The Fate of the Vamp

The Fate of the Vamp:

Weimar Émigré Cinema in the Golden Age of Hollywood

Sydney Black History McGill University, Montreal July, 2011-07-26 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master’s of Arts ©Sydney Black, 2011

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements...... i

Abstract...... iv

Introduction...... 1

Chapter 1: Weimar: the Distinction of Trauma...... 7

Chapter 2: The New Woman and the Screen ...... 24

Chapter 3: The Emigration...... 41

Chapter 4: The Salon and Success...... 59

Chapter 5: The New Woman on American Screens...... 81

Conclusion: The Closing of the Window...... 98

Summary...... 108

Sources Used...... 109

Acknowledgements

While conceiving of, researching material for, and frantically writing this thesis, I have found myself indebted to many people, whose only thanks, I’m afraid, will be my unending gratitude and these acknowledgments. In writing this thesis there were many obstacles around which I had to manoeuvre, if at times rather reluctantly and only at the most vehement behest of my supervisor, Dr Judith Szapor. She not only provided the inspiration for this thesis but was instrumental in guiding my research, and by finally relenting and taking her recommendations, I fell into a subject for which I have genuine enthusiasm. It is thanks to her that I was able to create this thesis, of which I am very proud. In addition to her support, I owe countless thanks to

Barbara Hall, Clare Denk and all of the helpful staff at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and

Sciences Margaret Herrick library, who enthusiastically helped direct my research while I was in

Los Angeles. The staff at the McLennan and Duchow libraries at McGill University – thank you for bearing with my unending retrieval of books. The same books. Over and over again. Thanks as well to Mitali Das, who patiently answered all my questions while I endeavoured to meet the technical requirements of thesis submission which managed to fairly consistently evade me. I would not have been studying histories of trauma if it had not been for Dr. Sarah Clift, nor do I expect that I would have been admitted to any graduate program if it had not been for the kind and enthusiastic letters of reference written by her and Dr. Georgy Levit, both of the University of King’s College, Halifax. I finally would like to thank the friends who were willing to bear with my atrociously rough drafts, particularly Melina Giannelia, who not only edited and translated sections, but clarified my own vision for me, and reassured me that my research was sound and my arguments well founded. And, of course, so much thanks to my parents. Both my mum and dad edited drafts, and shared their painstaking notes with me over the phone, though neither had taken an Arts course since twelfth grade English. More importantly, however, they chauffeured me around in Los Angeles traffic. No small feat. Thanks to everyone – this work could not have happened without you.

Abstract

Utilizing film and feminist theory, traditional histories of Germany and America as well as primary source material, this paper’s interdisciplinary approach exposes traditional misconceptions regarding the exiled nature of the Weimar émigrés filmmakers during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Through the construct of the New Woman, or the vamp, this paper explores the emigration to America and the ways in which it affected the filmmaking which had characterized Weimar cinema, while illustrating the changing perceptions of women through the 1920s-1940s. 1930s America would prove to be a short lived period wherein the émigré community was able to craft films which departed from the typical Weimar trope of the vamp, featuring prominent and sympathetic female characters.

Pendant l’âge or d’Hollywood, il y avait nombreuses cinéastes émigrés du Weimar – réalisateurs, écrivains, acteurs, techniciens – émigrés qui avaient changé leurs méthodes cinématographiques, et, du quelque part, avaient aussi changé des méthodes d’Hollywood. La littérature populaire sur le sujet de cette période est pleine des références de la caractère d’exile de ces cinéastes, mais, même si cette caractèrisation peut s’appliquer sur certaines de ces cinéastes, il est trop simplistique pour la totalité de la communauté des émigrés. L’approche intérdisciplinaire de cette thèse, en utilisant des théories féministes, des théories de filmes, des histoires traditionelles d’Allemagne et des États Unis, ainsi que des matériaux primaires, sert à exposer les histoires fausses des cinéastes émigrés du Weimar en Hollywood. En regardant la caractère de la Femme Nouvelle en cette période, on peut simultanément tracer la trajet de ces émigrés et leurs idées entre Weimar et Hollywood, ainsi qu’utiliser la cinématographie nationale de ces deux pays comme une lentille en analysant les perceptions changeant des femmes. La traitement vindictive des femmes, un élément caractéristique des filmes du Weimar, était abandonné en les États Unis en les années 1930. Cette période avait furni des opportunités pour la communauté des émigrés de s’éloigner de ces tropes, en fabriquant des films avec des caractères feminines qui étaient fortes et sympathiques.

Introduction

A New World metropolis sitting on the edge of boundless frontiers1

The cinematic production of the 1930s holds a place in the collective memory of cinema enthusiasts as Hollywood’s Golden Age. The Great Depression ravaged the American economy, inflicting damage and inciting struggle across all strata of society, yet it hardly managed to dampen the gilded film industry; the light-hearted comedies and the grandiose historical dramas of the period are often characterized today as indulgent escapism from the strain necessary for mere survival which swiftly had become commonplace for the majority of Americans. As never before, there were glamorous starlets who paraded the screens with their hooded eyes and painted lips, or riding pants and top hats. Actresses took centre stage – so to speak – and female leads were the order of the day in studios, sometimes out-earning their male co-stars.

Hollywood was truly characterized by glamour, which Margaret Farrand Thorp eloquently described as “first and most important, sex appeal (though that phrase is banned by the Hays office, you have to say ‘it’ or ‘oomph’), plus luxury, plus elegance, plus romance.”2 Finally, this was also a time period characterized by a massive influx of European intellectuals to the United

States. In particular, intellectual and artistic luminaries were emigrating from the fledgling

Weimar Republic to New York and Hollywood, bringing with them their artistic visions and cinematic excellence. While Berlin had once appeared to be the “New World metropolis sitting

1 Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan,” in Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890- 1918, ed. Emily D Bilski, ed. Berlin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 28. 2 Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies (United States of America: Yale University Press, 1939), 65.

1 on the edge of boundless frontiers,”3 as described by Paul Mendes-Flohr, the same can be said for Hollywood: the energy that defined Berlin at the turn of the century can, rather appropriately, be observed radiating from Hollywood during the 30s, when many turn-of-the- century Berliners would call the California coast their home.

The mass emigration from Weimar to America has been contemplated in academic accounts for decades, although the place of Hollywood – particularly in older accounts – has often taken a backseat to the stories of writers, composers and dramatists, who primarily exerted their influence on American culture from a concentrated base in New York City through more traditional media. This preference is perhaps best exemplified by the 1968 survey of intellectual emigration to the U.S., Illustrious Immigrants, by Laura Fermi, who completely neglects the film industry as a vessel for intellectuals. Fermi even goes so far as to characterize

émigré filmmaker Berthold Viertel as an Austrian poet, rather than as a stage or film director, though directing was the passion to which he devoted most of his career, both in Germany and

America.4 More recent émigré studies, such as those written by Anthony Heilbut, Jean-Michel

Palmier and Joseph Horowitz, indicate that the congregation of Weimar intellectuals in Los

Angeles – referred to as “Weimar on the Pacific” and “New Weimar” – has garnered increasing attention. Of particular notice has been the tortured existence of these cultural outsiders; the discontent with the Hollywood structure combined with an inability to adapt to their new circumstances was at times translated onto the screen production of émigrés, most notably in the film noirs of the 1940s.

The scholarship on Weimar émigré film, however, tends to focus on the technical methods used, the artistry of the works, and the shift, from the broad minded audiences of

3 Mendes-Flohr, “The Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan,” 28. 4 Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: the Intellectual Migration from Europe 1930-41 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 273.

Europe who welcomed their social critique, to the shallow entertainment value of American films. Some scholars, such as Vincent Brook in his work Driven to Darkness, are beginning to explore the ways in which the films of the émigrés relate directly to their creators’ Weimar origins and experiences in the fledgling republic. Yet one element of Weimar cinema that has captivated film theorists and feminist historians alike has gone unanalyzed in her new Pacific setting: the Weimar New Woman. This figure, more a social and artistic construct than a reality, was varyingly a crisp white-bloused salesgirl or a red lipped, bobbed hair vamp: she was everything that made Weimar men most anxious about the changing gender roles of post-war society. However, what happened to this construct when the architects responsible for her emigrated to Hollywood has never before been adequately explored.

Many Weimar historians have explored women’s histories within the Republic, amongst whom scholars such as Katarina von Ankum, Richard McCormick and Maria Tatar have devoted significant research into the artistic manifestations of Weimar’s changing attitudes toward women: this analysis has not, however, been extended to New Weimar. The aim of the present study, then, is to trace the emigration of film talent from their Weimar studios – where the New

Woman was so publicly and popularly defamed – through to their establishment in America.

Through this analysis, special attention will be paid to the process undergone by these émigrés to re-establish themselves both socially and professionally, and the effect these adjustments would have on the previously vitriolic depictions of women.

The first chapter will focus on the initial development of this intellectual community at its roots, in Weimar Germany, where the loss of the First World War shaped a distinct attitude towards women. The second chapter will then analyze the way in which this attitude would manifest itself in the creative and innovative film industry in Berlin. The vindictive depictions of

3 the New Woman, and the ways in which she emasculated men and destabilized the social order, came to characterize Weimar cinema. The New Woman became one of the hallmarks of Weimar cinema, as the characters cast in the image of the mythic spectre not only reflect the gender anxieties permeating the society of the time, but also demonstrate the film industry’s willingness to confront and explore those anxieties. A consideration of the films Metropolis

(1927), The Blue Angel (1930), and M (1931) will illustrate the variety of ways in which Weimar film gave shape to this daunting construct.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, waves of emigration led many prominent Weimar artists to America, and this emigration is the subject of the third chapter. The artistic vision of the filmmakers of Weimer had been sought after by the Hollywood studios, particularly since the advent of sound technology in film, a technological advance that led to a rapid decline in

European interest in English-language American films. These sought after artists made up the first of three waves of emigration from Weimar that would settle in Los Angeles, the latter of which were motivated by the increasingly hostile political atmosphere in Germany and finally the outbreak of war in Europe. Despite the fact that some of these intellectuals had been actively recruited to work in Hollywood, the fact remains that the Weimar émigrés faced many creative obstacles within the American film industry, dominated as it was by a much more commercial and hierarchical system than had existed in Weimar. Furthermore, adapting to the interests of an American audience whose social norms were so alien, and whose moral wellbeing was being safeguarded by state censors and the infamous Hays Committee, would prove difficult for most, if not all, émigrés, accustomed as they were to the open-minded attitudes of their Republic. And, finally, operating in a language that was the second, third, or fourth language of most émigrés would soon compound with other creative obstacles to dull the appeal of the extravagant Hollywood contracts that had been so effective in luring many

émigrés to America. It is important, however, to note that a totalizing narrative of the experience of émigrés is not possible, as this study will illustrate the variety of experiences

Weimar artists had in Hollywood.

The fourth chapter will look to one of the coping mechanisms which arose to combat the hostile circumstances of Hollywood: the salon. The salon was a tight knit social subculture within Hollywood that was comprised mostly of Europeans, and, of those Europeans, most had emigrated from Weimar. This subculture allowed the struggling artists to develop not only social ties nurtured by nostalgia and concern aroused by the turmoil in their previous home, but professional connections which would prove invaluable when promoting each other within the industry. While many émigrés brought the European salon with them to California – Alma

Mahler, Marta Feuchwanger and Nelly Mann, for instance – this thesis will focus on one of the best documented instances; the salon of Salka Viertel on Mabery Road. Despite this development, however, many émigrés struggled both financially and professionally, so it is important to examine the factors which contributed to these impediments and the cases of individuals who overcame them. In its concluding pages, then, this chapter will also look at the two émigrés who did find success and renown – Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder. The cases of Lang and Wilder will serve to demonstrate how their tenuous relation to this European social network and their concomitant embrace of American culture affected their reception in Hollywood. We shall see how these directors who met success had to maintain a nuanced relation to their own

émigré identity, engaging actively and sympathetically with American culture and representing

American themes while still maintaining the gloss of foreign exoticism.

Despite their efforts to embrace American themes, however, these better-integrated directors still maintained their derogatory and dismissive depictions of women in their films. In

5 surprising contrast, the films of the Euro-oriented émigrés, as represented by the salon, created films which played directly into the cinematic trends of Hollywood in the 1930s, namely, the historical costume drama and strong female characterization, intended to appeal to the female audience of which studios were beginning to realize the fertility. The fifth chapter will look into three films as case studies – Queen Christina (1933), Fury (1936) and Double Indemnity (1944) – in search of resonance with the Weimar’s canonical treatment of women.

By tapping into what had been a popular niche during the 30s, the makers of Queen

Christina found that the period where their interests had converged with those of the studios had ended as the political climate in America and the related trends in film changed at the close of the Second World War. The filmmakers who best characterized the close-knit European community which would eventually find itself under fire from the House Committee of Un-

American Activities in the 1940s, found themselves unable to replicate the success of Queen

Christina. The final chapter analyzes American trends towards social conservatism regarding women's roles and an increasing hostility towards immigrants. How these changes in social mood impacted the careers of émigrés who had promoted a liberal vision of women, and the impossibility of filmmakers, such as the screenwriter Salka Viertel, to continue working in an unfriendly Hollywood are the focus of the concluding chapter.

This paper takes an intensely interdisciplinary approach, utilizing film and feminist theory, traditional cultural histories of both Weimar Germany and the U.S. during the 1930s, and documents authored by émigrés themselves, giving voice to their own experience as rootless story-tellers, at home neither in America nor in a strange and hostile Nazi Germany. I seek to debunk many of the traditional misconceptions regarding the exiled nature of the

Weimar émigrés’ sojourns in Hollywood. The émigrés were not a unified group, neither strictly

6 exiles, nor Jews, nor political refugees; nor was their time in Hollywood as fruitless and frustrating as scholars have made it out to be; nor were the émigrés who met success artists renouncing all creative integrity for the sake of success. Reframing the notions of exile and the

émigré community, this study will use this fresh conception as a basis from which to reconsider the popular films which emerged from this community and the treatment of women therein.

Through the representation of women in film, this paper will show how the emigration to America affected the artistry of filmmaking which had characterized these filmmakers’

Weimar works, while illustrating the changing perceptions of women through the 1920s-1940s as reflected by a nation’s film industry, be it Germany’s or America’s. 1930s America would provide a narrow window wherein the émigré community of Hollywood was able to create films featuring prominent, exotic, self-sacrificing, complex and still sympathetic female characters, reflecting the interests of both the European filmmakers and the audience that Hollywood studios were targeting.

Chapter I: Weimar: the distinction of trauma

Any consideration of the fate and influence of Weimar’s cultural elite who would find themselves rebuilding careers in Hollywood from the late 1920s to 1940s must first understand the Weimar culture and what made it unique. What are the particular characteristics associated with the artistic production and cultural imagery of the fledgling Republic? The loss of the First

World War is doubtless the catalyst for the unique identity which would develop in Weimar. The defeat, unforeseen and unexpected by most of Germany, forced a radical reordering, not simply of the political structure of Germany during the transition from the Wilhelm monarchy to the establishment of Germany’s first democracy, but also of the self-identity of Germans themselves. The Great War had forced idealized notions of German nationalism, as well as idealized notions of masculinity and femininity; these were thrown into flux and forced into a reconceptualization when these tropes had failed to produce the victory for which they had been groomed. Weimar culture can be best characterized by the trauma of the First World War, impacting artistic production, male subjectivity, and the social status – both real and perceived – of the New Woman.

As Weimar historian Peter Jelavich discusses in his introduction to Berlin Alexanderplatz:

Radio, Film and the death of Weimar Culture, there is a specific scholarly discourse which has characterized “Weimar Culture.” While attempts have been made to emphasize the variety and scope of views and attitudes which, in reality, made up Weimar German society, the scholarly trope of Weimar culture perpetuated by the literature is best characterized as “innovative,

8 experimental, and left-leaning.”5 This association is perhaps best captured by Peter Gay, who writes that “*The Cabinet of Dr.] Caligari continues to embody the Weimar spirit to posterity as palpably as Gropius’ buildings, Kandinsky’s abstractions, Grosz’s cartoons, and Marlene

Dietrich’s legs.”6 Weimar historians often choose to highlight the vibrancy and potential of

Weimar culture rather than the elements which facilitates National Socialism, yet both of these elements existed simultaneously. Alongside the innovations of the Bauhaus and the radical vision of Otto Dix, Weimar fostered the likes of Carl Schmitt and the right-wing German National

People’s Party (DNVP). Acknowledging that, “if the Weimar Republic can justly be called a laboratory for leftist political theory and practice, it was no less of one for the right,”7 does not, however, mean that we must abandon study of the innovative and radical leftist Weimar. If one is to consider the culture which would be cultivated by Weimar’s many émigrés, the innovation characteristic of this time forms the most crucial portrait of Weimar, for this was the Weimar which Hitler and the Nazis sought to demolish during the rise of the Third Reich. Many of

Weimar’s more forward thinking elements were, furthermore, specific to German modernity and indebted to the legacy of the First World War; it would be these leftist artists who would unflinchingly reflect on the trauma to the male psyche and give the unsympathetic face of the

New Woman to that suffering.

Weimar is eternally haunted by the spectre of the First World War; the loss of the war itself, combined with the vindictive Versailles war guilt clause – a clause accepted by the heads of the new government– would fuel the popularity of the National Socialists and plague Ebert’s government throughout his tenure. The traumatic loss of an entire generation of men created

5 Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio Film and the death of Weimar Culture, (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2006), xi. 6 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outside as Insider, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1968), 102. 77 Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 330.

9 an arresting and heart-rending vacancy in Weimar society, which had gained absolutely nothing from the calamitous loss. It is easy to bypass Weimar as an inevitable failure; even the language of “the First” and “the Second” World Wars invite one to treat interwar societies as an ellipsis between historical moments. While some historians may argue that the seeds of Weimar’s downfall were already sown in its foundational moments, the artistic production and political discourse which characterize the potential and merit of Weimar also resulted from the experience of losing the Great War.

The horrors of trench warfare paired with the meaninglessness of defeat were engrained in many facets of Weimar society, making its cultural production unique. While the militarism and camaraderie of the war fostered the hypermasculized Freikorps paramilitary groups, wartime experience also fostered pacifism amongst veterans and citizens. Perhaps the most notable pacifist product crafted by a German veteran is the deeply humanizing All Quiet on the Western Front by the, perhaps equivocally,8 war veteran Erich Maria Remarque. According to Modris Eksteins, Remarque’s novel “was released in book form in January 1929, and it quickly met with a success hitherto unheard of in the publishing world ... unleash[ing] a bitter and acrimonious debate on the essence of the war experience.”9 However, prior to the economic boom in war books, plays and films in Germany, which Eksteins argues was initiated by

Remarque’s success, there were already veterans producing anti-war imagery. George Grosz, whom Peter Gay heralds as a hallmark of Weimar culture, and Otto Dix were both veterans; both became known for their graphic and unsympathetic depictions of war cripples, confronting

8 There was much debate about the nature of Remarque’s war service, whether or not he ever saw action and therefore whether or not his depiction of the front was entirely accurate. This scepticism, however, is at times attributed to right-wing and nationalist forces within Germany who were trying to undermine the pacifist message of All Quiet on the Western Front. Modris Eksteins, “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War,” Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1980), 346. 9 Eksteins, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” 346.

10 viewers with the grotesque reality of the mechanized warfare of the twentieth century. Dix’s

Der Krieg, a collection of 50 etchings, most of which were created while in active service during the First World War, was exhibited at Ernst Friedrich's International Antiwar Museum in 1924, ten years after the initial mobilization.10 Dix was particularly outspoken in his condemnation of war: “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, gas, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is! It is all the work of the Devil!”11 The experience of the war spawned artistic protest amongst the veterans who had been acquainted with its horror.

Active service, however, was not a necessary requisite for the creation of Weimar’s pacifist art; Malcolm Humble outlines the various uses of the image of the Unknown Soldier in

Weimar literature: Fritz von Unruh's play Heinrich aus Andernach, Kurt Tucholsky’s Gebet nach dem Schlachten, Bertolt Brecht’s Anleitung fur die Oberen and Wiederkehr des Unbekannten

Soldaten by Johannes R. Becher all employ the image of the Unknown Fallen Soldier to protest militarism.12 In Tucholsky’s work, for instance, “the resurrected soldiers form ranks at a church parade and pray to God to tear down the trappings of war, drive the survivors to desert, and thus to prevent a repetition of what happened in 1914, so that some sense can be made of their sacrifice.”13 The conspicuous absence of a generation of young men made the image of the

Unknown Fallen Soldier a poignant means by which artists could speak to all of Germany about the pain of war, pain experienced by veterans and those who had waited on homefront.

10 Dora Apel, “‘Heroes’ and ‘Whores’: The Politics of Gender in Weimar Antiwar Imagery,” The Art Bulletin 79, No. 3 (1997), 366. 11 Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 69. 12 Malcolm Humble, “The Unknown Soldier and the Return of the Fallen: The Political Dimension of Mourning in German Texts from the First World War to the Present,” The Modern Language Review 93 No. 4 (1998), 1035-1037. 13 Humble, “The Unknown Soldier,” 1036.

Perhaps one of Weimar’s most iconic Expressionist and pacifist artists was Kaethe

Kollwitz, whose depictions of mourning mothers show the breadth of wartime suffering, which clearly impacted not only the fallen soldiers and the explicit trauma of veterans, but also their families and the others left behind. The war had gained Germany nothing, and the feeling of fruitless sacrifice permeated the work of Weimar’s artists. Gay asserts that “even when the painter’s work was not explicitly political, or explicitly unpolitical, it reflected, as did all of

Weimar, one harrowing experience – the war,”14 leading to an artistic space where “poets, dancers, composers, sculptors, even cartoonists, tried out new techniques to rescue the world from itself...”15 The trauma of a war lost became a signature of Weimar artistic production.

One of the particularly distinct features of Weimar trauma is the crisis of male subjectivity. The war deeply impacted the combatants, splintering the psychic identities of the soldiers – all of whom were, clearly, men – who experienced an unprecedentedly dehumanizing war. In his discussion of war neuroses, psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel writes “it is not only the bloody war which leaves such devastating traces in those who took part in it. Rather, it is also the difficult conflict in which the individual finds himself in his fight against a world transformed by war.”16 Alongside the rampant physical damage to individual bodies – as mentioned above, war cripples were a favourite subject of both Grosz and Dix – a new recognition of psychic trauma emerged, popularized most by the iconic founder of the psychoanalytic school, Sigmund

Freud. Though Simmel does not go so far as to extend the psychic trauma – which, he explains, results when “whatever in a person’s experience is too powerful or horrible for his conscious mind to grasp and work through...[and] lies like a mine, waiting to explode the entire psychic

14 Gay, Weimar Culture, 108. 15 Gay, Weimar Culture, 108. 16 Ernst Simmel, “War Neuroses and ‘Psychic Trauma,’” in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7.

12 structure”17 – to soldier’s male identity, he does allude rather interestingly to the gendered nature of psychic trauma.

Psychic disorders, particularly hysteria, had always been heavily associated with feminine identities. Hysteria, a term whose etymological roots tie it directly to feminine dysfunction, as well as psychic disorders in general, have always been heavily associated with femininity. The idealized masculine figure of the German soldier, now returning from the front suffering from serious psychological trauma, is thus instantly incompatible with the feminized stigma surrounding hysteria and other psychic disorders. Whether he intended to or not,

Simmel evokes this stigma when he writes “we gladly abstain from diagnoses out of desperation, by which we previously accorded a psychosis the status ‘hysterical’...”. While

Simmel claims that his push for a change in terminology is to avoid believing these disorders to be curable, it is doubtless that the presence of men suffering from disorders which had previously been associated purely with femininity was the major force behind the reconceptualiztion of the nature of the male psyche in Weimar. Since men, and the male identity in general, had never before been impacted in such vast numbers by these “emotional illnesses that are not organic in nature,” previous understandings of mental illness and its relation to innate gendered difference were called into question during a radical reordering of traditional categories of male identity. In his attempt to force a reconceptualization of mental illness as such, Simmel, and psychoanalysts more generally, called into question traditional categories of male identity.

According to historian Dora Apel, Simmel was isolated in his willingness to accept psychic trauma in men; she writes that, “with few exceptions, Weimar doctors refused to

17 Simmel, “War Neuroses and ‘Psychic Trauma,’” 8.

13 acknowledge shell shock... as a legitimate war disability, instead regarding it as a form of hysteria, associated with the psychic weakness of women...”18 While Simmel does not extend his analysis to consider the gendered stigma of trauma and its implications for popular notions of masculinity, subsequent historians, psychoanalysts and gender theorists have made the explicit connection. Barbara Hales asserts that “the splitting of the self [as identified by Simmel] into cold exterior and turbulent interior provided evidence of male subjectivity in crisis.”19 This new psychological crisis of male subjectivity lent itself to a distinct aesthetic and theme that would manifest itself through various artistic mediums in Weimar.

This new questioning of masculine identity was no doubt perpetuated by, and, arguably, originated directly in, the propaganda of the Wilhelmine war effort. Apel explains the highly idealized gender depictions going into the war, demonstrating that what was at stake going into the First World War was not merely national pride or glory, but masculine pride and glory:

“purity symbolized moral rectitude and the sublimation of personal needs to a higher purpose, in this case, the survival of the nation. The additional qualities of courage, virility, youth, and male beauty derived from Greek ideals constituted the broader concept of manliness.”20 The qualities which epitomized the ideal male soldier, qualities associated with justice and right, proved to be illusory, shattered by the depravity inflicted on the male body through the mechanization of war, as well as the blow to the male psyche through defeat at the hands of the

Allied forces the war had become the defining experience of masculinity for a generation of men. Apel, quoting Dix, describes it as “a test of maturity, courage, and masculine prowess, ‘a supreme experience of life for men who could undertake it.’” Even for Dix, whose disdain for the

18 Apel, “‘Heroes’ and ‘Whores,’” 371. 19 Barbara Hales, “Projecting Trauma: The Femme Fatale in Weimar and Hollywood Film Noir,” Women in German Yearbook 23 (2007), 225. 20 Apel, “‘Heroes’ and ‘Whores,’” 367.

14 war was the dominant theme in his oeuvre, “the concept of manliness as a form of sublimated virility and personal heroism was less easily rejected:”21 despite the emasculating tone to his art, he still cherished the masculine camaraderie the war had instilled in its survivors. The idealized masculine identity developed in wartime propaganda comes under attack in the works of both

Grosz and Dix, which dwell the physical trauma to the male body, embodied by the recurring figure of the impotent war cripple. Dix’s the Trench, for instance, reveals a male figure, skewered by debris through his groin, from which Apel theorizes that “the proximity of blade and phallus insinuates the spectre of castration and the loss of both masculinity and humanity.”22 The war both physically and psychically dismembered traditional male identifiers in what were supposed to be the most pure and virile of German men. The preservation of an image of militarized masculinity found itself fatally damaged by German defeat.

The German defeat not only forced a reconsideration of male gender roles, but it also demanded a radical reordering of the female roles which had also been emphasized in wartime propaganda. Not subject to the same degree of physical and psychological dangers as men on the front, Apel explains that, “in the gendered hierarchy of war, women were instead perceived as suffering for the glory of their heroic sons and husbands, their own lives ‘blocked from view’ by the ‘pathos of hero worship.’”23 Forces from within the Reich, as well as within women’s groups, perpetuated the image of the devoted mother, naturalizing women’s place in the home, and excusing any departure from that as a patriotic mother’s sacrifice. Many of the arguments previously made for a more politically active role for women were based on the tempering values of feminine difference, rather than equality, emphasizing compassion, sensitivity and a

21 Apel, “‘Heroes’ and ‘Whores,’”367. 22 Apel, “‘Heroes’ and ‘Whores,’”, 373. 23 Apel, “‘Heroes’ and ‘Whores,’” 381.

15 nurturing ability as valuable and innately female traits.24 The war proved an opportunity to assert that value, and the chair of the Federation of German Women’s Associations, Gertrude

Bäumer, had declared “Whatever they may bring, whatever they may take, these times represent the solemn peak of the lives of our generation,”25 embodying this sacrificial language supposedly natural to women. Unlike the case of the soldier’s propaganda, however, what was asked of women during the war was not always consistent with the government’s message of domesticity and good-motherhood. “The larger social problems of homelessness, starvation, inflation, and unemployment, the widespread poverty and deprivations” for instance, were completely at odds with the woman’s ability to care for her children, and as such, “…were not officially recognized as part of women's sacrifice during the war.”26 Sacrificing for the nation meant sacrificing the health and lives of their children, complicating women’s relation to their maternal expectations. It is absolutely crucial to explore the ways in which the war and the resulting gender anxieties affected Weimar society and artistic production.

Maria Tatar explores the implications of the crisis of male identity for German women, particularly the depiction of women by male artists. In her study Lustmord: Sexual Murder in

Weimar Germany, Tatar explains the following connection between various facets of Weimar cultural production and war trauma;

Some of the writers, artists and filmmakers in this book may never have seen a trench or inhaled mustard gas; others may not have been brutalized by the war or unnerved by the taste of defeat. Yet all of them must in some ways have been implicated in the psychic fall-out of the war years: the sense of resentment directed against victors, noncombatants, and military chiefs alike; the crisis of male subjectivity occasioned by a sense of military defeat; and a painfully acute

24 Detlev J.K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 98. 25 Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), 152. 26 Apel, “‘Heroes’ and ‘Whores,’” 381.

sense of the body’s vulnerability to fragmentation, mutilation and dismemberment.27

This new configuration of masculinity asserted itself, in the cases covered by Tatar, as violence against images of femininity. In addition to his work which relates directly to the war, Grosz became particularly known for – seemingly unrelated – graphic and unsympathetic depictions of his literal “lady killers,” men who mercilessly murder unknown women. Dix also created many canvases titled Lustmord, depicting the evisceration and dismemberment of women’s bodies.

This violence within art – the chief culprits identified by Tatar’s case studies, which permeate across media, are Dix, Grosz, Alfred Döblin and Fritz Lang – was, in fact, mirrored by violence enacted on actual women (and, in the case of Fritz Haarmann, feminized men).28 While these cases of real-life violence represent the pathological extreme, they do beg the question, “how did the men in gender-crisis perceive and treat the actual women of Weimar?” While Tatar is right to draw attention to the conspicuous number of sex murderers who became sensationalized by the Weimar press – the Butcher of Hanover, the Bluebeard of the Silesian

Railway, the Mass Murderer of Münsterberg, the Vampire of Düsseldorf29 – there were many, less extreme manifestations of male distrust of women, as well as explicit misogyny, in Weimar.

The traumatic result of the war was often traced directly back to the women of the homefront, who found themselves the subjects of blame from a range of social and political factions within

Weimar.

Many men in Weimar actually articulated explicit resentment towards women, “who had escaped the shells and shrapnel of the trenches and survived the war with bodies intact,”30 after the War. Tatar’s theories regarding female guilt, both actual and perceived, for the result

27 Tatar, Lustmord, 11-12. 28 Tatar, Lustmord, 42. 29 Tatar, Lustmord, 42. 30 Tatar, Lustmord,, 12.

17 of the war are corroborated by statements made by men within the Republic. Otto Dix tellingly said, “in the final analysis all war is waged over and for the vulva.”31 The war happened, or was able to go on so long, because of women. This same sentiment was echoed more comprehensively by filmmaker F.W. Murnau:

And the women, incredible as it may sound, play the most important part in battle. Just so long as they dub as a coward the man who refuses or hesitates to ‘fight,’ regardless of his ideals, just so long as they are proud to cling to the arm of a uniform, and they glory in the sacrifice of their sons, sweethearts, brothers and husbands for ‘the cause,’ just so long shall we continue to have war and continue to show pictures apotheosizing war.32

Apel draws on this mistrust, framing the question which plagued both men and women after the war: “Did women, assumed to be naturally pacifistic because of their maternal nature, bear a greater responsibility for the war by failing to oppose the mobilization of their husbands, sons, and brothers?”33 Apel goes on to identify this sense of responsibility in the anti-war images of

Kaethe Kollwitz, who painstakingly constructed grieving parents in monument to her fallen son.

Women’s unharmed reproductive bodies and their failure to stop the slaughter of their sons is only a partial explanation of why women became suspect and resented after the war. The crisis of masculinity occasioned by the war was paired with new strides made by women in the public sphere during the war. It appeared as though men had suffered at the front while women remained whole and intact at home, benefitting from the sacrifice of their sons and husbands and displacing men’s place in the society they had been dying to protect. While “men too were

31 Beth Irwin Lewis, “Lustmord: Inside the Windows of the Metropolis.” In Women in the Metropolis, ed. K. Von Ankum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 220. 32 F.W. Murnau, “The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles: By Its Very Nature the Art of the Screen Should Tell a Complete Story Pictorially,” in German Essays on Film, eds. Richard McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal (New York: Continuum, 2004), 67. 33 Apel, “‘Heroes’ and ‘Whores,’” 366.

18 themselves often confused about the behaviour expected of them by changing times,” the so- called New Woman of Weimar “lived...for the present and according to her own desires.”34

One of the dominant characteristics of Weimar that has fallen under the academic trope of Weimar culture is the ambiguous construct of the New Woman. The New Woman is signified simultaneously by the new white-collar working girl infiltrating the administrative offices of the big cities, as well as by the jazz club vamp, painting her lips red and flaunting her sexuality. While the vamp’s sexuality is abundant and dangerous, the jazz club girl is still attacked on the basis of her short haired, waifish androgyny. Under the heading of “the New Woman,” historian Detlev

Peukert discusses both “The widely propagated image of the modern young female white-collar worker – non-political, consumption-oriented, enamoured of the products of the mass” as well as “the most challenging version of this image,... the male generated fantasy of the ‘vamp:’”35

The glamour girl, a bit too independent to be true, armed with bobbed hair and made-up face, fashionable clothes and cigarette, working by day in a typing pool or behind the sales counter in some dreamland of consumerism, frittering away the night dancing the Charleston or watching UFA and Hollywood films36

She is a construct, embodying the confusion and aggression were feeling in light of the changing gender roles of post-war society. Alfred Polgar’s “The Defenseless: a Conversation Between

Men” captures the confusion Weimar men apparently felt when confronted with New Women.

The son, in response the his father’s chastising him for not giving his seat to a woman on the streetcar, explains; “They have become comrades in work and in play, in pleasure and struggle...They’ve acquired better nerves and stronger muscles: they’ve emancipated

34 Kaes et al., the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 196. 35 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 99. 36 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 99.

19 themselves from the signs of slavery: the long skirt, the long hair...”37 His father is confused, and doubts his son’s ability to see and love women; their conversation concludes with the son’s response; “Father! It is just a passing fog.”38 The language of a fog, perhaps not so passing, captures the obscured vision of Weimar women which plagued men, the aporia between what was perceived and what was.

There were concrete changes in the conditions and lives of women in the New Republic.

These changes, however, cannot alone account for the stigma of the New Woman that pervaded

Weimar culture. Peukert explains, for instance, that “defeat and revolution brought...the right to vote and to stand for office.”39 This is confirmed by Ute Frevert, who observes that with the democratic revolution, women “took part in political gatherings, joined parties, trade unions and professional associations.”40 And yet, while women’s political participation appeared to increase during this period, these developments were paired with a waning in organized feminism: the feminist movement’s “political demands *had+ been met, at least in a formal sense,”41 and once those gains had been made, apathy seemed to descend on the younger generation of women.

Jans B Wager confirms this distance between legal and actual equality, writing that “women for the first time enjoyed legal equality with men, but not economic or symbolic equality.”42 And while the vote and representation in labour organizations were both important gains made by women in the Weimar Republic, the prohibition of abortion became “one of the most volatile issues for Weimar women.”43 The images of the New Woman that proliferate in Weimar culture

37 Alfred Polgar, “The Defenseless: a Conversation Between Men,” in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 204. 38 Polgar, “The Defenseless,” 204. 39 Peukert, the Weimar Republic, 99. 40 Frevert, Women in German History, 168. 41 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 99 42 Jans B. Wager, Dangerous Dames: Women and Representaion in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 20. 43 Kaes et al., the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 196.

20 do not particularly draw on her political emancipation, either. It is not women with ballots or at podiums who are criticized by Murnau or dismembered by Grosz and Dix – the focus is on her sexual and social liberation. Paragraphs 218 and 219 of the Weimar Criminal Code, which contain the prohibitions against abortion and speak essentially to women’s political rights within the Republic, directly address concerns of female sexuality and the traditional dictate of women as mothers.

Manfred Georg, in his defence of abortion, draws a significant parallel between abortion and conscription laws: “in a free state that had renounced its right to require a fixed term of military service – that is, the obligation of its subjects to allow themselves to be killed for the state – the right over one’s own body should be incontestable.”44 By explicitly linking women’s sexual liberation with the war, Georg draws on precisely the pervasiveness of the wars impact on all strata of society. This legislation reflected the hostility towards women in the workplace, where it was believed that, by abandoning the domestic sphere, they were denouncing marriage, motherhood and femininity. The New Woman is explicitly sexual, but unconcernedly barren, working, but not earning to support dependents, and concerned only with her own pursuit of pleasure. This woman, it was believed, posed a threat to the strength of the nation.

During the war, the declining birth rate had become an issue of national concern: “the German

Society for Population Policy...,founded in 1915, recommended positive measures to counteract the decline in fertility,” believing that “only in this way could ‘the political and economic power of the Reich be guaranteed to exist in the future,’ and ‘the onslaught of our enemies from the

West, the South and East be victoriously driven back.’”45 Women’s sexuality was therefore an unambiguously political question, linked to the vitality of a nation, recovering from the loss of its

44 Manfred Georg, “The Right to Abortion,” in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 200. 45 Fervert, Women in German History,159.

21 toughest test of national strength. The allegations of Dix and Murnau must therefore be understood as representative of a general mistrust of female sexuality that permeated not only the social but the political arenas of Weimar.

These sorts of allegations can be more concretely grounded in the crisis of masculinity triggered by the war rather than by any actual changes affected on the homefront by the war.

The women motivated to join the workforce during the war were not exploiting a newfound freedom while men were away; they were, rather, forced to work due to the constraints on the work force resulting from conscription, or out of a sense of patriotic duty. Furthermore, the majority of women who began working during the war were mothers, doing so out of a sense of purely maternal duty. Fervert explains that “the call-up of nine-million men, half of whom were married, as early as the end of 1915, meant that their families were suddenly faced with managing indefinitely without breadwinners.”46 Peukert confirms that, even after the war, single women worked primarily due to economic necessity, and that “women occupying traditional roles in households, on farms or in family business were still the dominant group in the female workforce.”47 Furthermore, both Peukert and Fervert attest to no real increase in the percentage of women in the workforce.48 And, while women did take jobs in traditionally male professions during the war, “as soon as the men came back from the war, these particular roles were reversed once again:”49 as Wager notes, “ironically, at the same time that women supposedly achieved equality under the law, the jobs that they had been filling because of a shortage of (literally) manpower were being reappropriated by the six million men returning

46 Fervert, Women in German History, 154. 47 Peukert, the Weimar Republic, 96. 48 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 96. Fervert, Women in German History, 156. 49 Peukert, the Weimar Republic, 97.

22 from the battlefields.”50 Richard McCormick confirms this disparity between the spectre of the

New Woman and the actual gains of Weimar women when he writes that “the so-called ‘New

Woman,’ the partly mythical notion of a sexually emancipated working woman that so fascinated the illustrated press in Germany.”51 The New Woman, characterised either as the emancipated, single working-girl, abandoning domesticity, or as the emaciated and made up vamp, was more of a myth perpetuated by artistic and cultural dialogues than it was ever the reality of most German women.

The trauma of the First World War was exacted on the bodies of soldiers, the identity of both genders, and the prestige and confidence of the nation. The exploration of this trauma, and the adjustment to the resulting changes that would take place in many arenas: personal, political, artistic and commercial. While Otto Dix and George Grosz would attack women on canvas, and Fritz Harmaan and Peter Kürten did in the streets, Fritz Lang and Murnau would do so on film. A distinct culture shaped by the loss of the war developed an equally distinct film style which became emblematic of the modernist, revolutionary democracy. On the screen, the

Weimar filmmakers would address male anxieties by giving a face to the fearful New Woman.

50 Wager, Dangerous Dames, 20. 51 McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity,” (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 2. [emphasis mine].

Chapter II: the New Woman and the screen

The booming German film industry is most responsible for perpetuating the myth of the New

Woman of Weimar and its popular circulation within Weimar German culture. The revolution in

Germany coincided with the relatively new film technology which was exploding into a popular mass entertainment medium. The development of film technology, itself a relatively recent invention, coincided conveniently with the timing of the revolution in Germany, exploding into a widely popular medium for mass entertainment. In 1921, the popularity of cinema was such that

Hugo Hoffmansthal was able to write that “the entrance to the cinema attracts the steps of people with a power like – like the liquor cabinets; and yet, it is something different.”52 Weimar is “often called the Golden Age of German cinema,” and its influence and appeal skyrocketed within this “era of unprecedented innovation and experimentation.”53 The intellectual approach to film, the subjects explored, and the technical methods employed were economically isolated from the rest of global cinema, giving rise to a unique and characteristic film industry, which would, before long, be exported overseas.

In many ways, the early Weimar film industry rivalled Hollywood, and Fritz Lang maintained “the Americans have still not understood how to use their magnificent equipment to elevate the miracle of photography into the realm of the spirit.”54 Film critic Willy Haas echoed a similar sentiment in his review of Lang’s Metropolis(1927), claiming “this German film leaves all

52 Hugo Hoffmansthal, “The Substitute for Dreams” in German Essays on Film, eds. Richard McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal (New York : Continuum, 2004), 54. 53 Kaes et al., the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 617. 54 Fritz Lang, “The Future of the Feature Film in Germany,” in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 622.

24 the American accomplishments in cinematography in the dust.”55 Jelavich explains that even the impressive growth of Weimar cinema can be traced to the First World War: the wartime ban on

French, British, Italian, and ultimately American imports allowed a tremendous expansion of

German production to make up the shortfall.”56 Following 1924, the Reichstag put restrictions on film imports to further limit foreign films, which soon became a non-issue; with the advent of sound technology, foreign language films were far less appealing to the domestic audience.57

The result was a vibrant and varied film industry within Weimar: an industry that, while wanting in wealth compared with Hollywood, was forced, according to Lang, “to compensate a purely material imbalance through an intellectual superiority.”58

Weimar film has been associated with the artistry of Expressionism and the New

Objectivity, embodying the “intellectual superiority” Lang spoke of, rather than the sort of popular blockbusters associated with American cinema. Historian Jean-Michel Palmier characterizes the Weimar cultural elite as having “often assumed of its audience a fairly high cultural level, developed on the basis of a succession of works, and paid scant attention to popular taste; its job was to fashion a sensibility for these new styles.”59 While “Weimar film became known as a high-brow alternative to Hollywood movies,”60 this may set up an unnecessary dichotomy between the more artistically innovative and evocative films and those which were popular with the German public. It can be surmised that, with the truly prolific creation of three hundred to four hundred films each year between 1919 and 1929,61 each of

55 Willy Haas, “Metropolis ,” in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 624. 56 Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 150. 57 Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 155. 58 Fritz Lang, “The Future of the Feature Film in Germany,” 622. 59 Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: the Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2006), 500. 60 Kaes et al., the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 617. 61 Kaes et al., the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 617.

25 these films did not uphold the intellectual and artistic mastery which so characterized the period. It was, however, the case that many popular films were full of symbolism, drawing on

Germany’s rich literary tradition; artistic films and popular ones were not mutually exclusive endeavours in Weimar cinema.

This innovative and erudite attitude to filmmaking in Weimar did not, as we shall soon see, translate into a liberal and sympathetic representation of women. The artistic seriousness of filmmakers does mean, however, that we can assume deliberateness behind filmic conventions, and read significance into the various stylistic and plot elements in film.

Filmmakers were able to make social comment and set cultural standards “because [they] had available to *them+ certain means of distribution, without however being controlled by them.”62

The films of Weimar, to a greater extent than those in Hollywood, serve as social commentaries and give insight into the perspective of their directors.

When embarking upon an exploration of the New Woman as viewed in Weimar films, it is important to clarify that the critique of women’s increasingly public social positions and seemingly emancipated sexuality was prevalent in the films of other cultures as well; the social position of women was changing throughout the West. David Davidson selects three films which he believes represent a more nuanced depiction of the so-called amoral woman – Pandora’s

Box, Blue Angel, and Jules and Jim – the first two from Weimar, the last (Jules and Jim) a French depiction of the femme fatale. Davidson observes that

these films' sources and settings suggest that they were conceived within the framework of a shared aesthetic sensibility - masculine, European, modernist; the characters Lulu, Lola-Lola, and Catherine represent various male artists' personalized yet similar responses to the social and cultural changes

62 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 500.

experienced during the period beginning with the fin de siècle and ending with the world-wide Depression.63

While Germany and France had different wartime experiences, and also occupy distinct geo- political boundaries, neither of these significant factors serve to distinguish between the

“masculine, European, modernist” representations offered up by both French and German film studios for Davidson: the trauma of the loss of the Great War and the subsequent introspection and self-doubt which German art unflinchingly explored in Weimar’s public sphere does not factor into his consideration. Barbara Hales, a historian of film and women’s studies, refers to a similar sentiment argued by Janice Morgan, who “finds the dark urban aesthetic of 1930s Paris... to be an equally significant influence on noir cinema as Weimar culture.”64 However, I maintain that Weimar culture and its film production was, in fact, quite distinct from other nations, and that the film depictions of women can only be understood in the historical specificity of German defeat. Hales writes; “although depictions of the femme fatale as sexual criminal and double can be found in other cultures and time periods, the pervasiveness of these character types in

Weimar culture underscores this context as significant in the femme fatale's re-emergence in noir cinema.”65 Indeed, the femme fatale figure, which reached its heights in American film noir, only did so after Fritz Lang’s last film to be released in Weimar,66 M. The film was described by

Brook as the seminal film of the film noir pantheon.67 That Lang is often considered amongst the founding fathers of film noir, and that his female characterizations are so strongly rooted in the resentment which mirrors that of greater Weimar, cannot be neglected as a mere convention of

63 David Davidson, “From Virgin to Dynamo,” 31. 64 Hales, “Projecting Trauma,” 224. 65 Hales, “Projecting Trauma,” 225. 66 M was not Lang’s last film made in Germany, but it was the last film he was able to get past the censors. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) was never released in Germany due to Hitler’s ascension to Chancellor, shortly after which Lang emigrated to America to continue making films, which will be analyzed in more depth in subsequent chapters. 67 Vincent Brook, Driven to Darkness, 79

27 the genre: perhaps these factors in Weimar are what shaped not only Lang’s dark and probing vision, but the conventions that would characterize later American noirs. The centrality and pervasiveness of the femme fatale, the vamp, and even more insidious condemnations of women (as we shall explore in M), in Weimar cinema reflects the obsessive anxiety over destabilized gender roles which emerged so strongly in Weimar, making it distinct from the films of France or Britain.

While Weimar film may share the same brooding resentment of the film noir of Paris, the artistic and intellectual approach to film that was bred by the particularly dire economic position of Germany after the war became a hallmark of Weimar film. The cost of the war, compounded with reparations and hyperinflation, created an insulated market for Weimar directors to experiment in. Jelavich writes that “from the end of the war to 1924, the hyperinflation gave Germany a protected film market, since foreign producers had no incentive to sell their wares in a country with an increasingly valueless currency.”68 With little competition, little hope for profit, and little capital to spend on films, many German directors were forced to employ creative means to realize their visions. Much of the artistry associated with Weimar film arose from the post-war economic conditions and indifference towards fortune became a hallmark of many artists in the German film industry. “Constantly under threat of being stifled for lack of funds,” writes Palmier, German artists “managed to find expression even in the most impoverished forms.”69 Profit was not the primary motive behind directors and writers: Fritz Lang bankrupted UFA making Metropolis70 and, in her autobiography, actress-cum-screenwriter Salka Viertel describes her inevitable arrival in Hollywood as one

68 Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 150 69 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 500. 70 Richard McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal, eds., German Essays on Film (New York : Continuum, 2004), 60

28 where she lent her home and money to anyone who needed it, living near bankruptcy much of the time. Upon moving to Santa Monica, Salka Viertel would remark that her husband

“Berthold’s determination to become a capitalist astonished me.”71 This indifference to fortune allowed for a more intellectual approach to film in Germany, an element that was absent from the escapism of most large-scale and capital driven Hollywood productions of the era, and forced a creative use of technology and background which the superior economic positions of

France and England did not necessitate. The limits forced upon German filmmakers by scant budgets and expensive technological patents forced innovative storytelling and inventive use of existing technology. The German directors and writers behind the iconic Weimar films did not contribute the entertaining dramas and comedies characteristic of Hollywood films, which

Palmier characterizes as “rich works that had scarcely any relationship to those that had made the richness of German culture of the Weimar era” and “which for [many Germans] did not even deserve the name of ‘culture:’”72 filmmakers in Weimar proffered social critiques which employed nuance and symbol (varying in sophistication, as evidence by Metropolis and Blue

Angel), to which major economic gain was not the highest priority. Profit was seen by many filmmakers as secondary to message, which explains Fritz Lang’s abhorrence of the Hollywood joke, “If you’ve got a message, use Western Union.”73

These attitudes and approaches towards the war, gender and filmmaking are the necessary elements which shaped a distinctly Weimar film culture. The mythology of the succubus vamp and the emasculating New Woman became fodder for a film industry financially isolated from the rest of the West. If indeed “the Weimar New Woman was a mass-media

71 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 139. 72 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 500. 73 Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 238.

29 projection that corresponded only partially to the reality of women in the 1920s,”74 what sort of messages were being conveyed through this projection, and by what conventions? Weimar produced a rich and voluminous canon of films to which one could turn in search of a distinctly

Weimar attitude towards, and depiction of, women. We will only consider three: Metropolis

(1927), Blue Angel (1930), and M (1931). While each film’s female characters and characterizations differ, they share in a condemnation of the New Woman, though who or what the New Woman was exactly varied film to film. These three films, spanning some of the most fruitful years of Weimar cinema, were high profile at the time of their release in Germany, and still continue to hold their status as iconic pieces of the Weimar cultural trope. In these three films we can identify an attitude towards women that is distinctly shaped by the experiences of

Germany. From that distinctly Weimar attitude, we can contrast these films with the directors’ later works in Hollywood.

This may strike the reader as a limited array of films, given the number of high profile members of the German cultural elite who found themselves working in Hollywood, starting in the late 20s, and continuing through the 30s and 40s. Indeed, two of the films, Metropolis and

M, were directed by the same man, Fritz Lang, and Blue Angel was Josef von Sternberg’s only

Weimar film. However, all three films have become unquestionably icons of Weimar film; the expense and grandeur of Metropolis, the cultural icon of Marlene Dietrich’s legs in Blue Angel, and the haunting noir of M, a story which appeared to have been ripped straight from the headlines of German newspapers, can leave no doubt as to their appropriateness as case studies.

74 Mihaela Petrescu, “Domestication of the Vamp: Jazz and the Dance Melodrama in Weimar Cinema,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 46 No. 3 (2010), 277.

To have two films by Fritz Lang in a brief consideration of Weimar film is not altogether surprising; one of the most established film industry stars at the time of his exile, the director still is praised today for his cinematic genius, described by Manohla Dargis for The New York

Times in 2011 as “the Austrian genius with a monocle screwed into his right eye and a dark forbidding Weltanschauung lodged in his head.”75 Historian Vincent Brook emphasizes Lang’s

Weimar prominence, proclaiming “had he not made another film after the Weimar period,

Lang’s place in the film noir pantheon... would be assured. That he went on to make some of the earliest, most influential, and most highly regarded noirs in the United States only adds to his pre-eminence.”76 This echoes a similar sentiment expressed by George Stevens Jr. of the

American Film Institute, who wrote “the German films he directed were groundbreaking and stand today as classics, notably Metropolis, [and] M, his first sound film....”77 Lang was perhaps the only director whose success in exile equalled his prestige in Weimar. Furthermore, the two films’ subject matters are so vastly different from each other, as were the economic and creative conditions of production, that reflecting on both the science fiction critique of modernity in

Metropolis and the chilling crime noir exploration of human pathology in M proves to be non- redundant. And while von Sternberg could be considered as a more American director than a member of the Weimar cultural intelligentsia, Blue Angel has become a symbol of Weimar cinema, and its characterization of the femme fatale was a perfect crystallization of perceptions of women within Weimar. Historian Barbara Kosta writes that Blue Angel “is one of the best- known films to emerge from the Weimar Republic (1919-33) – a landmark in German history,

75 Manohla Dargis, “Master Strokes, Despite Stamp of Hollywood,” The New York Times, January 23, 2011., 8. 76 Vincent Brook, Driven to Darkness: Jewish Emigre Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 2009), 79. 77 George Stevens Jr., Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age at the American Film Institute (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2006), 57.

31 internationally acclaimed.”78 Despite von Sternberg’s own foreignness to the Weimar film industry, Blue Angel must, according to McCormick, “be understood in relation to a historical context defined both by developments in cinematic form and by sexual and social anxieties pervasive in the culture of the Weimar Republic.”79 This is understandable, given that the original text upon which von Sternberg’s film was based on prominent German novelist Heinrich

Mann’s Professor Unrat. These three films capture the sentiments of their directors and writers, crystallizing their messages about the dangers posed by the social emancipation of women, and as films which were met with great popularity within Weimar, we can assume a degree of resonance within the movie-going society. Furthermore, all three contributed to and perpetuated the fear of the New Woman and the threat she posed to society. Their captivation with these fictional female types and their thinly veiled condemnation set the grounding for how we understand their work in America.

In his review of Metropolis, Willy Haas begins with the exclamation: “Rumours were already circulating a year and half ago that a marvel of film technology was in the works. And the reality surpasses even our wildest expectations.”80 However, Haas describes Lang’s treatment of character as “so removed in spirit,”81 a serious objection when considered alongside his praise of its technological innovations, innovations which are still esteemed today.

The only element of the film which Haas credits with relevance to Weimar society and “a more deeply perceived nature” was “a kind of poignant version of the female doppelganger motif in which the unleashed hell of the senses and the virgin’s most tender virtues are physically

78 Barbara Kosta, Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 1. 79 Richard McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature and “New Objectivity,” (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 15. 80 Haas, “Metropolis,” 623. 81 Haas, “Metropolis,” 625.

32 identical.”82 Of all the themes which Lang and co-writer (and then-wife) Thea von Harbou put into Metropolis – critiques of religion, capitalism, the dehumanization of mechanization, science and technology – the only element which Haas deems as having depth and meaning is Lang’s treatment of the dual femininity of Maria/the Maschinenmensch. Sympathizing with Lang’s depiction of a tempting, albeit seemingly innocent, woman’s ability to unravel a well-established society illustrates perfectly the psychic disorder of masculine identity, as discussed in the first chapter of this thesis. The film features a single female character, Maria, whose likeness is then transplanted onto a robot; Brigitte Helm plays both the original, good natured Maria, as well as the Maschinenmensch, programmed by the resentful scientist Rotwang to destabilize the city of

Metropolis. Lang is not so subtly juxtaposing the ideal woman, Maria, with the dangerously sexual vamp, embodied by the robot. Maria, in name and character, epitomizes the good

Christian mother; maternal, kind hearted, humble and poor, she captures the heart of the film’s protagonist, Freder, with her goodness. The false, robot Maria is distinguished physically from the original by a heavily made up face; that her heavily painted lips and made-up eyes become the key physical distinctions between the innocent goodness of the original woman and the malevolent machine indicates an obvious correlation with the overarching condemnation, so prevalent at the time, of the German women who visited nightclubs, exuded sexuality, and hid their “natural,” caring, maternal faces. Robot Maria’s first act when loosed onto Metropolis’ society is to star in a Josephine Baker-esque cabaret performance, lewdly dressed. Lang emphasizes that False Maria goes to Yoshiwara, Metropolis’ entertainment district: this emphasis doubtless serves as a additional condemnation of the jazz clubs and cabaret of the time, as well as their patrons, both male and female. In the end of the film, the

Machinenmensch is burned on a pyre, while the original Maria saves the children of the workers,

82 Haas, “Metropolis,” 625.

33 busy enacting their revenge. Metropolis provided Weimar viewers with the dichotomy that was already nascent in public consciousness: there are good German women who are always in danger of falling victim to the nightlife of the metropolis; should they do so, they become the ruin of men through their sexual wiles and endanger the stability and safety of family life. By placing the good Maria in opposition with the robot Maria, Lang insinuates a natural role for women that has become polluted by modernity; balance and stability can only be achieved when women act on their natural impulses of love and compassion, exemplified by the act of rescuing children.

Richard McCormick traces women in Weimar film on a trajectory which he describes as moving “from Caligari to Dietrich,” a reference to Siegfried Kracauer’s analysis of Weimar film’s foreshadow of fascism in Germany. He tracks the “cinematic depiction of male fears with regard to women, traditional gender roles, and male sexual identity,” which he asserts “undergoes a significant change in Weimar.”83 He stylizes this transition as one “from vampire to vamp, or from feminized monster to ‘phallic woman.’”84 Metropolis provides an important milestone in

McCormick’s analysis as the first film where “the monster has become the woman.”85 The threat to masculine identity is no longer the feminized Cesare of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or the other-worldly object of female desire, Nosferatu; the monster is, if in appearance only, a woman. This is an important shift towards acknowledging the blame which directors like

Murnau, director of Nosferatu, explicitly placed on women for the war and, less directly, the subsequent instability of male identity.

83 McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity, 25. 84 McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity, 25. 85 McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity, 29.

1930 marked the release of Josef von Sternberg’s German film debut, The Blue Angel. As explored above, the film fits somewhat problematically into the canon of Weimar cinema; von

Sternberg, after all, was essentially an American filmmaker. Having emigrated to the United

States when he was a child, he learned to direct in Hollywood. The film’s inclusion could exacerbate the trend in film scholarship which warns against over-emphasizing the influence of

German émigrés on American cinema, pointing towards the permeability of American-German cultural influence. Indeed, right-wing critics within Germany abhorred what they saw as the growing Americanization of Germany under the Republic, and Peukert even goes so far as to describe the vamp imagery as a symptom of “the ‘American’ syndrome”86 in Weimar. However,

Claire Goll asserts the nature of American cinema is that, “in the good American film, any literary element is left out.”87 This is most certainly not the case with Blue Angel which drew on the literary genius of one of Germany’s foremost authors. The film is certainly symptomatic of not simply von Sternberg’s own vision, but was shaped and is in concert with the film conventions of German cinema and with Mann’s novel, reflecting German anxieties. Mann’s original impulse to write the story was inspired by the very sensationalism which made the New

Woman into an entity to fear. He explains that his inspiration occurred while at the theatre;

“During the intermission, a newspaper was sold in the theatre which reported from Berlin the story of a professor whose relations with a cabaret singer had caused him to commit a crime. I had barely finished reading the few lines when the figure of Professor Unrat, that of his seductress, and even the place of her activities, the Blue Angel, arose in my mind’s eye.”88 A man deprived of his agency by a woman from a nightclub, who, according to Mann, “looked as

86 Peukert, the Weimar Republic, 99. 87 Claire Goll, “American Cinema” in German Essays on Film, eds. Richard McCormick and Alison Guenther- Pal (New York : Continuum, 2004), 51. 88 Heinrich Mann, “The Blue Angel is shown to Me” in Authors on Film, ed Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 125.

35 she would have had to look in order to make an aging man forget all his principles,”89 and seduced into crime, played magically into the arising anxieties regarding gender norms in

Weimar.90

Lola Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich in the film, is the epitome of dangerous female sensuality and empowerment, and her long bare legs became the symbol of her Germanic exoticism when she emigrated to America. Siegfried Kracauer, in a rather scathing review of the film – it “has been excellently made and has only one fault; namely that it is really nothing at all”91 – gives the film the credit that “there is a pleasing harmony between Marlene Dietrich’s vocal organs and beautiful legs.”92 Tatar points to the centrality of Lola Lola, writing that

“Sternberg’s Blue Angel, tells another story of abject personal and social humiliation at the hands of a femme fatale,” confirming “the evidence that images of Lustmord figure as a defence against male fantasies about sexually seductive women.”93 Von Sternberg draws on the established treatment of male anxieties in Weimar, according to McCormick: “In it the same self-reflexive emphasis on seeing and being seen can be noted; in the film’s narrative, as in

Metropolis, the figure of the ‘monster’ lives on as a vamp. Unlike Metropolis, the vamp here is not a machine, but she is a character who can be compared to Dr. Caligari’s somnambulist

Cesare.”94 Blue Angel, according to McCormick, is the zenith of Weimar film discourse on male identity crisis. Lola Lola provides a more dynamic characterization of the vamp than the robot

Maria of Lang’s Metropolis, and while Lang’s use of the false Maria conflates issues of women’s newfound sexuality with perceived dangers of technological advancement, von Sternberg’s

89 Mann, “The Blue Angel,” 126. 90 Though the novel was published in 1905, this highlights perfectly the elements which, while brought into the canon of Weimar culture, in fact represent continuities throughout the twentieth century. 91 Siegfried Kracauer, “The Blue Angel,” in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 630. 92 Kracauer, “The Blue Angel,” 630. 93 Tatar, Lustmord, 177. 94 McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity, 30.

36 depiction is unambiguously a critique of the new femininity emerging in Weimar. Davidson lists

Blue Angel amongst “three thoroughly European motion pictures [which] have attained classical status in large part through the sensitivity and sophistication with which the theme of the

‘amoral woman’ is treated.”95 Von Sternberg’s vision, along with Dietrich’s rendition of this vision, depicts the female sexuality associated with the New Woman, in its emancipated and highly visible state. The New Woman is portrayed in Blue Angel as equivocally innocent and monstrous; she unwittingly destabilizes the traditional world of men, and is nonetheless fully responsible for her actions and their subversive consequences. We have a more sympathetic and well rounded vamp than in Metropolis, but the blame for emasculating the authority and respect of Prof. Rath nonetheless leads one to the conclusion that the New Woman is responsible for metaphorically castrating the once virile men of Germany. Both messages reflect the anxiety over the possible implications for a more public and empowered woman in Weimar society.

The last film to consider does not feature either the one-dimensional destructive vamp of Metropolis, or the empowered, sensual - and perhaps unwitting - rogue of Blue Angel. M provides a critique of modern Weimar women from an entirely different vantage point; that of the mother. Film critic Gabriele Tergit, scandalized by Lang’s willingness to delve into the subject matter, reminds readers and viewers that the film features a child murderer who was seemingly based on a figure snatched from the headlines of Weimar papers, that of Peter Kürten, sensationalized in the press as the Vampire of Düsseldorf, “who did not shrink from cannibalism”96 and “admitted to killing thirty-five people in Düsseldorf, almost all women and

95 David Davidson, “From Virgin to Dynamo: The ‘Amoral Woman’ in European Cinema,” Cinema Journal 21, No. 1 (1981), 31. 96 Gabriele Tergit, “Fritz Lang’s M: Filmed Sadism,” in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 632.

37 children.”97 While Lang insists “M was finished long before this mass murderer”98 he does allude to the influence of actual crimes, of which many in Weimar had been committed against women by men who Tatar characterizes in her study as sex murderers, on the mood of Lang’s first true noir, if not the story. “At the Berlin Scotland Yard,” Lang explains directly after denying Kürten as the inspiration for M, “I saw the result of many murders. One case I will never forget – a small shop where a woman was murdered, and the murderer cut her throat and the blood just dripped over the counter into an open sack of white flour. I will never forget that my whole life.”99 Lang would later openly own the role of newspapers and current events in his films:

“when I make a picture...especially if it is what’s usually called a crime picture...I want to have newsreel photography. Because I think every serious picture that depicts people today should be a kind of documentary of its time.”100 If such social seriousness was devoted to Lang’s depiction of crime, we could perhaps interpret Lang’s reluctance to acknowledge the influence of Kürten or similar killers on the genesis of M as a denial of the female victimhood that had become ubiquitous in Weimar.

Regardless of whether it was, in fact, ripped from the headlines, or simply inspired by the general climate of violence which pervaded Weimar, M’s almost-sympathetic depiction of the antagonist illustrates the relationship between the actual physical harming of women and the artistic representation of doing so, the “strange bond between murder and art”101 which

Tatar explores in her work. However, despite the female victims of Kürten and others, Lang focuses on the innocent child victims, and places the blame for their murder on their less-than-

97 Tatar, Lustmord, 41. 98 Fritz Lang, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age at the American Film Institute, ed. George Stevenson Jr. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2006), 69 99 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age, 69. 100 Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America (London: Studio Vista, 1967), 19. 101 Tatar, Lustmord, 6.

38 vigilant mothers. Similar to the mothers of Metropolis whose political action distracted them from their children, left to drown the underground city, Lang places less blame on the explicit villain – in Metropolis, Rotwang, in M, Beckert – than he does on the mothers’ of the victims (or near-victims, in Metropolis). Lang situates the mothers of his films in direct opposition with the murderer, as simultaneously victim – “when the child’s death is represented on screen by silences and empty spaces, the mother-victim screams in despair”102 – and as executioners – “it is the mothers above all who are implicated in wreaking vengeance on [the murderer]

Beckert.”103 By filling the spaces of both victim and prosecutors, responsibility seemingly falls on the mothers of Beckert’s victims. The film’s final moment features the grieving mothers, with

Frau Beckmann sobbing “This won’t bring back our children. We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children.”104 While the film deals with issues of justice and the nature of crime,

Lang himself asserted that “the film’s message is not the conviction of the murderer but the warning to all mothers, ‘You should keep better watch over your children.’”105 Lang displaces the agency of the male perpetrator, who, anguished by his own acts, exclaims “I can’t help myself! I have no control over this, this evil thing inside me...,”106 and instead Lang makes the women who invite and allow the crime to occur culpable; this is such a striking echo of the criticisms of women in relation to the war that, despite Lang’s own belief that M was distinct from his previous work, lingering resentment was undoubtedly at work in the creation of M. This disregard for male agency, justified by the social position of women who appear to be frivolously distracted by their changing gender roles and expectations, runs a clear parallel with

102 Tatar, Lustmord 157. 103 Tatar, Lustmord, 158. 104 M, directed by Fritz Lang (1931: Berlin, Vereinigte Star-Film) 105 Tatar, Lustmord, 169. 106 M, Lang.

39 the desire to place the blame for German defeat outside of the agency, and thus virility and masculinity, of male soldiers.

As evidenced by the preceding examples, German cinema was recoiling from the destabilizing of traditional gender roles, perpetuated and perpetrated by the New Woman, whether the cinematic villain take the form of seductress, vamp or inattentive mother. The examples of Metropolis, Blue Angel, and M do not exhaust the subject matter which characterizes this filmic condemnation of women, as the works of McCormick and Tatar illustrate. Murnau’s candid antagonism towards women after the war was made manifest in not only Nosferatu but his 1924 film The Last Laugh, his penultimate German film before emigrating to Hollywood. Murnau, Lang and von Sternberg were amongst the many members of Weimar’s cultural elite who found themselves settled in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills by 1935. The following chapter will consider how the members of Germany’s film industry, responsible for such a distinct film style and characterization of women, found themselves in Hollywood and the obstacles that they would encounter in the highly commercialized, audience-driven American film industry.

Chapter III: the emigration

Many of the artists responsible for giving form to this distinct film culture with its open, and at times (if not always) misogynistic, exploration of gender anxieties found themselves leaving

Weimar not long after they had shaped its cultural legacy. Jelavich, through an analysis of the various medium manifestations of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, advances the thesis that “Weimar’s avant-garde culture was largely defunct by the end of 1931.”107 Jelavich looks to the increasing censorship of Weimar media – in print, radio and film – which stifled the minds of the artistic community and made the artistry and intellectualism associated with early

Weimar film nearly impossible by the end of the 1920s. However, in his analysis, Jelavich deals with the film industry in a vacuum, limiting his scope to the ways in which the industry smothered its unique cultural production from within; he does not consider that while the censorship board drove intellectuals out of Weimar’s film industry, Hollywood was simultaneously trying to induce them out of Germany. Weimar film culture was defunct by 1931, but internal censorship is not the end of the story: the culture did not simply die, it fled.

It is important to first address what has become a somewhat ambiguous heading; that is, the Weimar émigré. Many of these émigrés are not in fact German: Salka Viertel was Polish,

Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Josef von Sternberg were Austrian, and the last, like émigré Douglas

Sirk, lived most of his life, neither in Austria nor Germany, but in an altogether different country

(the United States and Denmark, respectively). These émigrés are often clumped together without any acknowledgement of their geo-political differences and the ways in which Austrian,

American or Danish upbringings contributed to distinct artistic styles; there are linguistic and

107 Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, xi.

41 cultural distinctions that exist between these countries which ought not to be ignored. However, another element of Weimar film was precisely this ad hoc conglomeration of central Europeans in Berlin. Lee Congdon traces the migration of the many Hungarian intellectuals – Communists, avant-gardistes, and liberals – who made their way from Hungary to Austria and Germany after the Hungarian revolutions of 1918-1919; the historian even goes as far to say “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that exiled Hungarians created Weimar culture.”108 While I would characterize Congdon’s exaggeration as more than slight, he accurately points to the internationalism that was emblematic of Weimar culture. Kosta characterizes Berlin as “a gathering point for talents across Europe.”109 Many of these double émigrés, during their time in

Weimar, cultivated an intellectualism in Germany that transcended nationalism. Hungarian

Communist writer Béla Balázs – who would find himself integrated into the Austrian film milieu alongside Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz and eventually become one of the foremost film critics in Berlin – would write, “it is true...that I proclaimed the synthesis of the nations, the

European man...It is true that I always felt my deepest metaphysical roots to be beyond every race and nation,”110 though he would find this philosophy hard to reconcile with the loneliness of exile. That many of the émigrés who came to Germany were leftists, and often championed a sense humanity across the boundaries of nationality, lent Weimar a philosophy consistent with the fluidity of its cultural elites’ various backgrounds.

What is important for our purposes is not that Lang or Viertel were or were not

Germans by birth, or even that any given émigré left Germany directly for Hollywood, as most did not. The émigrés are unified in this analysis because of their contributions to and

108 Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919-1993 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), xi. 109 Barbara Kosta, Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 3. 110 Congdon, Exile and Social Thought, 101.

42 proliferation of the uniquely Weimar culture discussed in the previous chapters. Their nationality is, for our purposes, secondary to their place in a distinct cultural pantheon, characterized by cosmopolitanism and internationalism. This is why “Weimar émigrés” would be a more apt description for the artists considered in this text than “German émigrés,” or even

“Jewish émigrés,” as many historians will overemphasize. The Viertels, the Manns, Murnau,

Lang, Brecht: they all contributed to the legacy of Weimar, regardless of origin, and oftentimes live on in academia through their association with Weimar, rather than as a prominent Polish screenwriter or Austrian director. This is not to deny their distinct backgrounds, but to explain why they have been, and will likely continue to be, so uniformly treated.

While I contend that Jelavich does not go far enough in his exploration of the causes of

Weimar culture’s demise, his attention to the increasing censorship in Weimar does play a part in some émigrés’ decision to leave. While the Weimar constitution explicitly forbade censorship of the theatre and cinema, “many representatives were concerned about film in particular: an affordable mass medium, it was seen by, and could easily influence, millions of citizens, especially those of the lower classes.” Because of this, article 118 addressing censorship of theatres left open a loophole which made censorship possible: “censorship will not be exercised, but in exceptional measures can be imposed by law on film,”111 it reads. Film was the only medium which took upon itself the task of censorship, in anticipation of a Nazi government, more conservative audiences, and more conservative ownership. Alfred Hugenberg saved UFA, the largest German film studio, from bankruptcy in 1928, and brought with him a distinct right- wing view: Hugenberg was an ardent German nationalist and an occasional Nazi ally.112 This shift in Weimar’s major film studio, accompanying the changing political climate – not simply the

111 Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 127-128. 112 McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar, 15.

43 activism of the Nazis, but the increasingly evident failure of the revolution – meant that many artists in the film industry found their options more limited than ever before. As Jelavich observes, “directors and screenwriters who desired to create serious films concerning sexuality, politics, and social issues had to develop creative ways of working around the constraints of the censorship code at the same time that they protested its very existence.”113 The censors were certainly a detriment to directors and producers interested in making films with serious social commentary. Of his last film released in Germany, M, Fritz Lang recalls:

Thea von Harbou and I sat for two hours in front of the room where the censors were looking at the film. We didn’t have anything to be ashamed, and yet you look there like a schoolboy worrying if you got a good note or not. Finally they came out and they said, ‘Mr Lang, this film has practically everything about which we disagree and which we cannot accept, but it is done with such integrity that we don’t want to make any cuts.114

Lang’s experience with M was certainly the exception to the rule - even Lang described the occurrence as “very funny”115 – and it still illustrates the stressful nature of trying to produce stimulating, controversial films in the late 20s and early 30s of Weimar. When Hollywood began eventually to approach the financially insecure and artistically frustrated filmmakers, they would find the contracts offered to them in America hard to resist.

An aspect of the emigration which is often neglected by historians who seek to paint a unified portrait of the émigrés as antifascist refugees is the fact that the emigration to

Hollywood preceded Hitler’s rise to power. Though he does not discuss the implication of censorship for the cultural emigration from Weimar, Jelavich’s claim that Weimar culture had waned by 1931 confronts another general misconception about the causal role of the Nazis’ in the emigration of Weimar artists to America. Anthony Heilbut, using a rather narrow selection of

113 Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 142. 114 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 70. 115 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 70.

émigré directors, contends that “the important fact of their careers was that Hitler had kicked them halfway across the world, from Unter den Linden to Hollywood Boulevard.”116 Heilbut uses political exile as the unifying theme in the American films of Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Otto

Preminger and Douglas Sirk, emphasizing their shared “discontent” regarding their circumstances. There is no doubt of the effect of the Nazi takeover upon the fate of scores of

German intellectuals who were forced to escape Germany; some of the most often cited examples include Heinrich and Nelly Mann, who had to escape through the Pyrenees on foot - a similar exodus to that which claimed the life of philosopher Walter Benjamin - and Bertolt

Brecht and his family, who fled from Germany to Denmark, to Norway, and finally to Finland where their boat for America departed just as the Wehrmacht marched into Russia.117 These dramatic cases, however, characterize only the last of three waves of emigration of Weimar filmmakers to America during the interwar years. The characterization of Heilbut’s, along with other, more popular accounts of émigré filmmakers, collapses these distinct waves of emigration from Weimar and neglects the experience of many of the Hollywood émigrés.

The initial wave of émigrés arrived in Hollywood in the late 20s, long before National

Socialism could be taken as a serious threat. It is difficult to imagine a period when Hollywood did not rule the global film industry, yet UFA and the French studios had maintained a much stronger hold over the European market. Economic protectionism, which “stipulated that for every German feature film distributed, one foreign film could be imported,”118 limited the number of Hollywood films available in Germany. In addition, the advancements in sound technology and the rising popularity of talking pictures starting in 1930 made it even more difficult for English-language films from America to gross large profits overseas. European

116 Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 230. 117 Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 249 and 258. 118 Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 150.

45 audiences enthralled with the novelty of sound wanted to hear voices speaking their own languages. As a result, “by 1927, 243 German feature films faced only 190 American works in domestic cinemas,”119 and, eventually, absolute import quotas were imposed. Aware of their limited opportunities to earn profit, American studios began looking to recruiting talent from across the Atlantic in an attempt to increase their appeal to European markets.

The émigrés of this particular wave can be best characterized as having been lured away from Germany, though this may be too forgiving of the Hollywood tactics, which Kosta describes as more akin to plundering.120 Hollywood sought to better its offerings by importing European talent, extending contracts to some of the most renowned stage and film directors. As sound technology grew increasingly popular, Hollywood found itself unable to compete in Europe against films starring native speakers, so studios began hiring European actors and directors to recreate foreign-language versions of their American films and regain a foothold in the

European market that had been lost with the rise of the talkies.121 Films like The Trial of Mary

Dugan (1929), The Sacred Flame (1929), Big House (1930), and Anna Christie(1930) would be filmed with English and German speaking casts.122 This would mean that bilingual actors who either had unaffected accents or actors whose accents increased their appeal in America, like

Marlene Dietrich, would become particularly desired by Hollywood studios. Able to offer more money, America set to gather some of the most promising of Weimar’s filmmakers. This was the case for Berthold Viertel, then a stage director in Berlin; while on vacation, his wife Salka received a telegram – “Would you go for three months to America? Have offer from Fox to write

119 Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 151. 120 Kosta, Willing Seduction, 2 121 Saverio Giovacchini, “The Joys of Paradise,” in the Dispossessed: the Anatomy of Exile, ed. Peter Isaac Rose (United States of America: University of Massachusets Press, 2004), 282. 122 Hans Kafka, “What Our Immigration Did for Hollywood, and Vice Versa,” New German Critique no. 89 (2003), 186.

46 and direct films”123 – which led the family to America, where three months became three years, and then became home. Salka Viertel felt by no means forced out of Germany by political, economic, or creative restraints; in her autobiography she writes: “although I was hoping to play in Berlin, the desire to go to America was greater and I cabled yes.”124 Berthold shared his wife’s enthusiasm, and in his reply, wrote:

Salka, they say Hollywood is a paradise! We will have a bungalow. They have engaged me as a writer but in the course of time I am to direct, which will mean a financial increase and a separate agreement. I will work at home and will have more time to be with you and the children. I am sure it will be wonderful for them!125

The Viertels were not the only Weimar émigrés tempted by, rather than forced to, Hollywood.

Kosta explains how “[Marlene] Dietrich became another one of Hollywood’s coups, in a fairly long list of German film talent recruited during the 1920s.” 126 To this list we can add Murnau,

Ernst Lubitsch, and Emil Jannings, Dietrich’s co-star as the cuckold professor Rath in Blue Angel, whose early emigration resulted in his being the first recipient of an Academy Award for Best

Actor in 1929.127 While many of these émigrés did start to leave Weimar just as the film industry began to increasingly employ censorship, they were simultaneously being offered more appealing contracts in America. Hollywood studios had not suffered as Germany had from the costs of reparations and financial stress of hyperinflation, and therefore there was simply more money to be put into films and those behind them. American studios had the means and incentive to attract directors, writers and actors, and paired with the increasing limitations in

123 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 122. 124 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 122. 125 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 123. 126 Kosta, Willing Seduction, 2. 127 Emil Jannings was the first recipient of an Academy Award for Best Actor, but also the first recipient of any of the Academy Awards, as a trip to Europe kept him from attending the inaugural ceremony, and the committee consented to give him his award early.

47 their home studios, this first wave of Weimar film immigration is incompatible with the trope of the discontented refugee.

Members of the second and third waves of emigration are those which most appropriately don the mantle of exiles. The second wave is best characterized as being motivated by anxiety and foresight, while the third left due to force. With a focus on Jewish emigration which for the most part excludes many of the emigres of the first wave, Vincent

Brook writes about two waves of Jewish emigration during the 1930s (though not necessarily exclusively Jewish, for our purposes). “The first,” Brook explains, was “spurred by the Nazis’ rise to power,” and notably included Lang, Otto Preminger, and Billy Wilder,128 while the final wave was driven out by force at the outbreak of the war. These were the most reluctant émigrés,

Brecht and Heinrich Mann for instance, who would come to best fit the image of the

“discontented Europeans” which Heilbut portrays. While Salka Viertel, initially at least, delighted over the orange blossoms and her tanned children, Brecht famously wrote:

On thinking about Hell, I gather My brother Shelley found it to be a place Much like the city of London. I Who live in Los Angeles and not in London Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be Still more like Los Angeles.129

The characterization of Weimar émigrés as simply victims of the Third Reich, either as political actors or persecuted Jews, whose films warn against the pervasiveness of fascism and the different forms it can take, is, however, only accurate when applied to the second and third waves of emigration.

128 Brook, Driven to Darkness, 79. 129 Philip Thomas, “Brecht’s Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, eds. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 215.

It is important not to disregard the members of initial wave of immigration, as their experiences can completely change the tone surrounding their so-called exile. The Viertels,

Lubitsch, Jannings and Murnau were setting the foundation for the “New Weimar” – as the

émigré community in Hollywood was teasingly called. These émigrés were there by choice: they were professionals who actively sought to revitalize their careers in Hollywood, and thus establish their lives there. And while many members of this first wave did not find the fortune or artistic freedom they had hoped for, neither can they be characterized as political refugees.

These were not directors, writers and actors who were working out of necessity, or making the best of bad situations, as was perhaps the case for some of the later émigrés; these individuals chose to change their career paths due to the impressive wages and technological superiority that Hollywood offered.

We must, furthermore, give credence to these early émigrés because of their role in expanding the ranks of “Weimar on the Pacific.” These early émigrés did not only set the foundation of a European community that welcomed and appealed to later expatriates. Thanks to efforts of individuals like Viertel and Lang, whether through private or public means, such as the European Film Fund, these established Weimar immigrants were responsible for the safe transport and visa acquisition of the true political exiles. Lang, along with Martha Feuchtwanger and Lille Latte, collected money to have Brecht brought over, and the director was responsible for having Brecht hired on, albeit briefly,130 as a co-writer on Hangmen Also Die! The safe transport and subsequent careers of the later exiles were dependent on the support from the large group of talented Europeans already gathered in LA; to neglect the professional

130 There is not much agreement between Brecht’s journals and Lang’s interviews about the nature of Brecht’s dismissal from the film, though according to Lang’s account, Brecht was unable to tactfully negotiate the terms of his contract (producer Arnold Pressburger accused Brecht of blackmail when Brecht pressed for film credit) Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 71.

49 contributions of the first wave – the films of Dietrich, Murnau, Jannings and Berthold and Salka

Viertel – is to ignore the importance of this support. Ignoring the work of the early émigrés is tantamount to ignoring the entire oeuvre of Weimar émigrés as a community.

Ironically, the financial promise of Hollywood, which created such an appeal to the directors who deliberately chose to work there, became the stumbling block of many. The

American studios had not experienced the financial crises Weimar had, and it is often remarked that the film industry seemed to be somehow immune to the depredation of the Depression; the result was that the available salaries were very tempting. Even Brecht, a truly discontented exile, when working on the ill-fated Hangmen Also Die!, had asked Lang, “Do you think three thousand dollars is too much *to ask for+?” and was very happy when Lang returned from the producers with an offer of seventy five thousand dollars.131 Palmier draws attention to the somewhat illusory draw of Hollywood wealth; “the film industry, above all, let them hope that they might glean a few crumbs from the fabulous wealth to be found there. They were tempted therefore to settle on the periphery of this mirage city.”132 And a mirage it would prove to be for many, as the hierarchy of the studios meant “they enjoyed a monopoly on the resulting revenues *of their films+. Stars, directors, writers, and other talent did not share in it:”133 the wealth that trickled down to the émigrés, regardless of how welcome and generous it may have seemed, was only a fraction of what went towards Hollywood moguls like Louis B Mayer and

Samuel Goldwyn. Furthermore, American film culture and this industry hierarchy made very different demands of the émigrés than those they had been accustomed to in Weimar, and

131 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 70-71. 132 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 511 133 Edward Jay Epstein, The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood (New York: Random House, 2006), 6.

50 much has been made of the incompatibility of the European directors with the markedly more capital driven American film industry.

The commercial nature of American film has been rightly identified as a double-edged sword by historians. In fairness, Brook writes of Fritz Lang, “the material resources and professional expertise afforded by the Dream Factory...offered considerable creative benefits.”134 Lang was, however, one of the very few exceptions to the struggle of the American system. Given the extremely high number of films each studio was producing per year, not every director or writer had large budgets at their disposals; often the émigrés were left to work with

B-movie budgets in order to prove themselves before being given more resources. Lang was perhaps the most established director to come to Hollywood during those years, and as such, had a much easier time than his fellow émigrés at securing both funds and the studio’s confidence. Furthermore, the studios’ drive for capital resulted in a much more producer- dominated industry, with more industrial working conditions. Frank Capra would write to The

New York Times in 1939 having captured perfectly the domineering place of producers in the productions of films. Capra’s letter estimated that “about six producers today pass on about 90 percent of the scripts and edit about 90 percent of the pictures:”135 it was the producers who chose the stories and it was they who had final say over the product that would be shown in theatres. This anonymous factory-style approach to filmmaking comes out particularly clearly in

Otto Friedrich’s description of the work Billy Wilder eventually found, after initial struggles; “he found a job at Paramount, at $250 a week, as a foot soldier in the studio’s army of 100-odd contract writers. They were required to turn in at least eleven pages of copy every Thursday. It

134 Brook, Driven to Darkness, 83. 135 Epstein, The Big Picture, 7.

51 was more or less assumed that nobody could write a movie script by himself.”136 Palmier confirms this account, noting the particularly adverse conditions which shaped the writers who had previously enjoyed authority over their work and the independence to execute it at their leisure and will:

Working conditions were disastrous in every way for these screen writers, who were underpaid and despised. Not only did they abandon any personal originality, and work up the inept stories retained by tyrannical producers – Daryl Zanuck is the best-known example – on an assembly-line basis, but most of their scripts were never filmed.137

The limits on creativity manifested themselves in almost laughable ways, such as in the case of

Heinrich Mann, who “had to be at his office from 10 am to 1 pm, though he did not actually do any work there.”138 Writers often found themselves writing, not because of a story they wanted to tell or a project they were enthusiastic about, but because writing was their job.

This atmosphere was in stark contrast with the more artistic atmosphere cultivated in

Weimar, where the director had nearly unbridled license to do as he saw necessary. The “elite culture, nourished by a broad classical and historical tradition, and addressed to a public that was relatively cultivated and attentive to all aesthetic innovations” that the artists has enjoyed in Weimar was replaced by one where films “had no intention of challenging society or raising public awareness...; the intention was to serve existing tastes. They were addressed to the masses, aiming to satisfy the desires, needs and dreams of the greatest number, and paid no attention to an elite audience.”139 Heilbut notes that “after all their demonstrations of aesthetic

136 Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: a Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 44. 137 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 512. 138 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 513. 139 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 500-501

52 mastery, the émigrés continued to find themselves treated as mere employees.”140 Brook confirms the limitation of the Hollywood studio hierarchy:

While the crassness of *Hollywood’s+ commercialism *has+ been overexaggerated, what remains uncontestable (sic) is that the German film industry, on the whole, favoured a more interactive process than did the U.S. industry, and that Weimar directors generally enjoyed more creative freedom and control than their producer-dominated Hollywood counterparts.141

That this structure constrained artistic control has been admitted by even some of the most successful émigrés: when asked why he made the transition from screen writing to direction,

Billy Wilder confessed, “I got very impatient with directors, good directors but people who did not have the proper respect for the script. I was just very incensed... you know, once you’ve finished your script, they grab it and rewrite it...I just wanted to have that script on the screen the way we wrote it.”142 Salka Viertel similarly saw many of the scripts she developed go unproduced due to lack of funds or interest. Oftentimes, “the box office requirements inhibited the treatment of ambitious material,”143 and if a script or film did not seem like it would resonate with viewers, it got scrapped. Capital and profit reigned supreme, with the result that

“in the very conception of a work, far more importance was paid to the consumer than to the creative artist.”144 The producers and heads of the studios were not motivated by artistic vision, but by profits. Producer Lewis Selznick is quoted as announcing that “less brains are necessary in the motion picture industry than in any other.”145 A telling example is that of Louis B. Mayer, who, if not actually illiterate, was known for not reading “scripts or scenarios, much less books, so when some story had to be officially considered, it was acted out for him.”146 Salka Viertel, in

140 Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 239. 141 Brook, Driven to Darkness, 83. 142 Wilder, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 315-316. 143 Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 239. 144 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 501. 145 Friedrich, City of Nets, 15. 146 Friedrich, City of Nets, 16.

53 a letter to George Cukor, made the rather disparaging remark that her screenplay had “been only written for you, Greta and the naughty Marcel because I am sure *Garbo’s agent, Peter+

Cusick can’t read.”147 Profits, not art, meant that crass businessmen like Selznick and Mayer made the final decisions regarding the painstakingly crafted scripts and films of the highly creative émigré artists.

It is important to keep in mind that the émigrés were not only alienated from the

Hollywood system, but the entire language within which it operated. Almost all of the émigrés spoke of their frustration with being unable to express themselves as articulately as they could in their mother tongues. Salka Viertel remembered Berthold’s struggle with both English and the complacent illiteracy of the producers he worked for: “for a man so erudite and creative in his own language, it was torture to confine himself to the primitive vocabulary of Mr Wurtzel, and escaping to the men’s room to read Kant and Kierkegaard was small relief.”148 This linguistic barrier became an insurmountable obstacle to success for some actors and writers, for whom a grasp of English was imperative. “Very few actors could express themselves in English without and accent,” writes Palmier, which may have been fine for Dietrich or Garbo, whose accents became part of their allure, but many, including Emil Jannings, “were never able to find roles comparable with those they had played in UFA films.”149 The same was true for some of

Weimar’s most preeminent writers – Heinrich Mann, Alfred Döblin, Alfred Polgar, Walter

Mehring, to name a few – who, like Wilder upon his arrival at Columbia, had trouble expressing themselves in English.150 Wilder would speak in film dialogue, Lang would listen incessantly to the radio and Salka Viertel became irritated that their “American friends protested indignantly,

147 Letter from Salka Viertel to George Cukor, June 18 1948, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, George Cukor Collection, file # 575. 148 Viertel 143 149 Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 518 150 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 512.

54 when I attempted to speak correctly, ‘Oh for heaven’s sakes don’t lose that charming accent,’ or

‘It doesn’t matter that you don’t say it right, it sounds cute.’”151 Viertel would interpret this

American “kindness towards foreigners *as+ one of the reasons for their own bad diction and lazy speech.”152 The lack of artistry or articulation in the American film industry was not only disdainful for the more intellectual pursuits of the Weimar émigrés, it also put may of them at a very serious professional disadvantage.

In another ironic twist, while censorship in Germany played a role in driving out the

émigrés, the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930, “the founding document of Hollywood censorship,”153 meant facing studio-imposed censorship in a whole other arena than that they had faced in Germany. While the German censorship had more to do with policing subversive political messages which had the potential to incite public protest, the

MPPC, or the Hays code as would be called, after founder William H. Hays, had a “particular emphasis on morality and obedience to the law.” This meant that when Paramount tried to rerelease Blue Angel in the US, Joseph I. Breen of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, responsible for upholding the Code, advised John Hammell of Paramount to

“withdraw this picture. It is a sordid story based on illicit sex relationship between two leading characters, and contains a great deal of offensive suggestiveness in its portrayal throughout.”154

The Massachusetts Board of Censors went so far as demanding the deletions of “all scenes showing Lola’s thighs,”155 which, of course, had been one of the most appealing element of the film. Those legs were largely responsible for Marlene Dietrich’s rise to fame, and so it would

151 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 140. 152 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 140. 153 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 41. 154 Letter to John Hammell from Joseph I. Breen, Oct. 8 1935, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margarte Herrick Library, Blue Angel Collection. 155 Letter to B.P. Schulberg from Massachusets Board of Censors, December 30, 1930, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margarte Herrick Library, Blue Angel Collection.

55 seem the censors had missed the point.156 While many historians will rightly assert that the censorship demands in Hollywood were still less stringent than the filmmakers would have found under the Third Reich, in exchange they would have to contend with the unique moral sensibilities of American society which the Hays Code imposed and enforced.

One of the ways the commercial nature of the American studios converged with this necessity of understanding American society can be seen with the marketing of films. Film as a novelty worth seeing in and of itself had long worn off, and the 1930s saw the advent of serious marketing attempts on the part of studios. This meant that it became increasingly crucial to understand the demographic and socio-economic composition of the film-going public, and studios came to the conclusion that women were their primary audience. The swiftly developing

American consumer culture as a whole led to the realization that “the new consumer economy needed a key participant for its promotion of style value to be effective: the American housewife, who had ‘billions to spend – the greatest surplus money value ever given to woman to spend in all history.’”157 Berry explains how by the 1930s, “retail commodities had made women’s domestic provision unnecessary, and the chore of manufacturing provisions...was replaced by shopping for them.”158 This led to the realization that it was women who were spending money on commercial goods, and therefore women who should be marketed to: indeed, “women’s responsibility for household purchases made them highly visible representatives of the new economy,”159 instilling women with economic power never before recognized. This fact was soon exploited; in 1929, Christine Frederick would publish Selling Mrs.

Consumer, a guide to marketing to housewives. Film studios soon sought to tap this new market,

156 Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 144. 157 Berry, Screen Style, 4. 158 Berry, Screen Style, 4. 159 Berry, Screen Style, 4.

56 often doing cross-promotions with fashion houses or cosmetic lines. They did this by making their female film stars into fashion and style icons, or even “types,” which different “types” of women could refer back to when trying to choose the right eye shadow or dress; women had to decide if they were the athletic, boyish, sophisticated, ingénue or romantic type, each one embodied by a specific actress (Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Kay Francis, Janet Gaynor and Marlene Dietrich, respectively, according to one fashion guide).160 Paul McDonald confirms that during the 30s, “with star-related promotions for cosmetics and toiletries, the Hollywood showcase addressed the market in ways that perceived women as the primary category of consumer.”161 While it is important to understand that women did make up part of Weimar film audiences as well, and that fact has been the focus of many Weimar film studies, Hollywood began to actively cater their films towards women in a way UFA had not. For instance, understanding that films needed to be sold primarily to women, the Hollywood studios began to promote their female stars on an unprecedented scale. According to Berry, “*t+he number of high-budget films ‘carried’ by female stars (who often earned more than their male co-stars) was considerable in the 1930s.”162 By way of example, it is interesting to note that Paul

McDonald’s survey of the Hollywood star system of the 1930s highlights Greta Garbo, Marie

Dressler, Judy Garland, Bette Davis and Shirley Temple, with Mickey Rooney as the only male case study featured. In another case, Adrienne L. McLean’s anthology dedicated to film stars of the 1930s similarly features eleven essays dealing with twenty different celebrities: of the eleven essays, only two are wholly dedicated to male stars, while fifteen of the twenty stars covered were actresses. This centrality of the female star was yet another adjustment to which

Weimar émigrés would have to adjust. Even Marlene Dietrich, without doubt the most

160 Berry, Screen Style, 8. 161 Paul McDonald, The Star System (New York: Wallflower Press, 2000), 54. 162 Sarah Berry, Screen Style, xvi.

57 renowned Weimar actress, had been billed secondarily to Emil Jannings in Blue Angel, and never really found international prominence until after she had launched her Hollywood career.

With a new industry construct, a new set of moral standards to adhere to, and an emphasis placed on female audiences and starring roles for actresses, the émigrés found many adjustments were necessary in order to succeed in Hollywood. That some flourished while others fell into anonymity has been well documented. However, the social cohesion which arose in Hollywood amongst the émigrés became a means of combating these obstacles. The following chapter will look at the rise of the reincarnation of the Weimar salon as both a personal and professional community which aimed to promote the careers of exiles.

Chapter IV: the salon and success

Finding themselves as linguistic and cultural outsiders in Hollywood, the Weimar émigrés naturally began to come together to reflect on the state of the homeland they left and on the new landscape they found themselves a part of. However, most of the émigrés did not end up in

Hollywood by coincidence alone: they were, by and large, linked by an industry. There were, after all, many exiles from across Europe who fled to America and simply stayed in New York to establish themselves. Indeed, “in New York were many outstanding art schools and concert halls, the best foreign-language publications, and the largest number of publishing houses, equipped to handle many languages or to patch up the lamest English,”163 which is why one would find the highest concentration of European-born intellectuals – artists, psychoanalysts, physicists, writers and even stage directors – in New York.164 However, if most of the émigrés settled in New York, it is also true that the density of émigrés was “second highest on the West

Coast,”165 and these were mostly émigrés who had worked in film, or were intrigued by the possibilities of adapting their art to the silver screen. Salka Viertel was responsible for establishing a salon of sorts in the living room of her Santa Monica home, which served as a social rallying point for many of the Weimar émigrés now in Los Angeles.166 What eventually

163 Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 95. 164 Fermi will also point to the opportunities, if not for directors or actors, then to writers and other intellectuals, in Turkey, which was being aggressively westernized by Atatürk, and whose government “looked favourably upon the possibility of hiring some of the eminent German scholars made suddenly available by Hitler’s policies” during the early 30s. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 66. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 222. 165 Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 96. 166 Vincent Brook speaks of other such gatherings hosted by Alma Mahler, Marta Feuchwanger and Nelly Mann, and Fred Lawrence Guiles acknowledges salons hosted by Marion Davies, Samuel Goldwyn and Anita Loos. In the émigré circle, however, proper prominence is given to Viertel’s salon.

59 arose was an informal but professional network and a means of coping with the alien working conditions of the American studios. An array of careers from within the industry was represented within the salon setting: screenplay writers, directors, actors, composers, technicians, producers would all come together on Sunday afternoons at the Viertels’ home.

Given the obstacles to professional success that faced the émigrés, many of the more successful individuals began to use their connections to aid the careers of their fellow expatriates.

Throughout the 1940s the media would resound with accusations fed to them by the representatives of HUAC, blaming the émigré community for furthering the careers of immigrants to the detriment of Americans in the industry.167 These accusations illustrate more about the anti-immigrant sentiments that began rising near the end of the 1930s and throughout the 1940s than it does any actual real danger of recent Europeans imports dominating the film industry and boxing out American artists. The salon proved less useful as a springboard to renown and success in America than it was an aid to simple financial survival.

When Salka Viertel first came to Hollywood in 1928, it was to accompany her husband,

Berlin stage director Berthold Viertel, who had been courted by Fox. Previously a vigorously employed actress, Salka found that much of her time in California was now spent at luncheons and parties, and she came to the quick realization that “all those who had been some time in

Hollywood seemed starved for new faces and...irritated with the old.”168 Viertel began cultivating a contingent of friends and acquaintances who would spend Sunday afternoons at her home, creating a much more intellectually elevated gathering point for the newly arrived (as well as the already established) than had welcomed her: Fred Lawrence Guiles characterize her

Brook, Driven to Darkness, 80. Fred Lawrence Guiles, Hanging on in Paradise (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975), 17. 167 John Joseph Gladchuck, Hollywood and Anticommunism: HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 1935-1950, (New York: Routledge, 2007), 74. 168 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 133.

60 gatherings as “more interesting than glamorous.”169 How the eventually famous salon of 165

Mabery Road came was established is not entirely clear; Viertel never personally deemed it a

“salon” – indeed, when asked about it, her son Peter said “it wasn’t really a ‘salon,’...She liked to cook for the people she admired and gave tea parties on Sundays, and that was about all there was to it.”170 Nor did she appear to make any conscious or calculating attempt to surround herself with particularly bright and cultured minds, though the same could not be said of other such hostesses.171 In a typically modest manner, of the salon’s origin she simply wrote, “contrary to predictions, moving to Santa Monica did not impair our social life. On the contrary, our

Sunday afternoons became very popular.”172 A European import itself – one which ironically characterized even pre-Wilhelmine Germany, not Weimar, nearly disappearing altogether after

1914173 – a salon with some of the most respected minds in music, literature, stage and screen met on Sunday afternoons overlooking the Santa Monica pier. While the Viertels’ only aim appeared to be to provide companionship and camaraderie amongst the émigrés, the salon grew to become a professional vehicle as well as a way to connect émigrés in a social setting.174

While many scholars, such as Heilbut and Brook, highlight the experiences of the

émigrés directors –Otto Preminger, Lubitsch, Lang, and Wilder, amongst others – who were believed to have made the most significant impact on American film while undergoing the most drastic change in professional roles, émigrés permeated the entire film structure. Alongside the directors were many writers, such as Wilder, who would go on to make his debut as a director

169 Guiles, Hanging on in Paradise, 17. 170 Peter Viertel, Dangerous Friends: At Large with Huston and Hemingway in the Fifties (New York: N.A. Talese, 1992), 11. 171 Screenwriter Anita Loos, who also had a salon in Hollywood, was derided by Dorothy Parker, who said the hostess “was all out to improve herself.” Guiles, Hanging on in Paradise, 18. 172 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 139. 173 Brook, Driven to Darkness, 80. 174 One should note that this salon was not exclusively attended by émigrés – Charlie Chaplin and Upton Sinclair visited the Viertels, for instance – but they were the prominent majority.

61 while in Hollywood, as well as Salka Viertel, and even authors as acclaimed in Europe as Alfred

Döblin, Heinrich Mann and Brecht. Furthermore, composers from Weimar, including the notable Erich Wolfgang Korngold, found themselves resetting the foundations of the Hollywood studios with a European talent base. Saverio Giovacchini even recounts the experiences of refugee technicians, such as cameraman Eugene Schuftan, whose exclusion from the unions175 often made them particularly dependent on the generosity of friends to find work.176 This array of professions that came to be represented at the Viertel salon meant that professional networking became ubiquitous. Giovacchini captures the solidarity that would come to characterize Weimar on the Pacific: “In 1936, when Otto Klemperer, the director of the Los

Angeles Philharmonic, recommended Frederick Kolm, a German actor, to Fritz Lang, Lang recommended Kolm to Ernst Lubitsch and to the Hollywood refugee producers Henry Blanke,

Joseph Pasternak, and Gregor Rabinovitch.”177 Already at a disadvantage in their new professional arenas, many of the émigrés did what they could to ensure projects and positions for their fellow expatriates.

Obtaining employment for fellow émigrés occasionally took on a more formalized nature, with, for instance, the founding of the European Film Fund by Liesl Frank and Charlotte

Dieterle, wives of studio émigrés Bruno Frank and William Dieterle. The EFF gave financial aid to the refugees and used connections to find them jobs and would become particularly generous in

175 Though Giovacchini does not explain why exactly the unions excluded émigré technicians, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees was only International insofar as it represented members in both Canada and the United States. This union, which would have represented Schuftan, was notoriously corrupt during the 1930s, popularly believed to be controlled by a Chicago crime syndicate. The union’s corruption paired with its obligation to American and Canadian technicians alone may, in part, explain their resistance to accept the European émigré technicians. For more on the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, see Denise Hartsough, “Crime Pays: The Studios’ Labour Deals in the 1930s,” in The Studio System, ed. Janet Staiger (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 176 Giovacchini, “The Joys of Paradise,” 290. 177 Giovacchini , “The Joys of Paradise,”290.

62 providing affidavits after the war broke out.178 The expectation of the EFF was that, through regular donations by working émigrés, the beneficiaries would be given financial aid until finding gainful employment, at which point they would begin to return the money and, eventually, make their own contributions to the fund.

It is hard, however, to distinguish the efforts of the EFF from the more informal networking of the salons. Donations to the EFF could be made blind, going to any refugee, or earmarked for a specific exile, as was the case with Brecht and his family, who benefitted from the personal fundraising efforts of Lang and others.179 While Lang credits the EFF with bringing

Brecht over, it was his personal efforts which led to Brecht being brought on as a co-writer for

Hangmen Also Die!180 Salka Viertel, who worked actively within the EFF finding all sorts of work for exiles, would herself earn a place of professional prominence within the studios thanks to her personal relationship with Greta Garbo; her scripts were almost exclusively written with the star in mind, making Viertel into a “Garbo expert,” creating projects which appealed to Garbo, ensuring the star power of the Swedish actress. Similarly, former UFA director Max Ophüls’ first job in Hollywood was courtesy of Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk’s from Creative Director-turned- director Edgar Ulmer and Billy Wilder first wrote for director Joe May, born in Austria as Julius

Otto Mandl.181 Douglas Sirk, in turn, hired the cameraman Shuftan.182 In Casablanca (1942), a film which takes place against a backdrop of emigration, providing an insight into the pains and hysteria of refugees, director Michael Curtiz would hire supporting actors Paul Henreid, Conrad

178 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 217. 179 Giovacchini , “The Joys of Paradise,” 291. 180 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 70. 181 Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 236. 182 Giovacchini, “The Joys of Paradise,” 290.

Veidt and Peter Lorre; all four had worked in German cinema prior to their emigration to

Hollywood.183

It is interesting to note that, just as it was not only directors who amassed in the

Hollywood studios, the camaraderie characterized by the EFF and the salon was not limited to supporting émigrés of the film world. After becoming acquainted with a German-Swiss couple who were without employment, and aware that as “European directors and actors were flocking to Hollywood... the demand for European servants increased,” Salka Viertel arranged for the husband and wife to become a butler-chauffeur and housekeeper for new émigrés; they were hired by the Viertels’ friends, the Feyders. 184 Similarly, Etta Hardt, a former executive-secretary in a publishing house – of whom Else Reinhardt, ex-wife of the famed Max Reinhardt, despaired hiring as a housekeeper because “the woman was a refugee and educated; it would be embarrassing to have her eat in the kitchen”185 – was introduced by Viertel to Garbo, and joined the Scandinavian star’s household. This sort of networking highlights the depth to which a

European subculture was established in Hollywood; they did not simply gather on Sundays to discuss the political turmoil back at home, but worked and lived alongside each other. This sort of networking underscores how unfounded the later accusations of Europeans dominating

Hollywood in order to push a leftist agenda were; the émigrés were not looking to dominate the film industry, they were simply trying to make a living, whether by encouraging each others’ screenplays or hiring each other on as domestic service. It was aid, and it was expected for the famous as well as the ordinary, for Bertolt Brecht as well as Etta Hardt.

183 Emily Barrette, “Daschunds and Saint Bernards: Casablanca and the ‘Discontented’ Hollywood Exiles,” (undergraduate paper, McGill University, 2011), 8. 184 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 150. 185 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 216.

Given the internal support of this community in the Hollywood studios, it may seem curious that so many of the émigrés struggled. This is not to marvel simply at a lack of fame or success amongst some of the émigrés, but at the real financial struggles experienced by the likes of Brecht, Ophüls, Arnold Schoenberg and eventually Salka Viertel.186 It was not simply that

Schoenberg fell into obscurity, an image which may have been heavy-handedly set in stone by early biographers,187 or that Salka Viertel “was neither beautiful nor young enough for a film career”188 in Hollywood, but that these émigrés could hardly support themselves. In a letter to director George Cukor, a son of Hungarian émigrés, Viertel would joke about her own financial troubles:

I am trying to sell my house but so far only one prospective buyer appeared and he asked if for the price I’d go with the house. I think I should get at least $10,000 more because that seems to be the established price for women in California. Or haven’t you read it in the papers? It’s quite en vogue here. Young women advertise themselves in the papers for sale for $10,000 minimum. As I am older and more experienced, I should get at least $12,500. The inflation is here – why kid oneself?189

While Salka could joke about her financial situation in 1948, her son Peter would be concerned for her financial wellbeing for most of his life. Arnold Schoenberg’s first job in America was at a small Boston conservatory where his course on composition went entirely unattended.190 He said of his teaching endeavours in America, “my work is as much a waste of time as if Einstein were having to teach mathematics at a secondary school.”191 It is important to note, however, that Schoenberg’s own accounts are not entirely trustworthy, as Sabine Feisst explains: “given

186 Brook, Driven to Darkness, 79. 187 Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4. 188 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 151-2. 189 Letter from Salka Viertel to George Cukor, June 16, 1948, File 575; George Cukor Collection, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (Los Angeles). 190 Friedrich, City of Nets, 31. 191 Friedrich, City of Nets, 32.

Schoenberg’s personality – a mixture of hypersensitivity, vulnerability, authoritarianism, pride, idealism, gratitude, and kindness – it is not surprising that he made many conflicting statements,” which has meant that “commentators, whether aiming at a negative or positive portrait, could always substantiate their views by using appropriate quotations.”192 Salka

Viertel, before she would become concerned with her own financial situation, would lament the fate of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, stating: “the world success of his films did not prevent

Eisenstein from suffering the fate of most European directors in Hollywood...After several months it became obvious that Hollywood had no use for him, and we only wondered why he had been called.”193 Regardless of whether the émigrés were amongst the first wave, sought after and seduced by the big-budgets of the studios like Berthold Viertel, in the second and third waves, avoiding the persecution of Hitler and the fate of the camps like Schoenberg and Brecht, or even a visiting filmmaker like Eisenstein, European genius did not ensure job security for artists in Hollywood.

Just as Fermi would conclude that “there is...no single word descriptive of a group whose motivations and intentions were so varied as those of the European-born intellectuals who came *to America+,”194 the careers of Hollywood Weimar émigrés cannot be easily dealt with as a cohesive whole. That disregard and disuse was “the fate of most European directors” leads one to question the extent of émigré influence in Hollywood: it seems contradictory that

émigrés were accused in the 40s and 50s of asserting an overwhelming communist influence when in fact, according to scholarship like that of Heilbut, Palmier and Horowitz, they had been mostly unemployed or struggling for recognition throughout the 1930s. They have been analyzed in contemporary literature for their impact on American film, but the vast majority fell

192 Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World, 4. 193 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 145. 194 Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 15.

66 into obscurity and financial woe. This is because, while the salon and the socially ostracized

Europeans have garnered attention from some scholars, others have looked at the impact of the prominent Weimar directors on American film, leading to two distinct portraits of “the Weimar

émigré.” That there existed a cohesive social and cultural subset within Hollywood that devoted itself to the sustenance and promotion of their ilk within various facets of the industry, and yet much scholarship will point to lives of near poverty and total anonymity, points to the existence of two distinct classes of Weimar émigrés. This is not to set a firm distinction or classification – it is more an illusory construct that has been adopted for semantic ease than a cut and dry classification – but it explains why the literature can speak of successful and influential Weimar

émigrés as well as destitute and unappreciated Weimar émigrés. How the successful émigrés – subject of film literature that triumphs the influence of Weimar directors in Hollywood – utilized the salon network – made up of the émigrés of social emigration histories such as Giovacchini’s

– bears exploration, as these two émigré tropes were not mutually exclusive, but coexisted and comingled. How the influential émigrés cultivated themselves professionally within the studios and how they related to the salon may explain why the immigrant network did not ensure success or prosperity for the latter.

Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang became two of the most successful Weimar directors to work in Hollywood. The career arcs of the two artists, however, are in near contradistinction. Lang was already a well established director in Weimar, and was known to the executives of the

Hollywood studios when he turned away from Europe for work. Wilder, on the other hand, a screenwriter of little renown, appeared to be simply swept up in the wave of acquisitions made by Hollywood where his linguistic difficulties soon put him out of work.

The notorious circumstances surrounding Lang’s arrival in Hollywood have been questioned and debated by historians and members of the film community alike, and have

67 become a requisite of any discussion of Lang’s emigration. The myth of Lang’s fateful meeting with Goebbels, who informed the director that not only was Metropolis the Führer’s favourite film, but that they would be willing to overlook his racial status – Lang was in fact half Jewish – should he take up the post of managing director of the entire German film industry. From there,

Lang maintained that he fled straight from Germany for Paris. While the job offer and meeting with Goebbels is possible – though Gösta Werner does observe rather significantly that “there is not a word about it in Goebbels's usually meticulous diary for the year 1933”195 – Lang’s passport conclusively proves that the claim regarding his swift and decisive departure is altogether false.196 But, as Manohla Dargis puts it, “a pulse-pounding flight to freedom, as incredible as any manufactures on a back lot, certainly sounded better, sexier and more mythological than a calculated departure.”197 While in France, Lang was in the lucky position of having received “several offers from Hollywood to sort through,”198 and the director finally settled on a contract with MGM, where his hiring was hailed by The New York Times as “one of the ‘scalps dangling from the metaphorical war belt,”199 of MGM and Irving Thalberg, who had closed the deal. As we will see in the following chapter, Lang’s first Hollywood film was a critical success, and though his successes throughout the 30s were limited, he would hit his stride during the 1940s.

Initially hired by Columbia in 1934, a studio which was not friendly to European writers,

Wilder quickly fell into poverty when he scripts were consistently overlooked; according to biographer Maurice Zolotow, “all he did was write movies and starve.”200 Just as Lang’s arrival in

Hollywood has become associated with his mythic meeting with Goebbels, there is an often

195 Gösta Werner, “Fritz Lang and Goebbels: Myth and Facts,” Film Quarterly 43, No. 3 (1990), 26. 196 Werner, “Fritz Lang and Goebbles,” 26. 197 Dargis, “Master Strokes, Despite Stamp of Hollywood,” 8. 198 Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: the Nature of the Beast (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 201. 199 McGilligan, Fritz Lang, 202 200 Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (New York: Limelight Editions, 1977), 59.

68 repeated anecdote that, so poor and yet too proud to accept charity, Wilder earned himself 50$ after being bet by Erich Pommer that he would not jump fully dressed into the pool at a party.

Not until he was paired with Charles Brackett by Paramount to write the screenplay for

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife did he start having any luck in Hollywood.

If their American beginnings were different, the respective ends of their Hollywood careers were equally dissimilar. Nearly two decades after his successes, Lang became frustrated with the founding of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the sudden accusations of Communism that circulated after the war. Many of the émigrés fled Hitler’s

Germany because of their political beliefs, and their strong opposition to fascism led some to increasingly left-wing politics; the accusations and investigations of the McCarthy era left many

émigrés bitter and disillusioned with American democracy. Lang had explained his departure from directing Hollywood films, and subsequent departure from the US, as a result of this air of suspicion which descended upon Hollywood: “I stopped making films here in 1956 or ’57 because I foresaw the downfall of the motion picture industry...When you made a film for an independent producer or a major company, did you know there were always spies around you, which reported every step you did?”201 Sadly, “after twenty years in Hollywood, Lang had no channel open to the major studios,”202 and in 1957 he returned to Germany under the auspices of directing Das indische Grabmal for UFA. In stark contrast, Billy Wilder served as writer and director for three films released in 1957 – The Spirit of St Louis, Love in the Afternoon, and

Witness for the Prosecution, out of which the last two are considered amongst his most successful films.203 His third attempt at direction would be the classic film noir Double Indemnity

(1944) – which will be dealt with more expansively in the following chapter – and would earn

201 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 64. 202 McGilligan, Fritz Lang, 422 203 Stevens, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 304.

69 him a place as a respected director in Hollywood throughout the 40s and 50s. Wilder would continue directing through to the end of the 70s, though his later works were less celebrated: he would, however, “have the good fortune to live through the eighties and nineties as the idol of a new generation of filmmakers.”204

Despite the vastly different conditions upon their arrival and the reversal of fortunes their careers would become subject to, they would both create critically acclaimed and popular films during their tenures in America. This would be because they shared an attitude towards filmmaking in America which worked vastly in their favour. That is, that they wanted to make films in America and for Americans. With such different experiences in Hollywood, the quality which many historians have identified as unifying Lang and Wilder is that they “came infatuated with American film techniques; they lacked either the condescension or hopelessness that characterized other émigré artists.”205 Despite the fact that both émigrés found themselves in the second wave of immigration, fleeing a now alien Germany rather than simply being seduced by the allure of Hollywood, both directors came to embody an American enthusiasm on a scale shared by few émigrés.

In 1973, Wilder confessed to director Max Wilke, “I would have come to Hollywood,

Hitler or no Hitler.”206 Wilder’s immigration was undoubtedly prompted by Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, yet unlike other émigrés he genuinely wanted to work in America. The script which earned him his passage all the way to the Columbia studios, Pam Pam, was Wilder’s attempt to create a Hollywood musical, though it had been written in Berlin. “No more peasant girls and handsome soldiers, no more lieutenants and countesses,” writes Zolotow; Wilder’s fascination with America was genuine and preceded his own arrival, as opposed to those

204 Stevens, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 302. 205 Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 234. 206 Giovacchini, “The Joys of Paradise,” 284.

émigrés who attempted to develop an interest in America simply because it was necessary for financial survival in Hollywood.207 Because of the code and censorship, many émigrés found that their career rested on their ability to interpret the social nuances of American culture: “how much thigh is too much thigh?” and “what is considered risqué, immoral, or blasphemous?” were questions whose answers could shape the success of a filmmaker working in a Hollywood caught up in the thralls of the Hays Code. Not all the émigrés were apt studies, but Wilder wanted to immerse himself in America: according to Zolotow, “he sought to improve his English by listening to the radio, reading all the Los Angeles papers, and following the new books.

Sometimes he would use food money to go dancing at the Pacific Ocean Pier in Venice.”208

Heilbut makes note of Wilder’s love of American popular music, which would find its way into his films in a distinctive and revolutionary way, as compared with the grand orchestral scores producers demanded for Tabu. When he was finally given an opportunity to direct, Wilder saw it as a challenge at which the studio expected him to fail: “and they thought I’m going to do a very arty movie. You know, all very The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But I just set out and made as commercial a picture as I possibly could. I made it a point.”209 As a writer, Wilder had always had to work with American collaborators, acquainting him more intimately with the nuances of

American life, its humour, its slang, its rhythms. With the help of George Brackett, his co-writer and director on 13 different films through until 1950, Wilder’s inaugural Hollywood films were true American pictures, dealing with themes, settings and characters specific to his new homeland; insurance fraud, cityscapes, and wiseguys gave Wilder the illusion of being a real

American director, even more so than von Sternberg, who’d been raised in America since his childhood. New management at Paramount would marvel that von Sternberg “was permitted to

207 Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood, 52. 208 Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood, 57. 209 Wilder, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 317.

71 make both The Scarlet Empress and The Devil is a Woman, as he pleased, without any attempt at criticism or restraint, despite the experience which the Studio had had with him during the administration of Mr Schulberg.”210 Von Sternberg, despite his Hollywood training and American upbringing, was seen as an Austrian autocrat and dilettante while Wilder was considered a witty and agreeable Hollywood man.

When Lang arrived in Hollywood he threw himself perhaps even more enthusiastically into American culture; by his own account, upon arriving in America, he stopped speaking

German altogether.211 It is well known that the New York skyline had been the inspiration for

Metropolis, establishing Lang’s fascination with the country before making it his home. Once living in America, Lang continually drew inspiration from his new surroundings: “I traveled around the country in my car, I spoke to every man, gas station attendant, whatever. I lived with the Navajos and I learned a lot,”212 he says of his first year in America. Like Wilder, he sought to create American films, and proudly relates the praise he received from Lotte Eisner; “You know, it’s very funny. When I see now the Molnar films which you made in Europe, they are all

European characters. Whereas your American films are only American characters(sic).”213

According to Nick Smedley, “Lang professed his love for America, claiming to see a nation of people 'who are well-fed, well-dressed; people who look forward to the future with hope ... Do you see poverty, oppression, or fear? No, you see happiness, and hope.'”214 He wanted to make

210 Letter from Henry Hurzburn to Adolf Zukor, March 5 1935, File 15; Adolf Zukor Collection, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (Los Angeles). 211 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 67. 212 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 65. 213 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 67. 214 Nick Smedley, “Fritz Lang's Trilogy: The Rise and Fall of a European Social Commentator,” Film History 5 (1993), 3.

American movies and he respected the American audience, refusing to adjust his films according to the Hollywood adage, “an audience has the mentality of a sixteen-year-old chambermaid.”215

Unlike other émigré directors, Lang did not generally try to employ other exiles in his films: “I can’t remember that I ever used a European actor as an American.”216 He worked the one time with Brecht on Hangmen Also Die!, and while he helped recommend Frederick Kolm, he did not cast him in his own films. Lang’s self-distancing from his Jewish roots paired with an ambiguous relation to the Nazi party made him an uneasy member of the émigré social circle.

His ex-wife, von Harbou, had gone on to make films in Nazi Germany, and Gottfried Reinhardt even recalls Nazi banners in Lang’s Berlin home.217 He did occasionally attend the Sunday afternoons at the Viertel home, but was notoriously awkward and uncomfortable amongst his fellow émigrés.218

Giovacchini rails against the simplistic characterization of “the anti-Nazi filmmakers who came to Hollywood in the 1930s...as either intellectual sellouts, completely integrated into the

Hollywood system, or as perennial exiles, eternally unable to enjoy the fruits of the paradise surrounding them.” Giovacchini is right to problematize the criteria for success and the limits of integration into the Hollywood system, though I do not agree with the characterization of the

émigrés as anti-Nazi filmmakers – this is not to say that it is not true, as almost all banded together to denounce Hitler, but that it is by no means the sole and defining characteristic of their work as filmmakers. Neither Lang nor Wilder fully turned their backs on their Weimar origins. Wilder maintained much more contact with his fellows from Weimar than Lang, but neither man turned his back on the émigrés socially. While Wilder “tried to shun the German

215 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 72. 216 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 66. 217 Brook, Driven to Darkness, 82. 218 Brook, Driven to Darkness, 82.

73 colony so he could master English,” writes Zolotow, “he was drawn into it out of loneliness.”219

Wilder was also more inclined to work with other émigrés than Lang, working with both Marlene

Dietrich and composer Friedrich Hollaender for his 1948 film Foreign Affair. His films, however, were much more compatible with Hollywood, allowing him to continue making films through from 1930 to 1980. Lang, in contrast, enlisted émigrés only on one occasion, for Hangmen Also

Die! a film about Germans. Neither director totally isolated himself from the émigré circle, yet both were noteworthy in their attempts to deal with American subjects in their films.

Giovacchini’s objection also strikes at the fact that that neither Lang nor Wilder were easily integrated and welcomed into the Hollywood studios. Both struggled, and, despite their dedication to American cultural study, were made to feel their own foreignness. Heilbut maintains that “even the most assimilated experienced the wrath of the Hollywood bourgeoisie.

Wilder and Lang spoke casually of the common complaint that they were ‘goddamned foreigners.’”220 Both directors, along with Lubitsch, Preminger and von Sternberg, “acknowledge that others *in Hollywood+ found them Prussian martinets.”221 These two directors, the most enthusiastic about America amongst their peers in exile, still found themselves characterized by their foreignness, and their films characterized as exceptional émigré films.

Despite their significant differences, this position of insider-outsider – not dissimilar to the artist’s position in Weimar, according to Peter Gay222 – may be precisely what allowed their films to be classed at the pinnacle of émigré achievements. While Salka Viertel complained that

“what the producers want is an original but familiar, unusual but popular, moralistic but sexy,

219 Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood, 58. 220 Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 236. 221 Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 239. 222 Gay, Weimar Culture, 102-103.

74 true but improbable, tender but violent, slick but highbrow masterpiece,”223 so did they want their directors to be established but flexible, exotic but familiar, cosmopolitan but grounded and neighbourly. Wilder and Lang, as the directors most able to maintain a place in the bridge across this aporia, thrived in Hollywood. They were expected to be both simultaneously in love with

America and distinctly German, or, alternatively, neither one nor the other. Nothing makes this paradoxical stance more clear than the MGM press sheets heralding Lang’s arrival in Hollywood.

The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer biography, a press sheet summarizing the director’s career and achievements before arriving in America that was unearthed at the Academy of Motion

Picture Arts and Sciences archives, tries to highlight Lang’s appeal as an eminent European artist, worldly and cultured, while simultaneously downplaying his German heritage, emphasizing his love of America. The biography shares the rather unlikely detail that “in his boyhood he aspired to be a cowboy,”224 and draws attention to Lang’s “medals for bravery in time of war,”225 while failing to mention that he did, in fact, take up arms against America. His gallantry and military decoration are presented as honourable and empathetic qualities, so long as they are depicted in an apolitical light. Even Lang’s refugee status is covered over rather smoothly, the studio being doubtless aware of the growing hostility towards the massive influx of refugees in America, and the closest mention of the politics that forced his migration simply states that “his next *film+, The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse, was banned in Germany.” Rather than draw attention to the censorship and oppression of oppositional voices by the Nazis and the anti-Semitism which motivated many Germans to seek refuge in America, Lang is characterized

223 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 283. 224 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Fritz Lang Biography Press Sheet, 1936; Fritz Lang Files, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (Los Angeles). 1. 225 MGM, Fritz Lang Biography Press Sheet, 1

75 as simply having “transferred his activities to the British screen”226 from where he “was signed by M-G-M and brought to America, where he immediately took out his first papers for citizenship.”227 In MGM’s description of Lang’s decision to move to America, there is no sign of reluctance on Lang’s part or the hand-forcing role that the political turmoil in Europe had in his decision; in this account, he came over enthusiastically, hoping to become an American citizen after his successes in Europe.

While his Americanism – a young Viennese boy at the turn of the century dreaming of being a cowboy – is crucial to the studio’s publicity surrounding Lang, so is his foreignness.

Giovacchini notes that “separation and isolation were also the result of a careful marketing job done by the studios and by the foreigners themselves.”228 While the self-promotion may be more true of the exotic actresses than of the directors or writers – both Dietrich and Garbo capitalized on their European exoticism, using that as a mark which distinguished them from other actresses, a fact that was tied into their fashion-forward donning of men’s pants – MGM certainly emphasizes Lang’s cosmopolitanism, explaining that “he has visited and lived for varying period in Vienna, Paris, Constantinople, Berlin, London, Munich, New York, and has toured through Russia, Asia Minor and Africa.”229 And yet, even in light of how well travelled, well established, and well respected he is in the international community, in America “his principle diversion is driving to small towns and large cities, absorbing the details of the lives of the American people,” showing that America is just as engaging and exciting as anywhere else

Lang had been. Lang was forced by this characterization on the part of the studio into a middle

226 This is not, in fact, accurate: Lang had been making a film in France, Liliom, based on the play of another émigré, the Hungarian Ferenc Molnar, before emigrating to America. 227 MGM, Fritz Lang Biography Press Sheet, 2. 228 Giovacchini, “The Joys of Paradise,” 282. 229 MGM, Fritz Lang Biography Press Sheet, 2.

76 ground between his European genius and being relatable and compatible with the Hollywood studio system. They appreciated his monocle, but not his autocratic methods on set.

Wilder and Lang both embraced American culture, and yet became the two directors most commonly characterized as “Weimar filmmakers” by America. On the reverse, the émigrés entrenched in the society of New Weimar tended to produce, or be interested in productions, which better characterized the artistry and forward-thinking that had been associated with

Weimar film. It is a fairly well accounted story that, despite his financial difficulties, Schoenberg turned down Irving Thalberg’s offer to compose the score for an upcoming film, believing it beneath his abilities. After having heard Schoenberg’s early composition, Transfigured Night, on the radio, Thalberg, a prominent producer for MGM in whom Louis Mayer had unyielding faith, had Salka Viertel, at that time a writer for MGM, arrange for Schoenberg to come in for a meeting. Schoenberg, after having deemed film scores to be, as a general rule, poorly executed, said he would work on The Good Earth, the film in question, only if he was given full creative control and fifty thousand dollars. This offer was, unsurprisingly, refused, though Thalberg – generally friendly and accepting of the émigrés – found the composer fascinating.230 According to Horowitz and the author of a new work on Schonberg’s American years, Sabine Feisst,

Schoenberg was not the unhappy exile he is sometimes characterized to have been: Schoenberg wrote,

[I] came from one country into another, where neither dust nor better food is rationed and where I am allowed to go on my feet, where my head can be erect, where kindness and cheerfulness is dominating, and where to live is a joy and to

230 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 207-8.

be an expatriate of another country is the grace of God....I was driven into paradise.”231

Despite this contentedness, he was not willing to compromise his artistic standards for economic gain. The fact that Schoenberg was not unhappy in America highlights an important nuance to the success of the émigrés. Indeed, while many biographers and historians have drawn attention to Schoenberg’s suffering, Feisst points out that he “enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life with an income drawn from university teaching, lectures, private lessons, conducting, commissions and royalties,”232 and all this was during the Depression, when most

Americans could not boast as much. It is not simply that Lang and Wilder liked America and so

America, in turn, liked them. Schoenberg liked America, but what is important is that Lang and

Wilder immersed themselves enthusiastically in the culture, and in doing so, became more flexible regarding their creative process. Schoenberg, upon touring the Disney studios, “found the artists ‘so tightly regulated that it makes you ill.’”233 While Wilder and Lang are characterized as having been “professionals who were willing to compromise, to adjust to studio pressures,”234

Schoenberg simply would not compromise his ideals in order to find work.

Of the Weimar émigrés most entrenched in the salon of New Weimar, very few found acceptance and enthusiasm for their ideas in America. Berthold Viertel’s films remained on the

B-list, and he slowly retreated eastwards until he found himself back in Europe. Heinrich Mann was forced at seventy to take a place as a screenwriter at Warner Bros., not on his own merits or renown, but thanks to the Emergency Rescue Committee.235 Even Murnau, who Horowitz estimates as one of the most successful Weimar directors despite his tragically short tenure in

231Joseph Horowitz, Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 113. 232 Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World, 6. 233 Horowitz, Artists in Exile, 115. 234 Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 239. 235 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 149.

Hollywood, found his last project, Tabu, impeded by studio demands. Since Murnau would not conform to the American penchant for sound films, he was forced to pay to have a score composed for the film in “a last desperate attempt to sell the silent products.”236 Salka Viertel’s scripts, featuring strong female characters in historical, European settings, most often found themselves gathering dust in MGM vaults.

One can overstate the role of the salon in determining the success or lack thereof which met the émigrés. It is not simply that the salon community created an artistic aristocracy who could encourage each other to hold fast to their creative values in the face of commercial failure, denouncing the cultureless nature of Hollywood and applauding themselves for their own artistry. Nonetheless, disdain for the studio methods of Hollywood often circulated witthin the insulated émigré community. Schoenberg, upon declining the contract to compose for The

Good Earth, wrote Alma Mahler Werfel, “I almost agreed to write music for a film, but fortunately asked $50,000, which, likewise fortunately, was much too much, for it would have been the end of me.”237 While discussing the incident with Viertel, he said “to compose means to look into the future of the theme:” he would not, as Thalberg predicted, write music on a producer’s terms.238 And while Schoenberg is not really a Hollywood émigré – insofar as he never actually completed a film project – his experience is not dissimilar to Brecht’s or even

Salka Viertel’s, who continued to write predominantly European, highly literate or historical stories, despite their decreasing popularity amongst producers.

Because of this desire on the part of the studios for the Weimar directors to both be foreign but enthralled with America and adaptable to the Hollywood studios, the émigrés who most strongly maintained their ties to Weimar found themselves falling into anonymity. Viertel

236 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 146. 237 Friedrich, City of Nets, 34. 238 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 208.

79 would not write a screenplay she didn’t think would suit Garbo, knowing the vision the actress had for her career, and Schoenberg would not relinquish artistic control for a paycheque.

Instead, it was Lang and Wilder, who maintained a sanitized foreignness while compromising their methods to the new system, who flourished. They became the American-Germans, or

Germans in the way that Americans wanted them to be. Just as the New Woman was a construct which did not reflect the reality facing the majority of Weimar women, so too did the

Weimar filmmaker become a trope in America; associated with these two directors, it was an archetype which did not in reality characterize the experience of the majority of émigrés working in Hollywood. As we look back we can see that the salon as a cultural and professional network was valuable for the émigrés though not necessarily correlating to the kind of success characterized by Lang and Wilder. Distance from this network which otherwise helped many exiles find work, was what enabled their success in navigating the contradictory expectations of the studios. What results in much of the literature is a focus on the works of Lang or Wilder, and in fact most of the film noir genre, as typically Weimar-influenced American films.

Chapter V: the New Woman on American screens

The films of Lang and Wilder hold a treasured place in the canon of Weimar émigré contributions to Hollywood. Their success, however, was tied to their ability to integrate

American themes and subject matter into their films, to mould their Weimar vision and artistry to the desires of American audiences. Their public personas and their professional approaches needed to adapt. The question inevitably arises of how much of their American films reflect their Weimar experience and how much they represent the filmmakers’ ability to adapt and create within the Hollywood studio system. An exhaustive analysis of the technical elements of film making – lighting, sounds, camera angles – and an more in-depth look at the business elements of the studio systems would be necessary to establish the degree of Weimar film’s influence in America – a task at least partially accomplished by Giovacchini, Hales and Brook.

Our own focus here is on the films’ depictions of women: to what extent did the anxieties surrounding the flappers, vamps, and the liberated New Woman crop up in the films of the

émigrés? Did the accusatory and vilifying depiction of female characters which occurred in our earlier case studies of Metropolis, Blue Angel and M exhaust itself in Weimar, or would the

émigrés turn these same methods against their depictions of American women? An analysis of three émigrés films will reveal that, in a surprising paradox, given the high degree of their professional adaption to the American film industry, Lang and Wilder’s early Hollywood films –

Fury (1936) and Double Indemnity (1944) – reflect a more typically Weimar depiction of women than the films of the less integrated émigrés, such as Queen Christina (1933).

As was discussed in chapter three, the 1930s saw an unprecedented increase in female leads in Hollywood films. While silent film had ushered prominent actresses towards

81 international renown, the attention paid to Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson, for example, does not compare with the ways in which Hollywood studios began to utilize and promote their female stars during the so-called Golden Age of cinema. This promotion has its roots in the increasingly commercial nature of Hollywood, and the newly realized fecundity of the female consumer market: actresses could not only become a selling feature of films, but their fame could be channelled to sell commercial goods as well. The use of actresses as beauty icons who could convince women to buy cosmetics and clothing had not been fully realized prior to the

30s. For this reason, actress Margaret Millington Banes could write in 1912 that "actresses as a rule know no more about making themselves beautiful than does the average woman; neither are they naturally more beautiful.”239 Studios in the 30s began promoting the illusion that their female stars were more beautiful than average women and, even more precisely, that they were women who knew how to make themselves beautiful. Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo came to prominence along with a cohort of American actresses, including Katharine Hepburn,

Claudette Colbert, Norma Shearer and Bette Davis, all of whose beauty and style have fuelled the image of 1930s glamour. By acting as beauty icons, these actresses became the centre of ad campaigns to sell not only the films, but the clothing, cosmetics and toiletries used therein. It is not, however, simply a case of more actresses being employed more prominently; the nature of their films roles actually changed to facilitate actresses’ profitability. As film was increasingly seen as a medium through which other products could be sold, the female characters in films had to be paradoxically idyllic while remaining relevant to the lives of average American women: they needed to be other worldly in their appearance, but make that appearance something housewives and working girls could nevertheless strive for. Since the advertising revenue of other products was becoming such a significant part of an actress’ commercial appeal for

239 Marlis Schweitzer, “‘The Mad Search for Beauty’: Actresses’ Testimonials, the Cosmetics Industry, and the ‘Democratization of Beauty,’” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (2005), 255.

82 studios, it became important for her to select her roles more carefully; a perfume favoured by the malicious seductress was more difficult to sell than the scent worn by an ambitious young ingénue. Indeed, many actors and actresses would have insisted on being paid more if they had to play an unsavoury character, according to Wilder’s account.240 This, coupled with the Hays

Code and its increasingly strict enforcement of moral order, made risqué or immoral female characters less appealing, less profitable and thus less prevalent in the Hollywood films of the

1930s.

The three films that will be analyzed in search of conformity with this new Hollywood standard of women’s representation allow insight into different conditions of production facing the Weimar émigrés. The first film is Lang’s Hollywood debut, Fury: the film was made soon after Lang’s arrival in Hollywood, released two years after landing in America, and provides an instance where the studios collaborated most accommodatingly with Lang’s vision. Accordingly, in this film we can expect to see a stronger Weimar influence than in those produced by émigrés who had longer to adjust to American culture and the Hollywood studio system. Furthermore,

Fury stands outside the genre which has become most associated with the Weimar émigrés – the film noir. Vincent Brook and Barbara Hales have both exhaustively studied the influence of the Weimar filmmakers on the film noir in Hollywood, and while Lang certainly contributed to the canon with his gritty crime dramas – the Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street

(1945) – it is important to realize that the echoes of Weimar extend beyond one particular genre.

With that in mind, however, one cannot neglect film noir and its infamously vitriolic depiction of female characters, and for that reason the second film which will be treated here is

Wilder’s first breakout directorial hit, Double Indemnity. Not only was it the film which solidified

240 Cameron Crowe, Conversation with Wilder (New York: Knopf, 1999), 48.

Wilder’s place as a director – earning him a Best Director nod from the Academy – but it has also features one of the most unsympathetic femme fatales: murderess Phyllis Dietrichson. Double

Indemnity was also considered amongst the pioneers of film noir and “quintessential to the noir canon”241 according to Brook. As one of the earlier noirs, Dietrichson’s characterization did not simply conform with an existing character trope, as was perhaps the case with later noirs:242 instead she served to set the standard of the succubus-like woman, exchanging on her sex appeal for personal gain at the expense of unsuspecting men, which became characteristic of the genre.

To serve as a contrast to the films of Lang and Wilder will be Salka Viertel’s first screenplay, Queen Christina. While Lang and Wilder established themselves rather independently from the émigré community, Viertel’s script was realized into a film in large part due to her personal connections with fellow émigrés. The film found widespread commercial success, and by considering Queen Christina in contrast with Fury and Double Indemnity we can gauge the extent to which the émigré community encouraged a stronger resonance of Weimar’s thematic treatment of women.

Fury, Lang’s inaugural Hollywood film, was a critical and popular success. The New York

Times reviewer Frank S. Nugent opened his review with the proclamation “let it be said at once:

‘Fury,’ which came to the Capitol yesterday, is the finest original drama the screen has provided this year.”243 Fury, the story of an attempted lynching of a man who turns out to be innocent, provides excellent insight into the extent of Lang’s early adjustment to Hollywood. Nick Smedley warns that “in assessing the personal contribution to American culture of this film director, it is

241 Brook, Driven to Darkness, 10. 242 The argument for genre convention was employed years later by director Brian De Palma: “‘using women in situations where they are killed or sexually attacked’ is nothing more than a ‘genre convention...like using violins when people look at each other.’” Tatar, Lustmord, 8. 243 Frank S Nugent, “Fury,” The New York Times Movie Review, June 6, 1936, accessed July 5, 2011, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F00E0DE113FEE3BBC4E53DFB066838D629EDE.

84 essential to know the nature of his involvement in a given film:”244 Fury was not simply directed by Lang but co-written by him as well, and the director counted it amongst his favourites of his own films, so we can infer that he was greatly involved with its development.245 A success in

America, this film is still considered distinct from the typical Hollywood cannon, both by

Smedley in 1993 and Nugent in 1936. Smedley notes that “cinematically and thematically it stood apart from its Hollywood counterparts.”246 Nugent similarly praised the film as a departure from the Hollywood norm, illustrating that even Lang’s contemporaries understood his film as distinct from typical American films:

This has been a completely enthusiastic report, and such was our intention. Hollywood rarely bothers with themes bearing any relation to significant aspects of contemporary life. When it does, in most cases, its approach is timid, uncertain or misdirected. "Fury" is direct, forthright and vehement.247

It is evident, then, that Lang did no completely abandon the approach he had towards film in

Weimar; in America as in Europe, he utilized film as a vehicle for social commentary.

The film’s, albeit limited, depiction of female characters also echoes Lang’s previous canon of work in Weimar regarding gender. It is important to focus on the treatment of these female characters, as they do, despite their peripheral place in the film, reflect on the perception of women held by Lang personally rather than the American studios. His characterization resonates so clearly his Weimar work with its apparent insecurity regarding women’s social roles. It is for this reason that we can begin to understand why Lang’s films became characterized as those of a Weimar émigré, despite his attempts at assimilation. The female characters of Fury are largely responsible for the injustices of the film and are rendered

244 Nick Smedley, “Fritz Lang’s Trilogy,” 1. 245 Lang, Conversations with Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 67. 246 Smedley, “Fritz Lang’s Trilogy,” 3-4 247 Nugent, “Fury.”

85 by Lang as vain, self-involved and unconcerned about justice, a clear echo of the themes he presented in M.

Fury’s primary themes of guilt and justice in society hearken back strongly to those he explored in M: both films deal with vigilante justice, concluding that law must be upheld by the system, rather than perverted in the hands of the masses, who themselves become (or, as in the case of M, already are) criminals. Maria Tatar’s analysis of M discusses Lang’s treatment of women within his directorial style, yet there is nothing in the prevailing literature which discusses Lang’s representation of women in Fury, which is nearly identical to the treatment discussed in chapter three regarding M. There are rather apparent parallels between the two films: not only do both films raise the question of vigilante justice, but also, in both films characters discuss an innate impulse to do wrong, an impulse which sane men ignore and criminals are subject to.248 Perhaps even more importantly for this paper’s purpose, in both films

Lang provides an indicting representation of the role of women in inciting vigilantism. In M it is the mothers who seek justice for their children, screaming at the film’s antagonist, Beckert,

“Rights? Someone like you has no rights. Kill him!”249 Similarly, in Fury it is the gossip mongering of women – a montage into which Lang not so subtly inserts a shot of hens clucking – which condemns the innocent Joe Wilson. When asked if Wilson could be innocent, a young woman is reprimanded by an older, more authoritative woman: “my dear young woman, in this country people don’t land in jail unless they’re guilty.”250 The line provides a nice nod to Lang’s own foreignness in addition to rendering its female speaker ridiculous. By the time the mob is on trial

248 In M this takes the form of Lorre’s impassioned confession in the mock courtroom scene. In Fury there is a monologue given by a barber: “Now I’ll tell you, people get funny impulses. If you resist them, you’re sane, if you don’t, you’re on your way to the nuthouse or the pen...Would you believe that in the 20 years that I’ve been stroking this razor across throats here, that many a time I’ve had an impulse to cut their Adam’s apples wide open? An impulse is an impulse. It’s like an itch. You gotta scratch it.” Fury, directed by Fritz Lang (1936: Los Angeles, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). 249 M, directed by Fritz Lang (1931: Berlin, Vereinigte Star-Film). 250 Fury (1936)

86 for murder, and their conviction seems imminent, it is a woman who screams out “I want to confess!...I’m guilty! We’re all guilty!”251 This pronouncement is itself an interesting twist, as the woman and mob are, in fact, innocent of the crime they are being accused of – the murder of

Joe Wilson, who has been watching the trial from the safety of a hotel; she is, in a sense, responsible for condemning more innocent people. While the entire film is a comment on vigilantism and the misplaced desire for justice both of which these female characters represent, alongside men, Lang’s condemnation seems particularly venomous against the women, whose hen-like clatter started the whole affair.

Lang’s depiction of the female witnesses, whom the District Attorney will accuse of lying or having been bribed, is equally disdainful. One witness, Miss Edna Hooper, claims to be a couturier and modiste; she is asked by the District Attorney to clarify that, “by couturier and modiste, you mean you’re a dressmaker, do you not?” and causes the all-male jury to laugh when he explains “It’s just the difference between a dress shop and a gown shoppe,”252 thoroughly embarrassing Miss Hooper. Lang’s prosecutor goes on to poke fun at his other female witness, who is made up and wearing a fashionable dress and hat, illustrating her desire to seem cosmopolitan and fashion savvy: he asks if she is “the proprietor as well as the hostess of the Green Light Inn?” to which she reveals her confusion and ignorance by responding, “Well, it’s my place, if that’s what you mean.”253 Lang makes these female characters not only laughable but contemptuous in their attempts to subvert justice. And furthermore, both witnesses attempts at pretence are revealed and mocked. While Fury is rightly dealt with as a film about justice and law and its role in American society, that this treatment of women has

251 Fury (1936). 252 Fury (1936) 253 Fury (1936)

87 aroused no comment is surprising. There is an evident condemnation of women as superficial gossips, vain and disinterested in justice.

Lang’s indictment of women would become even more pronounced in The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. While his 1930s films deal more with justice, law and order, reflecting Lang’s desire to “depict ‘people of today and the things that interest them or imprison them,’”254 there is still resonance of the misogyny characteristic of his Weimar films which foreshadows his later noirs. Interestingly, Smedley depicts the 1940s and the increasingly seriousness of American film as cultivating an audience that would finally accept Lang’s more biting critique, less prone to “lend itself to the idealism and self-assurance which had characterized the cinema of the high New Deal.”255 While this may be true, it is interesting that this correlates with Lang’s increasingly unsympathetic depictions of women, and the increasing popularity of film noirs like Double Indemnity.

Billy Wilder was the late bloomer of the émigré filmmakers; his first realized screenplay was not until he was paired up with Charles Brackett in 1936 to write the screenplay for

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), a film which Wilder himself would describe as “not a very good picture, but it was kind of all right.”256 Wilder was not given a shot at directing his screenplays until 1942. He would not really hit his stride as a filmmaker, however, until Double Indemnity, which was, like Lang’s Fury, co-written and directed by the émigré himself.257 The film would be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture (though it would win none). One may make the argument that Wilder was simply one of many directors caught up in the noir genre; however, most film historians date the genres origin to the release of The

254 Smedley, “Fritz Lang’s Trilogy,” 2. 255 Smedley, “Fritz Lang’s Trilogy,” 2. 256 Crowe, Conversations with Wilder, 40. 257 In an interesting twist, the author of the original story Double Indemnity, James M Cain, was requested to work on the screenplay with Wilder, but could not because he was working on a treatment of Western Union, a film directed by Lang.

Maltese Falcon (1941), and when asked if the film had inspired Double Indemnity, Wilder’s response was simply “No. Has it got any similarities?”258 William Hare also gives a special place to Double Indemnity, writing “while Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon marked the debut of film noir, Double Indemnity marked a major transition into the genre...a new world predicated on an anarchy of the spirit in which protagonists are gripped by obsession, generally represented by a chillier-than-ice femme fatale.”259 The noir genre as a whole draws strongly on the Weimar tradition in its openness to deal with the gritty underworld and its vilification of sexually emancipated female characters, and the question posed to Wilder could have just as easily been if he had been inspired by M. And just as M reflected the anxieties of Weimar regarding women’s roles in the new society, so too does Double Indemnity. In Fury we see a criticism of women caught up in vain and superficial behaviours which lead to the inevitable downfall of an innocent man; similar to Lang’s message in M, a “warning to all mothers, ‘You should keep better watch over your children,’”260 the women of Strand should focus on the things that matter, rather than elevating themselves with idle gossip. In contrast, in Double Indemnity we see the resurgence of the vamp figure, and her unsympathetic portrayal and vilification.

The film features insurance salesman Walter Neff, who is seduced by Phyllis Dietrichson, who is married to another man: Neff is quickly convinced into murdering her husband for her so the two can benefit from his insurance policy. Though little has ever been made of it, in the original novel written by James M. Cain, the murderess was named Phyllis Nirdlinger; the name was changed to Dietrichson for the film. There is no doubt that Wilder realized that this new name would evoke in the mind of his audience another famed femme fatale, actress Marlene

258 Crowe, Conversations with Billy Wilder, 20. 259 William Hare, Early Film Noir: Greed Lust and Murder Hollywood Style (London: McFarland & Company, Inc, Publishers, 2003), 24. 260 Tatar, Lustmord, 169.

Dietrich. This change of name illustrates the resurgence of the Weimar femme fatale, so aptly portrayed by Dietrich; the similarity in name could serve as a subtle cue as to what type of woman the ill-fated protagonist has fallen for.

Dietrichson is considered as one of the classic femme fatales, evil, cold, exploitative and overwhelmingly sexual, the inevitable ruin of men. When Joe Sistrom, a producer at Paramount, saw the Cain story in the paper, he took it to Wilder. According to Zolotow, “[Sistrom] said it was a thriller about this dame who kills her husband to collect his insurance. He knew it was just the sort of romantic love story to warm the cockles of Billy’s rotten heart.”261 From its inception, the wickedness of Dietrichson was what appealed to Wilder; it was her character he wrote with an actresses in mind – Barbara Stanwyck, who, according to Wilder, “took the script, *and+ loved it, right from the word go.”262 With the casting of Neff, on the other hand, Wilder says he “tried every leading man in town.”263 The focus of the film, then, is the morally bankrupt, seductress and the ends to which she can manipulate a man.

A false distinction is sometimes made between the femme fatale and the vamp, in both time period - the 1920s and 1940s, respectively – and her motivation; Janey Place suggests that

“often the original transgression of the dangerous lady of film noir (unlike the vamp seductress) is ambition expressed metaphorically in her freedom of movement and visual dominance.”264

Though how Lola Lola or Lulu, the classic vamps of Weimar, could be considered any less motivated by ambition and a desire to be free than Dietrichson is unclear. It is precisely the characters’ unwillingness to settle down and conform to traditional expectations which so devastates their male opposites; their seduction is a result of their desire for freedom from the

261 Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood, 11. 262 Crowe, Conversations with Wilder, 48. 263 Crowe, Conversations with Wilder, 48. 264 Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E Ann Kaplan (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), 56.

90 constraints of traditional female roles. Hales similarly sees no such distinction, and points instead to a continuum running through Weimar to Hollywood noir; “the longing for an irrecoverable past and the subsequent crisis of masculinity resulted in the transference of the

*Weimar+ director's psychic trauma onto the femme fatale.”265 She goes on to explain that

Freud's suggestion that the war’s damaged to male subjectivity results in the active pursuit of wholeness ”led to the construction of the femme fatale to symbolize the evils of war and the chaos of the postwar period.”266 Hales notes that this psychic trauma particularly manifested itself as the female criminality which came to dominate the film noir and that, in fact, in Weimar

“the pseudoscience of the day attributed female criminality to her insatiable libido.”267

Dietrichson’s use of her own sexuality and the threat it posed to an otherwise honest working man captures perfectly the spirit of fear Weimar felt towards the New Woman, and distinguishes Double Indemnity from the previous film noirs. Vincent Brook even goes as far to attribute this characterization to the fact that an overwhelming number of the émigrés were

Jewish, believing Phyllis Dietrichson to reflect “the assertive (read: phallic) Jewish woman easily transmogrified...into the anti-Semitic variation of the femme fatale: the carnally voracious belle juive,” an inversion of the typically disenfranchised place of women in Jewish orthodoxy. So while Dietrichson may fall into the trend of female film stars in central roles which occurred throughout the 30s, she still remains as a strong reflection of the women ubiquitous in Weimar’s film tradition.

The day after they were introduced, Greta Garbo asked Salka Viertel “Why don’t you write?” and though Viertel initially resisted – “Because I am not a writer. I am an actress, temporarily unemployed.” Viertel and Garbo had a rather renown personal friendship, taking

265 Hales, “Projecting Trauma,” 226. 266 Hales, “Projecting Trauma,” 226. 267 Hales, “Projecting Trauma,” 227.

91 walks and going swimming together near Viertel’s Santa Monica home. There had been speculation that Viertel became a manager of sorts, a counsellor advising Garbo on which deals to take and which to decline; given that Garbo began accepting fewer and fewer films, Viertel’s influence was considered with disdain and resentment. The screenwriter would mock this attitude in a letter to George Cukor: after Garbo refused yet another script, Viertel wrote, “again

I am afraid that this will be attributed to my sinister influence and my desire to exploit Miss

Brown,” a pseudonym of Garbo’s, “to increase my exorbitant fortune at the expense of the impoverished movie industry...”268 That the two used their personal alliance as a means of navigating the Hollywood system, however, is entirely accurate. After both Viertel and Garbo read a biography of Queen Christina of Sweden, Salka eased her resistance to writing and began crafting the screenplay, with Garbo in mind for the lead.269

The Queen Christina project is distinct from both Lang’s and Wilder’s in its inception; while Lang and Wilder both had contracts, and thus obligations to create their films, Viertel’s screenplay was genuinely inspired by the subject matter itself. Perhaps because of that, neither

Viertel nor Garbo wanted the film to be made in Hollywood; both had hoped it could be made in

Europe. Needless to say, then, that Viertel’s screenplay was not, as Lang’s and Wilder’s had been, made with American audiences in mind. After MGM had been recruited by Garbo, Viertel was disappointed that the film would made in Hollywood. She recounts Garbo’s words of comfort: “she was sure my ‘talent and enthusiasm’ could defeat Metro’s commercialism.”270

Viertel did not, as Lang or Wilder had, try to adjust herself to the studio system; she hoped instead that the studio would take an uncharacteristically enlightened approach to her script.

268 Letter from Viertel to Cukor, June 16, 1948, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, George Cukor Collection, file # 575. 269 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 152. 270 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 170.

The role of the émigré community in bringing the film about further distinguishes

Viertel’s story from Fury and Double Indemnity. She was not only encouraged by Garbo, but her husband Berthold as well; the latter would used his connections in the industry to find someone to translate the initial screenplay, written by Viertel in German. The film would eventually be directed by Russian émigré Rouben Mamoulian, who would go on to make a lasting impact on

Broadway, star Garbo and feature production design by Edgar Ulmer, who had come over from

Weimar to work with Murnau on Sunshine (1927).271 It was courtesy of Garbo that Viertel found herself introduced to Irving Thalberg, who would become the producer behind Queen Christina and Viertel’s eventual long-term boss at MGM. MGM offered Garbo a choice of directors, amongst which Garbo leaned towards Lubitsch, who was not available, von Sternberg, who had been directing the Scarlet Empress, and finally settled on Mamoulian – all recent émigrés.272 A story based in Europe, written, played, directed and designed by Europeans, Queen Christina was poised to meet the same reception as Schoenberg’s music and Eisenstein’s films. Rather than being lost of American audiences, however, as so much émigré work had been, the film has become a classic emblem of 1930s Hollywood, and considered amongst Garbo’s finest films.

Interestingly, what appears to have saved Queen Christina from the fate of most émigré films is precisely what is lost in Fury and Double Indemnity; the centrality of a strong, modern woman played by one of the most glamorous Hollywood actresses of the age. From its inception, what appealed to Viertel was the complicated and modern woman Christina seemed to have been, in her words, “a preposterous child of the heroic Gustav Adolph, she was eccentric, brilliant; and her masculine education and complicated sexuality made her an almost

271 Noah Isenberg, “Perennial Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G Ulmer and the Experience of Exile,” Cinema Journal 43 (2004), 4. 272 Marcia Landy and Amy Villarejo, Queen Christina (London: BFI Publishing, 1995), 9.

93 contemporary character.”273 Sarah Waters notes that “it is specifically with the issue of her sexuality that the Queen’s biographers have often found themselves engaged,”274 and Viertel was no different. This complexity of character and her deliberately modern gender ambiguity, a celebration of the progressive slack-donning androgyny of Dietrich and Garbo, carried on to the screen; Christina is declared to have been “brought up as a boy,” She wears men’s clothing, which leads her to be mistaken for a man while out riding, she reads, she governs ruthlessly and judiciously, and she takes lovers. It was a desire to depict a strong female character which attracted not only Garbo to the story, but Mamoulian as well, whose “preoccupation with women’s struggles, evident in his entire oeuvre, enhanced his fit with the entire Queen Christina project.”275 The film would reflect the theme of “a woman’s struggle against the constraints of convention,”276 apparent in many of Mamoulian’s films. This character, full of agency, stands in stark contrast with the weak or evil women of Lang and Wilder’s films. And it was on this character and her realization by Garbo that the studio focused its marketing efforts.

The studio sold Queen Christina as a Garbo picture. She was, without a doubt, its star; while casting leading men to act opposite her, Laurence Olivier was rejected after a screen test, reflecting later that he was “nervous and scared of my leading lady. I knew that I was lightweight for her and nowhere near her stature.”277 Mordaunt Hall wrote in The New York Times review that Garbo, “looking as alluring as ever, gives a performance which merits nothing but the highest praise. She appears every inch a queen.”278 According to Sarah Berry, Garbo had come to

273 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 152. 274 Sarah Waters, “‘A Girton Girl on a Throne’: Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism, 1906-1993,” Feminist Review 46 (1994), 41. 275 Landy and Villarejo, Queen Christina, 10. 276 Landy and Villarejo, Queen Christina, 10. 277 Landy and Villarejo, Queen Christina, 11. 278 Mordaunt Hall, “Queen Christina,” The New York Times Movie Review, Dec 27, 1933, accessed July 5, 2011 http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9802E1D91531E333A25754C2A9649D946294D6CF

94 embody, along with Marlene Dietrich, a sort of “Euroandrogyny,”279 and it was this quality, played up by the studios, which sold the film. The parallels between Garbo and her character emphasized this exotic androgyny; like her character, Garbo upset contemporary expectations by wearing men’s pants, a habit she shared with Dietrich and which became a token of their

Europeanism. Berry further notes that “the film has an ambiguous position on heterosexual romance because of her androgyny,” explaining that Christina’s “love affair primarily underscores the erotic freedom she feels while disguised as a man.”280 The film was written and intended for this female star, conforming to her own persona; perfectly illustrating the centrality of the star system which emerged around actresses in the 1930s.

Another indicator that the film was intended to draw in American women was the way in which it featured fashion. While Garbo was a sex symbol who appealed to male viewers, the elaborate costumes spoke to the escapism of fashion which would be coveted in particular by

Depression-era women. Queen Christina was one of the earliest films to feature the costumes, by renowned MGM designer Adrian, in commercial tie-in labels that were then made available for the public to purchase.281 And despite Thalberg’s initial objection that he did not “believe in historical films,”282 historical costume dramas became increasingly popular throughout the

1930s. Marie Antoinette (1938), Cleoptara (1934), Anna Karenina (1935), Mary of Scotland

(1936), and Gone With the Wind (1939), among others, prove the popularity of the historical biography and its use as a star vehicle for actresses, and accordingly, “the audience for historical costume film was presumed to be largely female.”283

279 Berry, Screen Style, xiii. 280 Berry, Screen Style, 180. 281 Berry, Screen Style, 21. 282 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 169. 283 Berry, Screen Style, 75.

What we see in these case studies is that, despite their conformity to the American studios, American tastes and American culture, Lang and Wilder did not conform with the growing Hollywood tendency to feature female stars in sympathetic roles that could then be sold the presumably female audience. It is the most typically émigré film, featuring a forward thinking, intelligent, androgynous woman in a position of political power, which conformed more closely to the studios’ desire to sell films to women by employing strong and relatable female characters. The explanation for this is not entirely clear. I do not presume that Lang or

Wilder refused to sympathetically represent women, nor do I think that the émigré community was more in tune with the rhythms of American cinematic consumerism and its demands of artists. What seems to account for the discrepancy is simply that, in order to succeed, the

émigré community needed to appeal to their audience; this meant featuring a popular female actress in a story which audiences could sympathize with and relate to. This was likely uncalculated, and the 1930s film trends simply allowed for a confluence of studio and émigré interests. Lang and Wilder, who were both enjoying autonomy in their roles – Lang already established before coming to America and Wilder well positioned within Paramount – did not need their films to conform to popular trends in order for them to be made and released. The studios had faith in the names and experience of the directors alone, and that could explain why their films, so dissimilar in their treatment of women from the pre-War canon of Hollywood film, have become emblematic of the émigré film. Their films, like the construct of the “Weimar

émigré filmmaker,” were both popular in America and yet distinctly foreign; the films completely conformed with the invented identity the studios had shaped for Lang and Wilder.

Queen Christina, on the other hand, so thoroughly an émigré film, is remembered today instead as a Garbo film and a typical Hollywood film. The success of a film made by the émigré

96 community necessitated the imperceptibility of foreign influence, while an “émigré film” as has become canonical in America, required it.

Conclusion: the closing of the window

The success of Queen Christina captured a perfect moment where the vision of the émigrés converged with that of the studios in a picture that was so seamless in its European and

American themes that it became simply associated with its star. This in and of itself – that “a film was known by its main star, not by its director” 284 – was characteristic of American cinema.

Viertel, Garbo and Mamoulian’s image of strong modern women found resonance and success courtesy of specific cultural trends of the 1930s; but as the Second World War came to a close, it became evident that the film’s success would not be easily replicated in a post-war American society, faced with the mounting spectre of Communism. The moment for innovative stories and depictions of modern women would come and go, and as the 1940s went on Lang and Wilder would meet increasing success, while Garbo would fall out of the public light, Viertel would become blacklisted and Mamoulian would return to the theatre where his vision was more easily accepted. American trends towards social conservatism regarding women's roles paired with a growing hostility towards immigrants meant that the émigrés who had promoted a liberal vision of women found their ability to work in Hollywood reduced, if not completely incapacitated, during the 1940s. The window for émigré success in Hollywood would be narrowly constrained by the shifting attitudes in a society they were still unable to navigate with ease.

Throughout the 1930s, women’s role in American families and within the political arena remained relatively stagnant. With the onslaught of the Depression, laws were passed which restricted women’s opportunities to work outside of the home and, as William H Chafe

284 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 502.

98 maintains, “the overwhelming majority of average citizens – including women – showed little interest in altering existing gender roles.”285 The hopes of sexual liberation disappeared, according to Sara Evans, with the public image of the flapper. The Depression, while straining the traditional household roles which held men as breadwinners, also led to a redomestication of women, who “revived their foremothers’ skills in home production to stretch family resources.”286 While 1921 saw the passing of the Sheppard-Towner bill – an unprecedented gain for women rights, the bill called for funding for maternity and childcare – by 1929 it expired permanently. Despite the recent political gains made by American women, the 30s would see public opinion polls announce that “more than 80 percent of Americans expressed the belief that *women’s+ proper place was the home.”287 After winning the vote in 1920, and becoming public, if not political, figures during the 20s, by the 30s, women’s political ambitions were modest, and the threat to tradition that had previously been posed by an active feminist movement was in recession.

Sarah Evans makes the connection between the emergence of “a new breed of

Hollywood stars, the femme fatales such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Bette Davis whose self-confidence and mannish ways filled the screens in the thirties” and the necessity of women during the Depression “to be grownups, partners in the struggle for survival.”288 The strong female characters of 1930s cinema did not pose a threat to the social fabric of American life as much as they provided an idealized image of female strength. Often at the film’s end

“marriage and domesticity provided the resolution”289 to what had seemed insurmountable obstacles facing the female characters. These female characters found themselves as the

285 William H Chafe, The Paradox of Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 121. 286 Sarah M Evans, Born For Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997), 200. 287 Evans, Born For Liberty, 202. 288 Evans, Born For Liberty, 197. 289 Evans, Born For Liberty, 198.

99 glamorous reflection of the real-life strength of Eleanor Roosevelt, who showed women’s ability to affect change, take on responsibilities and still be wives and mothers. And while women’s strength and maturity was called upon “the absence of a movement which articulated women’s specific concerns and interests” made women’s social contributions nonthreatening. Queen

Christina’s strength of character and devotion to her country mirrored the responsibilities

Midwestern mothers had for their families; while her thirst for knowledge, her political supremacy, her deliberate androgyny and ambiguous sexuality make her a truly modern depiction of liberated womanhood, in the end she relinquishes her political power in what she feels are the best interests of her country. And, of course, for love, a detail which led Garbo to feel “that her vision had been betrayed by Hollywood;”290 “just imagine Christina abdicating for the sake of a little Spaniard” she wrote in a letter to friends back in Sweden. Nevertheless, the message of devotion to simple domestic life, to being “not a queen, just a woman in a man’s arms,”291 permeated the film and would resonate with the female audience enduring the paucity of the Depression. That Christina abandoned her charge for a romantic adventure, and that this tryst turned tragic could also be seen as a warning to mothers and wives who longed to escape their responsibilities in the home. The strength of female characters was not revolutionary, inciting women to social liberations; it was reassuring escapism which assured women’s strength and valorized their self-sacrifice.

However, as the Second World War waged on, women channelled this strength into the workforce and began to threaten traditional gender roles which had been reinforced during the

Depression. Six million women joined the workforce over the course of the war; “wages leaped upward, the number of married women holding jobs doubled, and the unionization of women

290 Waters, “‘A Girton Girl on a Throne,’” 51. 291 Queen Christina (1933)

100 grew fourfold.”292 Just as there was backlash against the New Woman in Weimar in the aftermath of the First World War, so too did American men want to return from the Second

World War to a familiar household. Also comparable was the anxiety that arose amongst men: perpetrated by the media’s promotion of women’s wartime work, men were concerned that, having entered the factories and contributed to victory, women would not be content to return to their domestic lives. After the war, anthropologist Margaret Mead, as part of an anthology reporting on wartime life in America published in 1946, spoke eloquently to this anxiety:

The man overseas reads his paper or his magazine filled with news that women are doing new and therefore, by definition, “unwomanly” jobs, for a womanly job is just a job that everybody is used to seeing women do. He reads about the mannish clothes women are wearing, the welding outfits they are wielding, and he worries. What’s getting into women anyway? What will be the use of winning the war if when you go back home all the girls’ heads are filled with a lot of unfamiliar and unwelcome nonsense?293

Regardless of the permanency of the wartime changes on the lives of women – whether or not they found themselves confronting “the problem which has no name” as Betty Friedan would proclaim in 1963 – the anxiety was there. The film studios would adjust accordingly, and the female characters who had spoken to the power and ambition of women found no home in

Hollywood.

While Queen Christina would be a success in 1933, and studios would entertain a script about Marie Curie up until war broke out in Europe in 1939, by 1948 the possibility of realizing a historical film, set in Europe and featuring a controversial, emancipated woman was virtually nonexistent. Salka Viertel would continue to write scripts in the spirit of Queen Christina, despite the waning popularity of their intended star, Garbo. Two such scripts would fall into

292 Chafe, The Paradox of Change, 121. 293 Margaret Mead, “The Women in the War,” While You Were Gone: A Report on Wartime Life in the United States, ed. Jack Goodman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 277.

101 obscurity due to the changing mood of America due to the war; one featuring physicist Marie

Curie and the other, George Sand. Even when the Marie Curie project was proposed by Viertel in

1938, producer Bernie Hyman was aghast that Viertel could think of such a role for Garbo:

“What makes you think Garbo would be interested in that?...She’s never heard of Marie

Curie!”294 he declared, according to Viertel. Hyman was, of course, wrong, and in response to the telegraphed proposal, Garbo cabled “Love to play Marie Curie. Could not think of anything better.” Viertel was triumphant: “since Queen Christina she had not expressed herself so positively and directly.”295 Despite the studio’s reluctance, they poured resources into the film, soliciting Aldous Huxley for a script treatment and Cukor to direct and would even send Viertel to France to interview Irene Joliot-Curie, a physicist like her famous mother. In her memoire,

Viertel would significantly note that, though at the time unaware of its significance, the summer of 1939 when she would sail to France to research the Curies “was also the summer when

Congressman Martin Dies and his committee announced that Walter Wanger’s Blockade,

Warner Brother’s Juarez and Metro’s Fury were inspired by communists.”296 The film was trumped by the inevitability of war – “At the MGM office the Hitler-Stalin pact had changed everything. No one was interested in the film any longer”297 – and indicates Hollywood’s anticipation, or perhaps even precipitation, of the changing trends which would emerge with the advent of war. With the growing political tensions, Salka was told to start “thinking about a comedy for Garbo:”298 obviously a film featuring an ambitious and brilliant female physicist had no place in the wartime theatres. By the time the war had ended, however, the attitudes

294 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 218. 295 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 218. 296 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 227. 297 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 236. 298 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 239.

102 towards émigrés as well as to women’s upward social mobility which MGM had predicted would emerge did, making the George Sand project an impossibility as well.

Though the Communist witch hunts of HUAC are most strongly associated with the trials of the Hollywood Ten in 1947, as Viertel’s comment regarding Martin Dies indicates, as early as

1939 accusations of European favouritism in Hollywood would begin to proliferate. The magnates of the leading studios had been immigrants and they were now, according to detractors , sheltering, cultivating and promoting immigrant talent in one of the most prosperous and profitable American industry. While throughout the 1930s the diverse immigrant population had been part of Hollywood’s appeal – “a truly eclectic mix of characters that all combined to imbue ‘movieland’ with its magical essence”299 – by 1939 Martin Dies, a

Texas congressman, would found the House on Un-American Activities Committee to focus on

Hollywood’s supposed Communist threat. Long before the Hollywood Ten would stand and testify – or rather, refuse to testify, with Brecht, the eleventh “unfriendly witness,” as the only exception – to their communist involvement in 1947, the attitudes towards the fresh and innovative talent from abroad had been overturning. Anti-communism was easily transposed into a simple anti-Europeanism. The assault against “un-Americanism” was explicitly linked by

New York Republican congressman Hamilton Fish III to questions of immigration; “With the depression in full swing in 1930, the ‘threat’ that immigration posed to unemployed Americans served as a rallying point for Fish” who would go on to suggest “that the United States ‘deport every single alien Communist’ as a means of opening up jobs for those out of work.”300 Fish’s anti-immigration stance blanketed together immigrants with the threat of communism, and played on the fears that the dire economic situation posed to American families. The economy

299 John Joseph Gladchuck, Hollywood and Anticommunism, 1. 300 Gladchuck, Hollywood and Anticommunism, 52.

103 now secure after the war, having escaped the pseudo-communism of the New Deal by means of a wartime economic boom, Americans could more vocally denounce communism than they could when socialism had seemed to be the only reprieve from economic misfortune. Along with communism, many Americans became wary of the foreigners who had, according to Fish, taken precious American jobs during the Depression and flooded America in search of refuge during the war. The émigrés’ political activity in Hollywood, if not in fact communist, did not help their public image. According to Ed Sikov, “while few *of the émigrés+ were more than salon gauchistes, most had no qualms about working with Marxists to combat fascism:”301 this ambivalence towards Marxism, which had always paled in comparison with the threat of fascism for the émigrés, coloured the perception of all the émigrés as leftists, and association with groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League would make it hard to convince a sceptical public otherwise.

This anti-immigrant attitude converged with the anxieties regarding women’s place in the domestic sphere to make Salka Viertel’s Georges Sand project a hopeless endeavour.

Approached by George Cukor, who suggested Garbo for the role, many of the circumstances which shaped Queen Christina set the foundations for the Sand script. In 1947 Garbo would commit to the script; in a letter to Cukor’s Universal producer Peter Cusick would forebodingly mention that “most importantly *Miss Garbo+ is grateful to Salka for the incredible job of work

*sic+ that went into all of this.”302 This tone, echoed later in the letter when he writes to Cukor regarding the story construction, “I don’t know how much of this point you will feel like telling

Salka,”303 illustrates a dismissive attitude adopted towards the “more than six months of intense

301 Gladchuck, Hollywood and Anticommunism, 3. 302 Letter from Peter Cusick to George Cukor, November 10, 1947, File 575; George Cukor Collection, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (Los Angeles). 303 Letter from Peter Cusick to George Cukor, November 10.

104 work to write a film treatment”304 expanded by Viertel. Sensing the failure of the project she had worked so hard on being realized as she intended, she lamented to Cukor that “you know best that I never thought that George Sand should be made in Hollywood...This film will be only made in England or France or never be made at all.”305 This prediction – as well as her proclamation that Garbo’s “artistic integrity is something Hollywood will never understand and never value until she’s made a foreign film” – proved to be true. After the lawyer George Schlee became increasingly involved in the project, Viertel began to despair. To Cukor she wrote “the one thing that came out clearly from my conversation with Schlee was that he disliked George

Sand, de Musset and my story intensely:”

Dearest George, you know that I had never had such conceit to imagine that the work I have done is a finished screen play or drama. It represents a conscientious work about the most fascinating love story in the world of literature and I tried to make the characters as modern and alive as possible. Whoever read the story – and many different persons have done it – agreed that it was exciting, vital and ingenious... Alas – George Schlee’s world is...narrow and snobbish...306

Though she had to fight, Viertel was eventually paid for the story; “But the joy is gone!” she told Cukor: “Life is too short, all I want from it is harmonious and peaceful work for which I must have joy and enthusiasm.”307 This she would never find again. The debacle

“made Garbo once and for all renounce the screen.”308 Viertel soon realized she herself had been blacklisted.

304 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 300. 305 Letter from Salka Viertel to George Cukor, June 18 1948, File 575; George Cukor Collection, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (Los Angeles). 306 Letter from Salka Viertel to George Cukor, August 26, 1948, File 575; George Cukor Collection, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (Los Angeles). 307 Letter from Salka Viertel to George Cukor, August 26, 1948. 308 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 300.

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That year, Viertel would lament over how she “no longer saw those who still represented glamorous Hollywood.”309 Lubitsch had died and Brecht had fled and the possibility for “harmonious and peaceful work for which I must have joy and enthusiasm” seemed extinguished. While their legacy was continuing to influence

Hollywood, evidenced particularly by the prevalence of film noir, their actual contribution was increasingly limited. Not all émigrés faced the same fate Viertel would.

She was, however, representative of the ethos of the salon; Viertel was dedicated to artistic ideals and was only tentatively willing to compromise with the demands of the studios, which she bore with increasing exasperation. When her vision coincided with the popular trends in American film was when she met the greatest success – this would be true of Lang as well in the 1940s, as we have already seen Smedley point out.310 The director, however, would compromise to a much greater extent, experimenting with westerns as well as film noir. What must not be obscured is that not all the émigrés met with the same experience; what Viertel’s experience does reflect, however, is the absolute necessity of tapping into the trends in popular culture for American films to be successful. And while Wilder and scant others from the émigré community would be able to avoid the communist witch hunts of the 40s and 50s, blacklisting and suspicion of anyone who had been vocal in their denouncements of Hitler hindered the careers of most émigrés.

As the Weimar inspired femme fatale would begin to populate the film noirs of the 40s and 50s, the moment for the progressive depiction of modern women by the network of European émigrés had passed. It was Lang and Wilder, who adapted

309 Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, 302. 310 Smedley, “Fritz Lang’s Trilogy,” 2.

106 themselves to American themes, the latter much more adeptly than the former, and liberated themselves from the professional obligations to the salon émigrés who continued to have success throughout the 40s. However, even Lang despaired by 1957: his social critiques had been mistaken for political cynicism directed at the American government, and he suspected he had been blacklisted for some time. Having burned bridges with too many American filmmakers, unable to continue balancing his desire to engage with American themes with his Weimar roots which encouraged an engagement that was considered overly critical and pessimistic, he returned to UFA. The possibility for films shaped by the émigré subculture within Hollywood, the Weimar authors, composers, producers and actors who gathered at Salka Viertel’s on Sunday afternoons, would not survive the Second World War.

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Summary

In final summary, what this thesis hopes to have established is the timeline within which the

Weimar émigrés were best able to converge with the interests of the Hollywood studios, whose standards and functions were so drastically different than the elevated culture most had been accustomed to in Berlin. The highly commercialized American studios called for the émigrés to follow popular culture, rather than set the standard for an elevated and literary film culture; this, compounded with the hierarchy of the studios, linguistic hindrances and the cultural sensitivity to American moral norms necessitated by the Hays Code meant that many émigrés would struggle to re-establish their careers in Hollywood. For the émigrés of the salon, this period where they would find resonance with the studios’ aims was during the 1930s, when the studios and America felt threatened by neither the foreignness of the filmmakers nor the independence of their female characters. For as long as women were seen as a potential market for films, the creation of strong female leads who captured the sympathies of modern American women would flourish. For Lang and Wilder, the Germans as Americans wanted them to be, their invocation of the post-WWI image of the vamp meant that their films, which indicted strong-willed and seemingly selfish women, would find a stronger resonance in America after the Second World War.

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Sources Used

Film List: Fury, directed by Fritz Lang (1936: Los Angeles, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). M, directed by Fritz Lang (1931: Berlin, Vereinigte Star-Film). Blue Angel, directed by Joseph von Sternberg (1930: Berlin, Universum Film). Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang (1927: Berlin, Universum Film). The Woman in the Window, directed by Fritz Lang (1944: Los Angeles, International Pictures). The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang (1953: Los Angeles, Columbia Pictures Corporation). Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder (1944: Los Angeles, Paramount Pictures). The Lost Weekend, directed by Billy Wilder (1945: Los Angeles, Paramount Pictures). Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder (1950: Los Angeles, Paramount Pictures). Queen Christina, directed by Rouben Mamoulian (1933: Los Angeles, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Pandora’s Box, directed by G. W. Pabst (1929: Berlin, Nero-Film Studio). Shadows in Paradise: Hitler’s Exiles in Hollywood, directed by Peter Rosen (2008: Hollywood, White Star).

Archival Sources: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (Los Angeles). Adolf Zukor Collection Blue Angel Collection George Cukor Collection Fritz Lang Files Zinneman Collection Kurt Kreuger Manuscripts MPAA Production Code American Film Institute Archives The Harold Lloyd Master Seminar series: Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, William Wyler.

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