Ickes, Das Program von Heute: Woman at the Wheel, no. 398, 8, (1939). 138. Hete Nebel, 'Wer hat's leichter," Filmwoche, no. 8 (February 22,1939). 139. Boguslaw Drewniak, Der Deutsche Film, 1938-45 (Diisseldorf: Droste, 1987),572. 140. On SOderbaum's fan relationship to Harvey, see Friedemann Beyer, 197. 141. See Habich, 69-99. 142. See, for example: "Willi Fritsch und Lilian Harvey heute," Hahner Zeitung (February 2,1958); Lovis Windeck, "Das siiBeste Madel der Welt. Lilian Harvey wird Hausfrau. Abschied von einem Filmstar." Darmstiidter Echo (February 27,1953); Rudolf Reiner, "Filmstars von gestem und heute: Lilian Harvey und Willy Fritsch," Frankfurter Rundschau (November 1, 1958). 143. Many critics have speculated about the reasons for Harvey's postwar failure. Most argue that Harvey's image was not suitable for aging, that Harvey's girlish appeal was forever linked to physical youth. Others insist that Harvey was unwilling to play supporting roles, whereas other Third Reich actresses' postwar films show them as mothers of adult children. See, for example, Sven Hansen, "Lilian H. oder Der Mythos, der sich selbst iiberlebte," Die Welt (July 3,1979). 144. See Henri Nannen, "Lieber Sternleser," Stern, 13 Jg., no. 32 (August 6, 1960). 145. Kurt Will, "Das gab's nur einmal. Das kommt nicht wieder," Stern, 13 Jg., no. 32 (August 6, 1960). Will's take on Harvey was often later taken up in other Harvey reports. See, for example: "Lilian H. oder Der Mythos, der sich selbst iiberlebte," Die Welt (July 3,1979). 146. Kreimeier, 349.

CHAPTER

4

1. Lowry, Pathos und Politik, 121. 2. In detail, the contract specified a monthly salary of 10909.09 in Reichsmark and 40727.20 in Swedish Kroners. On contract agreements between Ufa and Zarah Leander, see Drewniak, Der Deutsche Film, 153. 3. Beyer, 158. The agreement was a continuing source of debate, both within Germany and abroad, because Germany needed its hard currency to cover its considerable foreign debt. In response to a query from Herman Goring regarding the payment of hard currency to stars and the negative press this had caused

NOTES

247

in the foreign news media, Ufa justified its decision as follows: "Frau Leander therefore has income, which is less than she could have obtained through a American offer valid at Ufa contract negotiations. In addition, her wages are appropriate in relation to that of other stars. It seems that it has come to inaccurate press notices, because a certain inflammatory foreign press has named fantastic wages to be paid in hard currency with the accusation that Germany, instead of paying its foreign debt, spends this much hard currency on foreign artists. In reality the films with Zarah Leander earn hard currency for Germany." Letter to Minister President Herman GOring, January 12, 1938, IA-PflKb. 290/200, collection of Paul Seiler, Filmrnuseum Potsdam. Similar payment requests by other foreign stars (i.e., Marika Rokk and Lilian Harvey) were later refused by Ufa in 1939. Kreirneier, Die Ufa-Story, 351. 4. Seiler cites Berliner Abendblatt, R 55, no. 56 ff., September 10, 1939, on comparative star incomes. Paul Seiler, Ein Mythos lebt. Zarah Leander, (Berlin: Graphische Werkstatten, 1991),54. Also see Drewniak, Der Deutsche Film, 165, for directors' salaries: in 1944, for example, the top salary for a director per film was 80,000 RM, which went to star directors such as Veit Harlan, Willy Forst, and Carl Froelich. 5. For example, Kann denn Liebe Sunde sein? was recorded by German rock singer Udo Lindenberg and became a popular hit in the early 1980s. On Judy Garland and gay spectatorship, see Dyer, "A Star is Born and the Construction of Authenticity," in Stardom. Industry of Desire, 132-40. 6. Beyer, 153. 7. Axel an der Himme/stur, a musical parody of Hollywood and Greta Garbo, was written by Hans Weigel, Ralph Benatzky, and Max Hansen, who emigrated to Vienna after having written satirical couplets about the alleged homosexuality of Adolf Hitler. Paul Seiler often cites Leander's association with antifascist and gay artists to underline the apolitical nature of Leander's career decisions. See Seiler, Introductory Lecture to "Die Grope Liebe," unpublished, Filmrnuseurn Potsdam. 8. Michael Totenberg, "Option auf einen Star," Die UFA-das deutsche Bilderimperium, Magazin no. 14 (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1992), 10. 9. Beyer, 151, and Seiler, Ein Mythos lebt, 19. 10. Ufa letter to Goring, January 12, 1938, IA-PflKb. 290/200. 11. See complete discography by Jiirgen Briickner, Rainer E. Lotz, Manfred Weihermiiller, and Richard Weizer in Paul Seiler, Kann den Lieber Sunde sein? Zarah Leander CD collection, BCD 16016, 89-106. 12. See Seiler, Ein Mythos lebt 14--8, and Leander, Es war so wunderbar! Mein Leben. 13. Beyer, 151. 14. Verena Lueken, Zur Erziihlstruktur des nationalsozialistischen Films (Siegen: Universitat-Gesamthochschule Siegen, 1981),20. 15. Lueken, 19. 16. See Stacey, Star Gazing. 17. Rentschler, 138-9.

248 NOTES 18. Helma Sanders-Brahms, "Zarah," Jahrbuch Film 81/82 (Munich: Carl Hauser Verlag, 1981) 165-6. 19. Rentschler, 145. 20. Karsten Witte, "Revue als montierte Handlung," in Wir tanzen um die Welt,228. 21. Seiler, Ein Mythos lebt, 14--8. 22. Kreimeier, 355. 23. Drewniak,135. 24. Goebbels's diary entry on June 2, 1937, notes that he is not impressed with Leander. On 4 February 1937, he reports reprimanding Hans Jakob Weideman, Vice President of the Reichsfilmkammer, for insisting on signing Leander, and on June 30,1937, he complains about having to order Ufa to sign Imperio Argentino, a Spanish actress favored by Goebbels, when they had wanted to sign Leander so badly. Imperio never gained any popularity. Following Leander's huge public success, Goebbels's attitude toward Ufa's choice shifts dramatically. Leander is mentioned in further entries as visiting the minister on several occasions and is even described as giving Goebbels status reports regarding the political attitudes toward Germany in Sweden, after returning from a trip to her homeland, in the entry of April 19, 1940. See Goebbels, Die Tagebiicher von Joseph Goebbels, 1924-45 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1997). 25. Paul Seiler's dedication to Zarah Leander research is the object of Christian Blackwood's 1984 documentary My Life for Zarah. 26. See Lueken, Zur Erziihlstruktur des nationalsozialistischen Films; Heide Schliipmann, ''Trugbilder weiblicher Autonomie im nationalsozialistischen Film," in Frauen und Faschismus in Europa: Der Faschistische Korper, 211-28; Gertrud Koch, ''Von Detlef Sierck zu Douglas Sirk," Frauen und Film, no. 44/45, October 1988,109-29. 27. For a general discussion of feminist film criticism, see Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 13-102. 28. Katharina Sykora, "Heroische Seelenrevue," Die Ufa-Das deutsche Bilderimperium, Magazin no. 18 (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1992), 3. 29. Many of the news features regarding Leander even contained headings such as "Zarah Leander Talks: A Woman in Two Worlds" or "A Woman and Two Faces." See: Hete Nebel, "Zarah Leander plaudert: Eine Frau in zwei Welten," Filmwoche, no. 10 (1939), 293, and "Eine Frau und zwei Gesichter," collection Paul Seiler, Filmmuseum Potsdam; no further reference available. 30. The term Ueberweib is best translated as "super-female." 31. This is a reference to the Leander song "lch steh' im Regen" from Detlef Sierck's To New Shores. 32. All titles in parentheses refer to song titles or refrain lines from songs that Leander performed in various films. 33. The style of the article, if somewhat obtuse, is characteristic for Nazi writing, which combines a flowery descriptive style with strong polemics. What is meant here is that Zarah Leander only pretended to care about feelings of

NOTES

249

love--a strategy that enabled her success-whereas in reality she sought only her own financial gain. 34. Beiblatt zum "Politischen Dienst" fUr SS und Polizei, Reichsfiihrer SS, SS Hauptamt,1943. 35. See, for example, Friedemann Beyer, Ufa-Stars im Dritten Reich, 151-95. In his chapter on Leander, Beyer points to the limited time Leander spent with her children and to the failing of two of her three marriages. He suggests that Leander's egocentric need for self-display and public adulation led her to disavow all political considerations. 36. Michaela Jary, Ich weifl es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen (Berlin: edition q, 1993),50. 37. The term Gleichschaltung refers to the elimination of opposition and was initiated by the Nazis on January 31,1933. This was followed by its implementation in the media through the ratification of the Enniichtigungsgesetz (enabling act) on March 23, 1933. 38. Werbe-Ratschlag, "Premiere," Syndikat-Film-Tobis, Schlagworte. 39. Hete Nebel, "Zarah Leander plaudert-Frau in zwei Welten," Filmwoche, no. 10 (1939), 293. 40. The image of the glamorous Hollywood style film star was well established at this time. It continued to be discussed in publications such as Otto Bergholz's Wunderland Hollywood?! which described movie stars' luxurious mansions, exclusive hobbies, and expensive wardrobes up until the late 1930s. 41. Cf. "Zarah Leander. Von Viirmland urn den Erdball," Filmwelt, no. 47-50 (November 18-December 18, 1938), and Kiithe Brinker, Zarah Leander. Eine grofle Kilrriere, (Berlin: Hermann Wendt GmbH n.d.) among others. 42. Richard De Cordova, ''The Emergence of the American Star System," in Stardom. Industry of Desire, 27--8. 43. Edith Hamann, "Unser w6chentliches Interview: Zarah Leander." Filmwoche, no. 20 (1937). 44. The particularly negative description of the Hollywood star appeared in National Socialist publications throughout Nazi rule. In the popular press, however, international film stars were openly criticized only after the beginning of World War II, when international, and especially U.s. productions, ceased to be in distribution. 45. See, for example, "Die Premiere der Zarah Leander," Filmwoche, no. 31 (1936). 46. See, for example, Kiithe Brinker, Zarah Leander. Eine grofle Kilrriere, 41~, and Paul Baumgarten, "Zarah Leander: Ein Leben in Episoden," Der Stern, collection Paul Seiler, Filmmuseum Potsdam. 47. Hans Joachim Schlamp, "Willy Birgel spielt mit Zarah Leander, Angela Gallofer, Brigitte Homey," Reihe der Filmschriften, Heft 17 (Berlin: Verlag Robert M6lich, n.d.). 48. For a detailed discussion of the genius genre, see Schulte-Sasse, 147-228. 49. Zarah Leander participated in raising funds for the 'Winterhilfswerk" in 1939, which collected donations for winter relief. She also performed songs in

250 NOTES the 12th "Wunschkonzert der Deutschen Wehrmacht" on December 1, 1940; Theo von Mackeben. Herbert von Karajan, Marika Rokk, and many others also appeared. Various leading Nazi politicians, including Goebbels and von Brauchitsch, attended. Both events received extensive press coverage. Request concerts can be seen as fulfilling a distinct political function. The Nazi newspaper VOlkischer Beobachter characterized their effect on audiences as follows: "[The request concerts] came out of the idea that the radio, like no other media, can weave a live and direct band between the great community of front and home. This can keep alive and reinforce the feeling of inseparable unity in everyone, whether he is serving at home or in the field, as it cannot be done in any other way with the same meaningful and conscious effect." Herman Hacker, collection Paul Seiler, Filmmuseum Potsdam; no full citation. The Third Reich film production Wunschkonzert (Eduard von Borsody, 1940), starring lise Werner and Carl Raddatz), described the idea of request radio concerts as the link that emotionally connected Germans torn apart by war times. 50. For example, Leander was reported to have attended a reception at Hermann Goring's house in June 1939. 51. Nebel,295. 52. Zarah Hedberg married actor Nils Leander in 1927. Her daughter, Boel Leander, was born in 1928 and her son Goran in 1929. The couple separated in 1930. In 1932, Leander married journalist Vidar Forsell, who remained her husband throughout her Third Reich career. They divorced in 1946. A third marriage, to musician Arne Hiilpers, followed in 1956. 53. "Zarah Leander. Von Viirmland urn den Erdball. Part II," Filmwelt, no. 48 (1938). 54. "Zarah Leander. Von ViirmIand urn den Erdball. Part I," Filmwelt, no. 47 (1938). 55. Otto Bergholz, "Stimmen, die die Welt bezaubern," Reihe der Filmschriften, Heft 26 (Berlin: Verlag Robert Molich, n.d.). Among the Hedberg's ancestors, however, were members of the clergy. 56. "Zarah Leander. Von Viirmland urn den Erdball. Part I," Filmwelt, no. 47 (1938). 57. "Zarah Leander. Von Viirmland urn den Erdball. Part I," Filmwelt, no. 47 (1938). 58. "Zarah Leander. Von ViirmIand urn den Erdball. Part III," Filmwelt, no. 49 (1938). 59. "Zarah Leander wird eingekleidet: 13 Kostiime und was fur welche!," Filmwoche, no. 4 (1941), 83. 60. John Ellis, "Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon," Star Texts, 303-4. Dyer, Stars, 36. 61. Th. Riegler, "Vier Schauspielerinnen-vier Temperamente," Im Scheinwerter, Beilage zur Filmwelt no. 17 (n.d.), film files of the Bundesarchiv Berlin. 62. Rentschler, 128. 63. Sanders-Brahms, 165. 64. Lueken, 19.

NOTES

251

65. Sykora, 3. 66. Claudia Rhode, "Leuchtende Sterne?" in Helga Belach, ed., Wir tanzen

um die Welt, 135. 67. Cf. Lowry, 205--6; and Traudisch. 68. Edith Hamann, Filmwoche, no. 20 (1937). 69. For an excellent meta-history of Sirk criticism, see: Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sierck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Also see: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "Six Films by Douglas Sirk," in Jon Halliday and Laura Mulvey, eds., Douglas Sirk (London: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1972), 95-106. 70. Thomas Elsaesser, ''Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 179. 71. Cited in Klinger, 8. [Klinger's additionl. 72. Laura Mulvey, "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama," Movie, no. 25 (Winter 1977 /78),53. 73. Rentschler, 135. [Myadditionl. 74. Kreirneier, 352. 75. Kreirneier, 352. 76. On Sierck's German work, see: Julian Petley, "Sirk in Germany, Sight and Sound 57,1"; Katie Trurnpener, "Puerto Rico Fever: Douglas Sirk, La Habancra (1937) and the Epistemology of Exoticism," in S. Bauschinger and S. Coca lis, eds., "Neue Welt"/" Dritte Welt": Interkulturelle Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Lateinamerika und der Karibik (Tiibingen/Basel: Francke Verlag, 1994); Linda Schulte-Sasse, "Douglas Sirk's Schlussakkord and the Question of Aesthetic Resistance," Germanic Review, vol. 73 no. 1 (Winter 1998) 77. Also see: Thomas Nadar, ''The Director and the Diva: The Film Musicals of Detlef Sierck and Zarah Leander: Zu neuen Ufern and La Habanera," in Cul-

tural History through a National Socialist Lens, 65-83. 78. The term was used in the title of the infamous art exhibit Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), which opened in Munich with great success in 1937. The term entartet was also used to describe "inferior" races, especially Jews. 79. Sykora, 4. 80. Werner Fiedler, "Zu neuen Ufern," Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 1937, cited in Paul Seiler, 59. 81. Richard Meyer, "Rock Hudson's Body," in Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out (New York: Routledge, 1991),262. 82. Gertrud Koch, 'Von Detlef Sierck bis Douglas Sirk," Frauen und Film, no. 44/45 (October 1988), 116. 83. Lowry,212. 84. Koch, 122. 85. Lowry, 213. 86. Rentschler, 145. 87. Kreirneier,352. 88. On Hitler's approval of the film, see Drewniak, 634; on international dis-

252 NOTES tribution, including the film's Venice premiere, see Drewniak, 802. The film also received a positive notice in the New York Times, SlO,1938.20:2. 89. In 1939 Goebbels made Froelich president of the Reichs{ilmkammer, which further indicates Froelich's privileged relationship with the NSDAP high command. Cf. Drewniak on Carl Froelich, 75--6. 90. Cf. Drewniak on Hermann Sudermann, 500-3. 91. The ethical conflicts between an emerging bourgeoisie and a morally corrupt and exploitative aristocracy are frequently featured in German dramas of the eighteenth century (e.g., G.E. Lessing's Emilia Gaiotti, Minna von Barnhelm, Friedrich Schiller's Cabal and Love, The Robbers, Don Carlos). For a detailed discussion of the usage of eighteenth century motifs in National Socialist film, see Schulte-Sasse. 92. Sykora, 5. 93. Sykora, 5. 94. For a discussion of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in Nazi aesthetics, see Saul Friedlander, Kitsch und Tod. Der Widerschein des Nazismus (Miinchen: Hansen, 1984). 95. The New York Times, SlO,1938.20:2. 96. Martin Klockmann, "Gesellschaftsleben einer verklungenen Zeit," Filmwelt (June 10, 1938). 97. See Klockmann. 98. Koch,109. 99. "Zehn Gebote zur Gattenwahl," NS-Frauenwarte, 1934/5, no. 10,295. The National Socialist press frequently circulated medical misinformation, such as the myth that sexual intercourse permanently altered a woman's genetic makeup. It was suggested that a single sexual contact with a "non-Aryan" resulted in her inability to bear" Aryan" children in the future and would therefore "contaminate" her, and the nation's, racial purity. 100. Gertrud Koch, "1m Angebot der Woche," Frankfurter Rundschau, no. 167 (July 23,1981),15. 101. Filmkurier, August 25,1942, quoted in Michael Toteberg, "Dann werden tausend Marchen wahr," Die Ufa-Das deutsche Bilderimperium, Magazin no. 18,15. 102. Helga Belach, " ... als die Traurnfabrik kriegswichtig wurde," Wir tanzen um die Welt, 185. 103. Rolf Hansen was hired on Leander's insistence. Carl Froelich's former assistant, Hansen had previously displeased Goebbels by making the film Ultimo, eventually released in 1950 under the title Eine Frau fUr's Leben (A Woman for Life), which presented a critical view of the economic and social problems of a young married couple in Nazi Germany. See Kreimeier, 354. 104. "Zarah Leander als Frau von heute," newspaper clipping, collection: Paul Seiler, Filmmuseum Potsdam. 105. On war as an underlying spectacle in the film, see Mary-Elizabeth O'Brian, "The Spectacle of War in Die grosse Liebe," in Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens, 197-213. 106. Schliipmann,222.

NOTES

253

107. Lowry, 154. 108. Lowry, 161, and Helmut Regel, "Zur Topographie des N5-Films," in Ulrich Kurowski, ed., Deutsche Spie/[ilme 1933-45. Materialien (Miinchen: Miinchner Filmmuseum, 1978),45. 109. Newspaper review clippings, collection Paul Seiler, Filmmuseum Potsdam. 110. Schulte-Sasse, 290, citing Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 111. Schulte-Sasse, 293. 112. Dora Traudisch, "Film im Dritten Reich," Medien Praktisch, no. 2 (1988), 49. 113. Witte, in Helga Belach, ed., Wir tanzen urn die Welt,228. 114. Lowry, 125; Broszat, "Grundziige der gesellschaftlichen Verfassung im Dritten Reich," in Martin Broszat and Horst Miiller, eds., Das Dritte Reich. Herrschaftsstrukturen und Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983),63. 115. Sykora, 7. 116. Heide Schliipmann, cited in Sykora, 7. 117. Lowry 202. 118. Jens Thiele and Fred Ritzel, "Politische Botschaft und Unterhaltungdie Realitat im NS Film: Die Grosse Liebe (1942)," 100 Jahre Film 1895-1995, Band 2 (Frankfurt/M. Fischer, 1991),315. 119. Stephen Lowry also acknowledges that "elements of Leander's star image and of images of autonomous womanhood might be necessary at the beginning of the film, in order to stir public interest and address audience desires." Lowry, 195. 120. Thiele and Ritzel, 311. 121. Karsten Witte, "Visual Pleasure Inhibited: Aspects of the German Revue Film," New German Critique, no. 24-25 (Fall/Winter 1981-2), 258. 122. Lowry, 182. 123. Loiperdinger und Schonekas, 11, quoted in Lowry, 182. 124. Lowry, 205. 125. Lowry, 195. 126. Zarah Leander, Es war so wunderbar! 127. 127. Paul Baumgarten, "Zarah Leander. Ein Leben in Episoden," Der Stern (1938),298. [My emphasis). 128. Because of the scarcity of empirical historical evidence, these observations must remain somewhat hypothetical. The rigorous persecution of gays and lesbians in Nazi Germany resulted in driving their subculture deep underground. That it existed nonetheless, and that Leander was part of this gay culture, can be traced only through biographical accounts (Le., Leander's and her lyricist Bruno Balz's recollection of their personal experiences: Leander was reprimanded for entertaining gay friends, Balz was arrested for his homosexuality) and symptomatic readings such as I attempt above. In investigating traces of a gay culture, which the National Socialists sought to erase, and relating these

254

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traces to continuities in pre- and post-Nazi Germany, we can speculate with some certainty about the reception of Zarah Leander's image by gay audiences at the time. 129. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, on Freikorps literature. 130. Sanders-Brahms, 169. [My emphasisl. In this article, Helma SandersBrahms also points to Peter Zadek's and Luchino Visconti's work to reiterate that the linkage between Nazi culture and homoerotics has become a popular trope in the postwar era. 131. Sanders-Brahms, 168. 132. Kann denn Liebe Sunde sein? written by Lothar Briihe, lyrics by Bruno Balz, from The Blue Fox (Der Blaufuchs, Ufa, 1938). 133. Cf. Schliipmann. 134. See Beiblatt zum "Politischen Dienst" fUr SS und Polizei, Reichsfiihrer SS, SS Hauptamt, 1943. 135. See complete discography by Jiirgen Briickner, Rainer E. Lotz, Manfred Weihermiiller, and Richard Weizer in Paul Seiler, Kann denn Liebe Sunde sein? Zarah Leander CD collection, BCD 16016, 89-106. 136. Eine Frau wird erst schon durch die Liebe, written by Theo Mackeben and Michael Gesell, from Heimat (Home, Ufa, Carl Froelich, 1938). 137. lch steh' im Regen, written by Ralph Benatzky, from Zu Neuen Ufern (To New Shores, Detlef Sierck, Ufa, 1937). 138. Sagt Dir eine schOne Frau 'vielieicht', written by Nico Dostal and Bruno Balz, from Das Lied der Wuste (Desert Song, Paul Martin, Ufa, 1939). 139. Ulrike Sanders, Zarah Leander. Kann denn Schlager Sunde sein? (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1988),26-32. 140. The verb durchhalten is best translated as "to carry on to the end" or "to hold out." Durchhaltelieder (hold-out songs) and Durchhaltefilme (hold-out movies) are usually seen as those films and songs that lacked an overt propagandistic message and instead consoled their audiences with the prospect of a sweet hereafter (in this case, after the final victory). 141. Paul Seiler told me of his personal encounter with these fans, who visited his archive in the fall of 1996. He plans to write about his conversations with Holocaust victims, who are now residents of Florida, in an upcoming article. 142. Seiler, Ein Mythos lebt, 25. 143. Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich. Geheime Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS (Herrsching: Pawlak, 1984), no. 253, "Stimmen zum Rundfunk," January 22, 1942. 144. Boberach, ed., a.a.a., Bd. 14, S. 5445. 145. Er heisst Waldemar, vocals by Zarah Leander, written by Michael Jary, lyrics by Bruno Balz, recorded on November 21,1940, in Berlin. 146. Sanders, 30. 147. See H. Schr6ter, Unterhaltung fUr Millionen. Vom Wunschkonzert zur Schlagerparade (Diisseldorf-Wien: Econ-Verlag, 1973), 96; and Gerhard Eckert, Der Rundfunk als Fuhrungsmittel (Heidelberg: Vorwinke, 1941). 148. Knut Hicketier, "'Der Fiihrer spricht ... ' Programmedium Radio," UfaMagazin, no. 17 (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1992), 6-7.

NOTES

255

149. Kreimeier, 283. 150. See Sanders, 34-9. 151. Karena Niehoff, "Wucht und Weh," Der Tagesspiegel (April 10, 1973); cited in Seiler, Ein Mythos lebt, 25. 152. "Zarah Leander. Von Varmland um den Erdball. Part I," Filmwelt, no. 47 (1938). No page numbers. 153. Various German publications reported that Leander had given an interview in the Swedish newspaper Ny Dag, in which she acknowledged to be friendly with Jews. In addition, she had answered the question of whether or not she would sing anti-German songs in her new revue by suggesting that this was entirely up to the director. See: Der Stoptrupp, Feldpostnummer 38925, Hrsg., 7/20/44. 154. Letter by SS Kriegsberichter von Reichmeister, December 2,1944, collection Paul Seiler, Filrnmuseum Potsdam. 155. See, Beiblatt zum "Politischen Dienst" Jilr SS und Polizei.

CONCLUSION 1. Gerd Eckert, "Filmtendenz und Tendenzfilm," Wille und Macht, Fiihrerorgan der nationalsozialistischen Jugend, Nr. 4 (February 15, 1938), 24, cited in Albrecht, 507. 2. Tim Mason, ''Women in Nazi Germany," parts 1 and 2, History Workshops, no. 1 (1976),55, cited in Petley, 137. 3. See Dyer, "A Star is Born and the Construction of Authenticity" in Star-

dom: Industry of Desire. 4. Cf. de Cordova, 27--8. 5. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994),19. 6. On the female stereotypes in Nazi cinema, also see Kerstin-Luise Neumann's discussion of Zarah Leander and Kristina SOderbaum: "Idolfrauen oder Idealfrauen?" in Thomas Koebner, ed., !dole des deutschen Films, (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1997), 231-43. 7. Homeland pictures typically contrasted both figures without eliminating either and resolved the narrative problematic by physically separating the oppositional protagonists and allocating each their own space (city/country). The immensely popular Sissy trilogy starring Romy Schneider further united both paradigms. Sissy, the Bavarian mountain child who becomes the celebrated empress of Austria---enshrined in the luxury of the imperial court and simultaneously imprisoned by it-is in fact emblematic for the preoccupations of postwar kitsch and excess. 8. Goebbels, Die Tagebiicher, entry of February 27, 1942; cited in Albrecht, 80. 9. Rentschler, 223. 10. Goebbels, speech from November 27,1939, cited in Winkler-Mayerh6fer, 77. 11. Grob E4, cited in Rentschler, 167. 12. Rentschler, 221.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 19 Agfacolor, 70 Albers, lians, 37, 155,228n. 101 Albrecht, Gerd, 15 Althen, Michael, 95 Althusser, Louis, 14 AJnhenn,Rudoll,24n.38 Astaire, Fred, 122 Axel an der Himmelstiir, 157 Baarova, Lida, 28-29,39 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 82, 191 Balz, Bruno, 160, 208--10 Barabas,Paul,l44 Baumer, Gertrud, 26 Baumgart, Gertrud,26 Bechdoll, Ute, 35-36, 48 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 33, 82, 140-41, 177 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 11 Ber~ann,In~d,51-52, 144, 156 Berkeley, Busby, 104 Beyer, Friedemann, 89, 158, 179 Binding, Rudoll, 87 Bingham, Dennis, 218 Birgel, Willy, 37,79,177 Black Roses. See Schwarze Rosen Blaufuchs, Der (The Blue Fox, Tourjansky), 173--74 Bloch, Ernst, 59,101 Blood and soil; films in Nazi culture, 47; in liarlan's films, 46-47, 57, 69, 74, 79, 103,216; in respect to Leander, 165, 169 Blue Fox, The. See Der Blaufuchs Borgelt, lians, 16 Braun, Bertha, 26 Braun, Eva, 23,28,30 Brausewetter, lians, 37 Brecht, Bertolt, 3, 11 Broadway musical, 210 Brooks, Peter, 66

Capra, Frank, 125, 129 Capriccio (Ritter), 134-43 Capriolen (Caprioles, Griindgens), 35 Caprioles. See Capriolen Charell, Erik, 123 Chaste Susan. See Die keusche Susanne Chopin, Frederic, 89 Christians, Mady, 100 Clair, Rene, 135 Claudette, Colbert, 122, 131 Comedy, 98; comedy of remarriage, 121; liarvey comedies, 98-154; screwball comedy, 121, 149 Commedia buffa, 140 Congress Dances, The. See Der Kongrefl

tanzt Cooper, Gary, 111-12, 123 Crips, Lilian, 25,117 Curse, The. See Der Fluch Dagover, Lil, 39,117 Damals (1n the Past, Hansen), 162, 173--74, 207 De Cordova, Richard, 58, 165 De Grazia, Victoria, 8 De Lauretis, Teresa, 142 Desert Song. See Das Lied der Wuste Dietrich, Marlene, 9, 39, 44, 99-100, 105, 117,131,155,157-59 Divine Jette, The. See Die GOttliche Jette Dream in Blonde. See Ein Blonder Traum

Drei von der Tankstelle, Die (The Trio from the Gas Station, Thiele), 118-19 Drewniak, Boguslaw, 151

Du sollst nicht stehlen. Ein Spiel von Liebe und Gaunerei (Janson), 118 Durchhaltefilme (keep-on-going films), 86 Durchhaltelieder (hold-out songs), 208 [)ye~Richard,34,59, 115, 169

269

270

INDEX

Eckert, Gerd, 213 Eggebrecht, Axel, 21

Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in Shadow, Maetzig), 43 Eichberg, Richard, 109 Eichberg-Film G.m.b.H., 118

Ein blonder Traum (Dream in Blonde, Martin), 106, 123 Ellis, John, 34,49, 107, 167, 169 Ellwanger, Karen, 31 Elsaesser, l1homas, 66, 105-6, 116, 176 Empress and I, The. See 1ch und die Kaiserin

Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht (It was a Gay Ball Night, Froelich), 173-74 Euthanasia, 90, 236n. 126

Faded Melody. See Verklungene Melodie Fanny EIssler (Martin), 124, 141, 153 Female fighter and comrade, 6, 26, 64, 212 Femme fatale, 6, 131-32 Femme fragi/e, 6, 89-90 Film criticism, in Nazi Germany, 57, 125, 164 Film politics and culture under National Socialism, overview 11-22 Final Accord. See Schlussakkord Fluch, Der (The Curse, Land), 101 Foucault, Michel, 31 Four Associates, The. See Die vier Gesellen Fox, 100, 111-12, 123 Frankfurt School, 106, 225n. 49

Frau am Steuer (Woman at the Wheel, Martin), 115, 124, 134, 143-52, 185

Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten (Women are Better Diplomats, Jacoby), 70 Frederick the Great, 33, 63 Friedlander, Saul, 192 Friedmann, Regine Mihal, 44, 61 Fritsch, Willy, 37,79,101,103-4, to-ll0, 112,115,115,119-120,123-24,126, 129-30, 135, 144, 146, 148-50, 152, 239n.l7 Froelich, Carl, 186, 193 Frohlich, Gustav, 37 Gable, Clark, 122, 129-30 Gaines, Jane, 40, 116 Gallagher, Catherine, 5 Garbo, Greta, 52, 100, 113, 164,196

15~57,

162,

Garland, Judy, 155 Gay audiences, 205-206, 211, 217 Gebiihr, Otto, 37 Genius figures, 33 Genius pictures, 4, 33, 167 George, Heinrich, 37 Gish, Lilian, 101 Gledhill, Christine, 58, 66,171 Gliickskinder (Lucky Kids, Martin), 121-22, 124-34 Goebbels, Joseph, 3, 5, 7, 11-14, 18,28,33, 45-46,53,60,62,64-65,70,70,85,87,90, 97,105,108,117,125,133,140-41,160, 193,213,218,219 Goebbels, Magda, 30 Golden City, The. See Die Goldene Stadt

Goldene Stadt, Die (The Golden City, Harlan), 44, 46, 69-80, 85, 87, 93, 185, 193 Goring, Hermann, 98

Gottliche Jette, Die (The Divine Jette, Waschneck),35 Gottschalk, Joachim, 43 Grace, Dinah, 115 Grafe, Frieda, 88-90 Great King, The. See Der grof1e Konig Great Love, The. See Die grof1e Liebe Greenblatt, Stephen, 4 Greene, Graham, 123 Grego~lJUich,46

Gretler, Heinrich, 100 Grob, Norbert, 220

Grof1e Konig, Der (The Great King, Harlan), 55,60,62-64

Grof1e Liebe, Die (The Great Love, Hansen), 79,86,156,171,174,180,194-203,208, 212 Grunberger, Richard, 42 Griindgens, Gustav, 155 Gunther, Winfried, 10~7 Gypsy King, The. See Der Zigeunerbaron Hake, Sabine, 20 Hamann, Edith, 52,114 Hansen, Max, 160 Hansen, Miriam, 6 Hansen, Rolf, 194 Harlan, Kristian, 53 Harlan, Veit, 9, 42-97, 134, 186, 230n. 8 Harvey, Lilian, 8,9,38-40, 44,51,98-155,

Index 271 172,174,185,216-18, 245n. 131; star image, 107-18; films, 118-52; postwar, 152-54 Hawks, Howard, 79 Heart that Never Dies. See Das unsterbliche Herz Heimat (Home, Froelich), 172, 174, 186-95 Heimatfilme, 218, 255n. 7 Heiotkehredffhne, 124, 187,242n.86 HerDark Secret. See Ihr dunkler Punkt. Herz der Konigin, Das (The Queen's Heart, Froelich),173 Herzog, Charlotte, 40, 116 Hickethier, Knut, 46 Hippler, Fritz, 30, 32 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 11, 22, 25, 27, 30, 32, 34, 38-39,49,98,100,105,126,129,134,160, 209,219 Hoffmann, Hilmar, 15 Hollaender, Friedrich, 100 Hollywood; actors, 39, 51, 107; beauty, 28; cinema, 17,20,67,70,79,98, 104, 169; glamour, 4; Lilian Harvey in Hollywood, 51, 100-102, 111-12, 116-17,122-23,217; stardom, 9, 36, 49, 101,118,154, 155;modeffi, 10,40,58,99, 107,122,131-33,152,153,217-18; studio system, 109 Home. See Heimat Hoppe, Marianne, 35 Homey, Brigitte, 38, 39 Hudson, Rock, 183 Huyssen, Andreas, 28

I Am Suzanne!, 122-23, 125 Ich und die Kaiserin (The Empress and 1, Hollaender), 100

Ihr dunk/er Punkt (Her Dark Secret, Guter), 119

nIusion (Tourjansky),59 Immensee (Harlan), 46, 78-87, 89, 174 In the Past. See Damals It Happened One Night (Capra), 122, 125, 129 It Was a Gay Ball Night. See Es war eine

rauschende Ballnacht Jameson, Fredric, 35, 133 Jannings, Emil, 37, 155 Jary, Hilde, 186

Jary, Michael, 209 Jew Suss. See Jud Suj1 Jews and Nazi Germany; Jews represented in Nazi films, 60, 97; nonAryans, 13, 105; cultural elements as "too Jewish," 16, 130, 159, 171, 210; Jews, 24, 66, 100,208; Harlan's Jewish wife, 53 Journey to Freedom, The. See Der Weg ins

Freie Journey to Tilsit, The. See Die Reise nach Tilsit Jud Suj1 (Jew Siiss, Harlan), 43-45, 60-63, 77 Jugend (Youth, Harlan), 45, 50, 52, 60 Kaes, Anton, 13, 104, 106, 120 Kalbus, Oscar, 31, 37, 39, 135 Kii.utner, Helmut, 59 Kerr, Alfred, 45

Keusche Susanne, Die (Chaste Susan, Eichberg),118-19

Kleine vom Bummel, Die (Little Girl Shopping, Eichberg), 109 Koch,Gertrud, 160, 183-84, 193 Kolberg (Harlan), 45-46, 55, 64-65 Kongrej1 tanzt, Der (The Congress Dances, Charell), 120-21, 123, 152 Korber, Hilde, 53 Kracaue~Sieg£ried,3

Kreimeier, Klaus, 17-19, 37, 39, 47, 64,105, 154,160-61,176,210

Ul Habanera (Sierck), 156, 172, 174-76, 184-86 Lang, Robert, 67 Leander, Niffi, 168 Leander,larah, 8-9, 16,38-40,44,50,52, 59,79,99,103,112-13,117,135,151-52, 155-212,216-18, 246n. 3; star image, 162-71; films, 172-204; songs, 204-12 Leiser, Erwin, 15 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 61 Lichtspielgesetz, 13 Liebe und Trompetenblasen (Eichberg), 109 Liebeswalzer (Love Waltz, Thiele), 101 Liebmann, Robert, 100 Lied der Wiiste, Das (Desert Song, Martin), 172 Little Girl Shopping. See Die Kleine vom

Bummel

272

INDEx

1oos, Anita, 31 Lost Traces. See Verwehte Spuren Love Waltz. See Liebeswalzer Lowry, Stephen, 46--47, 70, 72, 76, 184-85, 195,203 Lucky Kids. See Gliickskinder Lueken, Verena, 158, 160, 172 Lukacs, Georg, 18 Liith, Erich, 48

Neumann, Kerstin-Louise, 41 New German filmmakers, 175 Niehoff, Karena, 211 Nielsen, Asta, 46, 52 Nietsche, Friedrich, 88 Noack, Frank, 69

Olympia (FUefenstahl), 12 Onkel Briisig (Uncle Briisig, Waschneck), 45, 50

Maetzig, Kurt, 43 Marcuse, Herbert, 47 Marian, Ferdinand, 37-38, 61 Marriage in Shadow. See Ehe im Schatten Martin,Paul, 100, 109, 113, 116, 123-24, 129,134, 144,245n. 131 Mason, Tim, 215 Masquerade, 141-42 Me and My Gal (Berkeley), 202 Melodrama, 66; Nazi melodrama in general, 59~, 69, 98,174,216-17; directed by Sierck/Sirk, 175--76; directed by Harlan, 59~, 66-97; in respect to SOderbaum, 9, 67-97, 103; in respect to Leander, 158, 173, 177, 197, 203; melodramatic identity of stars, 58; musical melodrama, 174 Men, as defined by Nazi ideology, 22-23, 131; representation of men in National Socialist films, 37-38, 131; representation of men in Hollywood films, 79 Meyer,FUchard,183 Meyersdorff, Irene von, 78, 87 Mitry, Jean, 66 Montrose, Louis, 30 Motherhood; as a Nazi ideal, 6, 23-25, 38; in SOderbaum's films, 50, 54, 93; in Leander's films, 103, 165--66, 168-69, 171,174,185,192-94; in Harvey's films, 150 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 140 Murnau, F. W., 68 Musical comedy, 98, 174 My Lips Betray (Blystone), 112 My Weakness (Butler), 112 Nannen, Henri, 152 Neale, Stephen, 57 Nebel, Hete, 150

Opfergang (The Sacrifice, Harlan), 46, 78-80, 84,86-95 Opitz, Carl, 164 Orient Express (Martin), 123

Patrioten (Patriots, FUtter), 134 Patriots. See Patrioten Pedro soli hiingen (Harlan), 60 Petley, Julian, 47, 77, 85, 94 Petro, Patrice, 5, 6 Peukert, Detlef, 15, 19 Pickford,Mary, 101, 109 Polan, Dana, 197 Pommer, Erich, 100 Porten, Henny, 117, 186 Pour Le MeriU (FUtter), 134 Premiere (von Bolvary), 157, 164, 172, 186 Prinzessin Trulala (Schtinfelder), 118 Propaganda: in FUtter's films, 134; in Harlan's films, 60, 96

Queen's Heart, The. See Das Herz der Konigin Rabenalt, Arthur Maria, 15 Racism; in Die Goldene Stadt, 77, 235n. 96 Raddatz, Carl, 78, 87 Redottee, Hartmut, 82, 85, 94 Regel, Helmut, 197 Reich's Water Corps. See Reichswasserleiche Reichswasserleiche, 42, 57, 94

Reise nach Tilsit, Die (The Journey to Tilsit, Harlan), 68, 78,87, 186 Rentschler, Eric, 14, 20, 37, 40, 59, 93, 103, 106,131-32,159,172,176,185,219-20 Request concerts, 250n.49 Rhode, Claudia, 173 FUefenstahl, Leni, 1, 11-12,46 FUtter, Karl, 112, 134-35, 138, 140, 143

Index 273 Ritzel, Fred, 200 Riviere, Joan, 141 Rogers, Ginger, 122 Rogge-Borner, Sophie, 26 Rokk,~arilka,38-39, 117, 151, 159, 172 Romance in a Minor Key. See Romanze in Moll Romani, Cinzia, 39, 42, 94,116-17 Romanze in Moll (Romance in a Minor Key, Kautner),59

Sternber~ Josef von, 131, 159 Stock!, Ulla, 144 Storm, Theodor, 80 Strauss, Richard, 140 Streicher, Julius, 116 Stu1cas (Ritter), 134 Sudermann, Hermann, 186-87, 192 Sunrise (~urnau), 68 Sunset Boulevard (Wilder), 152-53 Sykora, Katharina, 161, 172, 181, 192

Rosenber~Alhed,23,25,39,58

Riihmann, Heinz, 37 Russell, Rosalind, 121

Sacrifice, The. See Opfergang Sanders,lJUike,206,207,210 Sanders-Brahms, Helma, 159, 172,205 Schafer, Hans Dieter, 17-18,48,105--6 Schell, ~aria, 152 Schiller, Friedrich, 61 Schliipmann, Heide, 160, 195, 199, 206 Schlussakkord (Final Accord, Sierck), 176-77 Schmitz, Sybille, 39 Schneider, Romy, 152 Schulte-Sasse, Linda, 17-19, 61, 63, 197 Schwarze Rosen (Black Roses, ~artin), 123-24, 130 Seiler, Paul, 160 Seven Slaps in the Face. See Sieben Ohrfeigen Shumway, David, 121, 148 Sieben Ohrfeigen (Seven Slaps in the Face, ~artin), 124 Sierck, Detlef (Douglas Sirk), 59, 79, 133, 135, 156, 160, 175-77, 182-83, 185-86, 212 Sirk, Douglas. See Detlef Sierck SOderbaum,~sHna,8-9,39,41,42-97,

99, 103, 108, 113, 131, 140, 152, 159, 168, 172,174-75,193,216,218; star image, 49-59;fihn5,59-97 Sontag, Susan, 59 Spieker, ~arkus, 20 Staal, Victor, 37, 79, 135, 180, 194-95 Stacey, Jackie, 36, 156 Stardom: in Nazi Germany, 30-41; Harvey, 107-18; Leander, 162-71; SOderbaum, 49-59 Staufer, Teddy, 105 Steinhoff, Hans, 134

Tchechowa, Olga, 117 Temple, Shirley, 101 Theweleit, Klaus, 22, 47, 79, 205, 229n.l04 Thiele, Jens, 200 To New Shores. See Zu neuen Ufern Towjanski, Victor, 59 Trenker, Louis, 46 Trio from the Gas Station, The. See Die drei von der Tankstelle Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl), 3, 11 Triumph of the Will. See Triumph des Willens Troger, Annemarie, 25 Ufa (Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft), 6,7,11,13-14,17,28,30,33,34,41,43, 46,50,77,98,100-101,108-18,123-25, 130, 133-35, 144, 150-51, 155, 157-58, 164-65,172,175,176,186, 194 Uncle Briisig. See Onkel Brasig Unsterbliche Herz, Das (The Heart that Never Dies, Harlan), 67 Urlaub auf Ehrenwort (Ritter), 134

Vater werden ist nicht schwer (Schonfelder), 118 Veidt, Conrad, 31,100 Verdi, Giuseppe, 83,140 Verklungene Me/odie (Faded Melody, Towjansky), 59 Verwehte Spuren (Lost Traces, Harlan), 67 Vier Gesellen, Die (The Four Associates, Froelich),l44 Vossen, Ursula, 119-20 VVachsmann, Franz, 100 VVarth, Eva-~aria, 31

274

INDEX

Weber, Carl Maria von, 141 Weber, Max, 34

Weg ins Freie, Der (The Journey to Freedom, liansen), 172-74 Wehner, lise, 150 WeUDnar:cinema,5,32, 110;ctUhlre, 10, 110,143; role models, 25, 28, 143; stardom, 39, 102, 110, 217; stars, 55, 101, 108-9; Systemzeit, 31; traditions, 7, 99, 104, 107, 169 Weiser, Grethe, 35, 121, 149 Werner, lise, 39 West, Mae, 121, 195 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (Aldrich), 153 Witte, Karsten, 15,20,59,70,98,101, 104,

120, 129-30, 133-35, 140, 142, 159, 198, 202, 243n. 95 Woman at the Wheel. See Frau am Steuer Women are better Diplomats. See Frauen sind

doch bessere Diplomaten Women: role in Nazi ctUhlre, 4-5, 9, 22-30, 47-48,99,103,115-17,143,164,167-68, 171,175,213-218,226n.74,227n.77

Youth. See Jugend Zigeunerbaron, Der (The Gypsy King, liartl), 41 Zizek, Slavoj, 17

Zu neuen Ufern (To New Shores, Sierck), 79, 135,156,172, 174, 175-86, 195

German film-goers flocked to see musicals and melodramas during the Nazi era. Although the Nazis seemed to require that every aspect of ordinary life advance the fascist project, even the most popular films depicted characters and desires that deviated from the politically correct ideal. Probing into the contradictory images of womanhood that surfaced in these films, Antje Ascheid shows how Nazi heroines negotiated the gender conflicts that confronted contemporary women . According to National Socialist ideology, Hollywood's new women and glamorous dames needed to be replaced with idealized images of the German wife and mother. The careers of Kristina SOderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander speak to the Nazis' attempt to address and contain the "woman question," to redirect female subjectivity and desires toward self-sacrifice for the common good (as manifest in National Socialism). The roles and star personas assigned to these actresses, though intended to entertain the public in a politically conformist way, point to the difficulty of yoking popular culture to ideology. In the series Culture and the Moving Image, edited by Robert Sklar Antie Ascheid is an assistant professor in the Department of Drama and Theater at the University of Georgia . Cover photo: Zarah Leander, courtesy of Stiftung Deutsc he Kinemathek Cover design: Becky Baxendell Printed in U.S.A.

Temple University Press Philadelphia 19122 www.templ e.edu/tempress cloth ISBN 1-56639-983-1 paper ISBN 1-56639-984-X

ISBN 1-S6639 - 984- X

90000>