The Moguls of Hollywood and the Third Reich

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xlv:1 (Summer, 2014), 47–56.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE THIRD REICH Jonathan Rabb A Fight for Love and Glory: The Moguls of Hollywood and the Third Reich

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939. By Thomas Doherty (New York, Columbia University Press, 2013) 429 pp. $35.00 The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. By Ben Urwand (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2013) 327 pp. $26.95 Although historians continue to gain critical insights into the past through their interaction with such ªelds as economics or psychol- ogy, they have been less inclined to give their attention to the rise of cinema studies as an academic discipline. Yet, at least since the foundation of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California in 1929, ªlm study has become a lively and thriving scholarly enterprise that would certainly repay their no- tice. The two recent books under review, in particular, suggest a unique perspective on a decade of United States history. To grap- ple with the questions that they raise is to probe into American attitudes toward many of the major issues surrounding Adolf Hitler’s Germany. If, in some ways, research into the world of the cinema resem- bles any study of the creative arts, historians would do well to become more sensitive to the meaning of images. But cinema also brings together concerns with technology, with economics, and with popular culture that give it an interdisciplinary purpose from the outset. As these two books show, moreover, such a global enterprise can have implications for international relations. They also share another interest that is all too rarely addressed by historians— the powerful presence of irony in human affairs—and nowhere is the irony of the Nazi era so visible as on the silver screen. Conrad Veidt’s role as Major Strasser in Casablanca—for many

Jonathan Rabb is Professor of Writing, Savannah College of Art and Design. He is the author of the novels The Second Son (New York, 2011), Shadow and Light (New York, 2009), Rosa (New York, 2005), The Book of Q (New York, 2001), and The Overseer (New York, 1998). © 2014 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00649

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00649 by guest on 25 September 2021 48 | JONATHAN RABB people, the archetypical Nazi of ªlm—is a perfect case in point. Sneering, effete, and brutal, he becomes the catalyst for Rick to re- claim his nobility, for Renault to discover his backbone, and for Ilsa to understand the meaning of self-sacriªce. In a career that in- cluded nearly seventy ªlms, Veidt’s role as evil personiªed was not something new to him. The majority of his most memorable per- formances prior to Casablanca had him cast as a silent murderer or a freak—the somnambulist in Robert Wiene’s expressionist master- piece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Ivan the Terrible in Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924), and, again with Leni, the disªgured Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928) (the visual inspiration, some say, for Batman’s arch-nemesis, the Joker). But it is as a Nazi that Americans remember him. The Nazis, however, saw Veidt differently. To them, he was an artist who had openly and continuously criticized the slow, if le- gal, creep towards fascism. He was the activist who had made the ªlm Different from the Others in 1919, a searing attack on Germany’s Paragraph 175, the provision that made homosexuality a crime. Furthermore, as a Protestant, he had married Illona Prager, a Jew, a choice that forced the couple to emigrate to Britain in 1933, whereupon he immediately made Jew Süss (1934), a polemic against antisemitism, based on Leon Feuchtwanger’s novel of 1925. Veidt is the ideal poster child for the many ironies in the relationship between Hollywood and the Third Reich. He was one of a handful of stars who made the ªlms of Weimar the envy of the world, both for their artistic experimentation and their technological innovation. He was also a man of principle when Weimar began to self-destruct. Nonetheless, he found himself tethered to Nazi roles once the American studios decided to take aim at Hitlerism. Such are the ironies that occupy Doherty in his excellent Hol- lywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 and Urwand in his more troubling The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. For each, the central con- cern is why the men who embodied Hollywood—mostly Jews— proved so passive in dealing with Germany and the Nazis in the 1930s. Questions of appeasement and eventual capitulation have long occupied historians of the period. Scholars of cinema studies are in a unique position to shed light on these issues given the wide scope of their medium. Films are at once a reºection of a cultural ethos and an agent of its transformation. Their political impact and social commentary afford them a singularly privileged perspective.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00649 by guest on 25 September 2021 HOLLYWOOD AND THE THIRD REICH | 49 To have the added luxury of peering behind the screens and cam- eras in order to discover the motivations of the people who shaped the ªlms and inºuenced popular attitudes lends this historiography a fascinating and crucial dimension. It is no surprise that both Doherty and Urwand dig deeply into the worlds of censorship, economic exigency, and zeitgeist in order to unpack two fundamental questions: To what lengths did the American studios go to maintain their long-standing relationships with German ªlm companies once the Nazis took over the industry, and to what extent did their actions actually support, or even promote, the new German ideology? Doherty explores a much wider context than Urwand in arriving at his answers, analyzing with great insight the Spanish Civil War and the surprising effect of newsreels, along with the sway that various activist groups held over both the studios and the general public. Urwand, for the most part, conªnes his discussion to a few emblematic ªlms and the machinations of Georg Gyssling, the German Consul in Los An- geles during the 1930s. The causes behind the conºicting relationship between Hol- lywood and Nazi Germany during the 1930s have historical roots that are no less traceable than those of any other troubling develop- ment. Few would question, for instance, that the Nazi era makes no sense without a ªrm understanding of the failed Socialist revo- lution of 1919; the political, cultural, sexual, and intellectual freedoms that such a failure inspired; and the nefarious backlash and deep-seated hatreds that those freedoms were powerless to keep at bay. Likewise, without a strong sense of Hollywood’s involvement in Weimar, any talk of Nazis in Hollywood can edge perilously close to pure speculation. This is exactly the point at which cinema studies offers its particular insights about the events of the 1930s. By the time Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Hollywood studios—at least Paramount, mgm, and Fox—had been doing business with the Nazis for six years. The other studios, not sending their ªlms to Europe, had been rewriting, re-cutting, re- casting, and rejecting projects to keep any anti-Nazi or pro-Jewish sentiment from reaching the screen. Even independent ªlms were running into roadblocks with the Hays Ofªce, which monitored the Production Code, concerning issues that might be morally or politically controversial. One project—about the rise of a dictator clearly modeled on Hitler and aptly named The Mad Dog of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00649 by guest on 25 September 2021 50 | JONATHAN RABB Europe—met with various degrees of discouragement until it was ªnally bullied to close down in 1933, then again in 1936, and, remarkably, one last time in 1940. Even with Hitler at the gates of Paris, no one wanted to distribute, let alone make, the ªlm. It would be too easy to lay all responsibility for the studios’ in- action on the censors. Granted, William Hays, through Joseph Breen, his leading minion (a staunch Catholic with his own unsa- vory attitude toward foreign elements—namely, Jews—running the studios) wielded considerable power. But the studio heads were only too happy to follow one of Breen’s earliest directives, which proved central in understanding Hollywood’s relationship with the Nazis: Films were meant to entertain not to propagandize. Moreover, the green or red light regarding ªlm projects did not reºect merely German tastes. Americans themselves were hardly keen on ªlms with too obvious an agenda: Such messages were reserved for ªreside chats by way of a different technological medium (the radio). Throughout the 1930s, trying to “sell a Hitler item as entertainment” or decry the evils of antisemitism was simply bad business. Whatever the beliefs of the moguls, Hollywood’s fundamental aim in those days was to make money—as the Hays Ofªce well knew—not to raise consciousness. Since the studios had been making a great deal of money in Germany well before Hitler’s arrival—at a time when no one could have conceived of the horrors to come—they were more than willing to alter their product to suit both their foreign and domestic audiences. In no small measure, the creation and distribution of movies may well have been the arena in which the economic forces tying America to Nazi Germany during the mid-1930s are most clearly visible. The American ªlm industry had already set its sights on Berlin by the early 1920s when it began to lure some of the most talented German ªlmmakers and stars to Hollywood (the “Lubitsch Touch,” a vague descriptor of the directing style attributed to the German-born Ernst Lubitsch, was already at Warner Brothers by 1923). But talent alone was not all that the studios were chasing, even then. The German ªlm market had a legion of distributors and exhibitors that the Americans were eager to use; they watched Weimar ªlm thrive during the inºation period (1920–1924), even as the rest of German industry teetered on the brink of ªnancial collapse. Domestic ªlm sales may have recouped only a meager 10 percent of production costs, but the German studios were making a

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00649 by guest on 25 September 2021 HOLLYWOOD AND THE THIRD REICH | 51 killing with exports. A foreign certiªcate, giving the bearer the right to distribute outside Germany, could represent a value nearly equivalent to the cost of the exported ªlm itself. According to Kracauer in his seminal overview of the period, “unpleasant proªteers” and “minor banks” made the most of these opportunities. As long as the foreign markets wanted German ªlms—works that were stretching the imagination and challenging audiences in ways that Americans had yet to try—the industry boomed. Although these studios were also issuing considerable ªller to keep the machine humming, “amidst the weeds” and the greed, Berlin gave birth to ªlm noir, the social-commentary drama and technique that turned movies into art.1 In 1924, however, when Weimar stabilized the mark, making the staggering decision to discontinue all exports, what was de- signed to bring Germany back from the precipice nearly destroyed the ªlm industry. Those investors who had been playing fast and loose with start-up movie studios—joint stock companies built on speculation—went far into the red, and they looked to take the major studios down with them. Diminished box ofªce sales left distributors no way to recoup their losses, and the banks, once happy to play along, wanted their money back. As a result, interest rates soared. Enter Hollywood. With the gold standard restored, and the German ªlm industry on the verge of bankruptcy, the American studios began to ºood the market with ªlms of their own. They developed distribution networks, bought and built theaters, and imagined a Hollywood East, unfettered by a weak Weimar too willing to turn a blind eye. The German government attempted to stem the onslaught, but its efforts proved disastrous. Its decree that a German ªlm had to be produced for every foreign one that was introduced into the country produced a tidal wave of quota ªlms. Most of them were never released but their certiªcates, which allowed their bearers to im- port a foreign ªlm into Germany, soon were traded like stocks. The Americans became leading speculators, buying as many of these certiªcates as they could and gaining ever-more control over production and distribution. By 1925, Universum Film AG (ufa), the ºagship studio of the

1 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, 1947).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00649 by guest on 25 September 2021 52 | JONATHAN RABB industry, was in dire straits. It had been borrowing along with ev- eryone else, on a scale to match its output, with no hope of meet- ing its obligations. Paramount and mgm, which were waiting in the wings, promised substantial loans if ufa would cede control of both its quota certiªcates and its movie theaters. On these terms, Para- mount and mgm expected to become the most dominant studios in Germany. ufa, however, had one last card up its sleeve, a technological innovation that would revolutionize the industry and leave the Americans scrambling just to stay relevant—sound. In 1919, an American named Lee De Forest—the inventor of the audion tube—had devised a system that could record sound directly onto ªlm as a parallel line, thereby producing image and sound simultaneously. The trouble was that he was unable to ªnd the key to perfect synchronization. Early ªlm had a tendency to speed up and slow down as it moved through a projector, gar- bling the sound track as it moved (Warner’s The Jazz Singer, osten- sibly the ªrst talkie in 1927, used separate components in its sound- on-disc process, making synchronization almost impossible; mgm’s Singin’ in the Rain was brilliantly to parody the folly of the early talkies twenty-ªve years later). Three German technicians (Josef Engl, Hans Vogt, and Joseph Massolle), however, had already ironed out the problem of synchronization. Their invention, dubbed the Tri-Ergon process, made ªlm with sound a reality as early as 1925. ufa had been behind the Tri-Ergon efforts from the start. In autumn 1925, the company scheduled a demonstration for poten- tial buyers, Paramount and mgm among them, using their ªlm, The Little Match Girl. But what had worked ºawlessly to that point met with complete disaster on the night of the showing: Batteries lost power; stataphones produced a dull roaring sound; and the poten- tiometer barely emitted audible tones. The inventors cried foul. Two weeks later, ufa was forced to sign an agreement with Parufamet, the new distribution company formed by Paramount and mgm, thus sealing its fate. If ever there was an instance of technology shaping the arts, and culture in general, that was it. Did the Americans sabotage the demonstration? Had even De Forest ªlched his system from Tri-Ergon back in 1919 as some claimed? Whatever the answers, the lengths to which the Ameri- cans were willing to go to entrench themselves in the German market were clear by 1925. Moreover, Hollywood now recognized

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00649 by guest on 25 September 2021 HOLLYWOOD AND THE THIRD REICH | 53 where the majority of great minds in the ªlm industry worked, and the moguls were not about to waste their opportunities. That two years later ufa was once again staring into the abyss—after the ªnancial disaster of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—did nothing to deter Hollywood from pursuing its ends. This time, however, Alfred Hugenberg, a German media mogul, managed to save the studio. Though a Prussian conservative with little taste for the new regime, Hugenberg was a businessman ªrst, and one with whom the American studios could work, despite the occasional battle of egos. In fact, he immediately created a producer-unit system of production at ufa that was identical to the one in Holly- wood. Hugenberg was undoubtedly antisemitic, though not viru- lently enough to remove any of the proªtable Jews from his ufa payroll. But during the next six years, if there was anyone in Ger- many who could interpret the changing political mood for the American moguls, it was Hugenberg. Sadly, his ability to see into the future was limited. When, in 1933, he became minister of economy and agriculture in Hitler’s ªrst cabinet—his party having won enough seats to merit the ap- pointment—he boasted, “We’ll box Hitler in....Intwomonths we’ll have pushed [him] so far into a corner that he’ll squeal.” The American moguls shared, and unfortunately clung to, this sentiment for a long time. This commitment to “taking the long view,” as Doherty rightly points out, helped to determine Hollywood’s relationship with the Nazis. “The moguls,” he writes, “did not expect the Third Reich to last for a thousand years” (Doherty, 318). In 1933, 1936, and even 1938, not many people did. The world kept waiting for Hitler to squeal. Nor could any of the studio heads have en- visioned how the unspeakable policies established in 1935, known as the Nuremberg Laws, would inºuence the ten years to come. Doherty looks at this era through the eyes of those who were living at the time, for whom 1925 and 1927 were far more real than 1941. Even as the policies of the Hitler regime grew more sinister, the moguls continued to believe that the German ªlm industry would never sabotage its long-standing relationship with America. “Surely,” Doherty writes, citing Variety’s take on things, “eventu- ally, the Nazis would ‘minimize the anti-Jew thing’ as a concession to economic reality” (Doherty, 24). Regardless of ideology, Holly- wood could not conceive of its business relations with Germany in

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00649 by guest on 25 September 2021 54 | JONATHAN RABB any other way. There is no starker evidence of their conªdence than the power exercised by economics in determining American relations with the Nazis. Should the studios have done more? Certainly. Did they allow commercial interests to trump all others? Perhaps. The fact that during the Nazi period, the studios made a fraction of the money that they had made during Weimar emphasizes the strength of their conviction in the long game. Whether a series of forthright ªlms would have had an impact on attitudes at home or policy in Germany is impossible to say. As Doherty explains, antisemitism ran rampant during this period. As examples, Charles Edward Coughlin (“Father” Coughlin) was spewing his hatred on the American airways, and the Yorkville theater on New York’s Up- per East Side was running—and selling out—pro-Nazi ªlms, as late as 1940. The “Heil Hitlers!” that rang out during the showing of newsreels in Chicago, Kansas City, and New York had the exhibitors—not the moguls—asking for the ªlms to stop running lest they incite public unrest. Doherty reports from the start that the major studios that tried to keep their hands in Germany for the longest time were Para- mount and mgm, given their long history with Berlin, and Fox (“the goyishe studio”) because of its newsreel commitments; the rest of them were out by 1934. Doherty’s chapter about the newsreels explains how the Nazis refused to allow any German currency to leave the country, thereby turning Fox Movietone and the other American newsreel companies in Berlin into quasi–money- laundering enterprises. His insights resonate strongly in their rich and vital appreciation for the echoes of Weimar, which were still ringing in the ears of the studio heads in 1940. Far from playing the role of apologist, Doherty repeatedly condemns the studio heads for reshaping scripts and rejecting projects in deference to Article Fifteen of the German quota law (Urwand’s bread and butter) that demanded a “fair” representation of Germans in American ªlms. He catalogs the ongoing uproar from the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League that all too often fell on deaf ears, despite the atrocities taking place across Germany and Spain. He also suggests that the studios listened too readily to the Anti-Defamation League (adl) and B’nai B’rith, which urged the moguls to avoid all Jewish subjects, especially those that showed Jews in too positive a light, for fear of rousing antisemitism on the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00649 by guest on 25 September 2021 HOLLYWOOD AND THE THIRD REICH | 55 home front. Yet, as Ross’ forthcoming book will show, the reac- tion to Nazi Germany was by no means as complaisant as these conditions might suggest.2 Urwand, however, would ªnd even the word complaisant too weak to describe Hollywood’s position. For him, it engaged in outright collaboration; in his approach, the relationship between Germany and American ªlm seems to have begun with the arrival of Gyssling in 1933. To be fair, Urwand takes great pains to discuss All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Hitler’s musings about inspiration in Mein Kampf, but he does so only in aid of a deeper understanding of Nazi rabble rousing, not to unpack the Weimar ªlm industry. The blinders are already over his eyes. From Urwand’s vantage point, Gyssling, who was never more than an obscure German diplomat, wielded untold power over the Hays Ofªce, the moguls, and even the State Department, making them all, in some sense, his collaborators. For the same reason, ªlms such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town could be read to promote not Americanism but the “leader principle,” simply because the Nazis interpreted them in that way. Most remarkably, given Urwand’s unwavering approach, mgm’s need to sell its Reichsmarks at an incredible loss—to make at least some money from the currency held hostage in Germany—was evidence of the studio acting as a willing participant in the ªnancing of “the German war machine.” By failing to take into consideration the relationships that existed prior to the Third Reich, Urwand is forced to adopt the only view left to him, that of 20/20 hindsight, which makes even the smallest nods to appeasement (the studio owners certainly tried to appease) seem like acts of betrayal and complicity. More problematical, however, is that in his eagerness to paint every aspect of the Hollywood/Nazi relationship in the darkest hues, Urwand tends to abandon the rigors of scholarship. As a his- torian, he relies too readily on conjecture and hyperbole when documents are missing or fail to substantiate his claims; phrases such as “in all likelihood” and “it is impossible to know for certain” appear with unfortunate frequency. Gyssling, in fact, sent only one letter directly to the studios during his tenure in Los Angeles,

2 Steven J. Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews and Their Spies Foiled Nazi Plots against Hol- lywood and America (New York, 2014).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00649 by guest on 25 September 2021 56 | JONATHAN RABB though Urwand would have us think that he had the private ear of the moguls at every turn. Moreover, Urwand spends an excessive amount of time giving plot summaries at the expense of analyzing acting style, cinematography, and directorial choice. He also bases his analysis on audience responses rather than the intentions of ªlmmakers. That German reviewers, for example, parroted Nazi ideology in their interpretation of Hollywood movies is hardly surprising. That their claims prove collaboration between the Nazis and the studios is simply unfounded. Urwand’s commitment to speculation and narrative seem better suited to the conspiracy novelist than the scholar. Indeed, his use of the term collaboration—clearly meant to place the moguls in the company of Vichy’s Philippe Petain and the like—is simply a way to both sensationalize the relationship and reduce its complex- ities to the demands of a single, hedgehog-like theory. Even the German zusammenarbeit that he sets in parentheses at every oppor- tunity carries a nuance that he fails to see. In hands less eager to ªnd the sinister, the term means cooperation. One can imagine that this was the meaning that the savvy Nazis gave it in their records. Doherty, by contrast, realizes that for the study of cinema to cast new light on the events of the 1930s, it must rest on an appreciation for a more fox-like approach that takes the entire context into consideration—the technological, cultural, and political underpin- nings that both shaped and reºected the period as a whole. His attitude reveals that any study of the relationship between the United States and Germany during that crucial decade is at an enormous disadvantage if it does not include the insights of cinema-studies scholarship.

The story of Hollywood in Weimar is essential to understanding how the American studios (and thus American culture) dealt with the Nazis, for better or for worse. To ignore its impact is to risk misunderstanding the issues of the 1930s, both large and small. Any simple interpretation of the American ªlm studios’ connections with the Third Reich belies the actual interactions of those in- volved. Claims to the contrary, and efforts to slap empty labels on them, inevitably fail to convince. As some might say, they don’t amount to a hill of beans.

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