Entertaining the National Community 311 Butcher Even Decorated His Display Window with a Bust of Hitler Sculpted out of Lard
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Entertaining the National Community 311 butcher even decorated his display window with a bust of Hitler sculpted out of lard. In order to prevent a wholesale trivialization of the party’s symbols, the government quickly forbade ‘the use of emblems as well as names and symbols of the movement for the purposes of commercial advertising’. Since this proved inadequate, it soon passed a ‘Law for the Protection of National Symbols’ on 19 May, which subsequently had to be sharpened several times before achieving the desired effect. The extended versions of the law expressly prohibited, among other things, the use of Hitler portraits and swastikas for all advertising purposes, effectively copyrighting them on behalf of the party.²⁸ Incidentally, Nazi leaders were not the only ones playing this game. According to Goebbels’s diaries, the mother of Horst Wessel, the Nazi martyr who had written the lyrics for the party anthem ‘Die Fahne hoch’, also tried to claim proprietary rights over the song shortly after it was recognized as a national symbol under the law of 19 May.²⁹ But to return to the main point, the problems of brand protection showed that the relationship between Nazi propaganda and commercial advertising had to be managed carefully. The party might borrow as much as it wanted from the advertising industry, even arranging cabinet-level meetings with the American public-relations guru Ivy Lee, but commercial businesses were strictly prohibited from using Nazi brands.³⁰ As with all forms of commercial or political publicity, the key for Nazi inte- gration propaganda was to stir people’s desires while simultaneously channelling them in a particular direction. Put differently, the challenge was to strike a balance between release and control. In the context of 1930s Germany this elusive equilibrium was no more attainable via heavy-handed indoctrination than through the insistent didacticism of decades past. Although a more ideologically adamant approach might be practicable for the representative arts, when it came to the mass media the forms and messages needed to be more subtle, more consensual, more appealing. Although not everyone in the party leadership liked it, pleasure and entertainment formed the bedrock of popular culture in the Third Reich. ‘FILM FOR ALL’: CINEMA AND SOCIETY IN THE 1930s Given the far-reaching government control over the film industry, what is most remarkable about German cinema of the 1930s was not the appearance of obviously pro-Nazi dramas like Hitlerjunge Quex and Hans Westmar (1933), or monumental propaganda films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens ²⁸ Reinhardt, Reklame, 423–4; H. Berghoff, ‘Von der ‘‘Reklame’’ zur Verbrauchslenkung’, in H. Berghoff (ed.), Konsumpolitik (Göttingen, 1999), 93–4. ²⁹ Reuth (ed.), Tagebücher, ii. 811 (10 June 1933). ³⁰ On Lee, see Sproule, Propaganda, 55–6. 312 Entertaining the National Community (1935) and Olympia (1938), but rather how little the bulk of film production seemed to change. As Richard Grunberger put it long ago, ‘had a cinema-going Rip van Winkel dozed off in the Depression and woken in the Third Reich he would have found the screen filled with the self-same images: spike-helmeted, hollow-eyed soldiers ‘‘going over the top’’, bewigged courtiers posturing before rococo backdrops, poachers and milkmaids tangling among ears of golden corn, and ganglia-flexing mountaineers scaling cloud-wreathed pinnacles.’³¹ At first sight one is tempted to interpret these continuities as evidence of proto-fascist tendencies before 1933. But the more convincing explanation is that film in the Third Reich did not significantly diverge from previous trends or international norms. Amidst the many continuities there were, of course, certain changes from the Weimar era. The film images confronting Grunberger’s Rip van Winkel had indeed been around for years, but on closer inspection he might have noticed that certain things were no longer so common on the silver screen in the 1930s, such as the trickle of social critique and the ambivalent prognoses of modern society that were also part of Weimar’s cinema culture. In addition, he may have discerned a marked decline in low-budget films and a greater emphasis on the production of lavish melodramas and star-studded comedies capable of achieving cross-class appeal. Yet this does not change the fact that the cinema under the Nazis largely remained what it had always been: a commercial form of entertainment that, while unavoidably conveying certain political messages, was primarily geared towards enjoyment. The vast majority of feature films made in Nazi Germany thus followed the conventional format of love stories, dramas, and comedies that had pulled in the crowds for decades and were simultaneously being churned out in Hollywood, Paris, and London. Insofar as there was anything distinctive about them, it was the degree to which they fused personal happiness with social harmony. These themes lay at the core of some of the most successful German films of the 1930s, whose obligatory happy ends generally involved the parallel resolution of social conflicts and personal problems. An example was Willi Forst’s Maskerade (1934), in which the heroine, played by Paula Wessely, finally resolves an ongoing dispute over a nude painting by appealing to the compassion of her jealous physician husband Peter Peterson to save the life of the offending artist, Adolf Wohlbruck. In a somewhat similar vein, Paul Martin’s box-office hit Glückskinder (1936) ends with Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch finding true love after initially pretending to be married in order to avoid jail, in the process reacquiring Fritsch’s lost job and clarifying Harvey’s family identity. Both of these films demonstrate the common recipe of interweaving a central love story with a wider set of social relations, in which the resolution of group tensions goes hand in hand with the fulfilment of individual desires. In this formula, the social and the personal suggestively converge into a wider community of fate. Finding love coincides with the ³¹ Grunberger, Social History, 475. Entertaining the National Community 313 attainment of justice and understanding, and individual happiness derives not from resisting the external pressures of society (as Romeo and Juliet), but rather is predicated upon harmonious social relations and the alleviation of tensions.³² Most feature films of the 1930s followed the typical conventions of dramas, adventures, thrillers, musicals, or comedies. Overtly ‘political’ films were rare, and remained so even during the war. Even many of the productions commissioned directly by the state (which amounted to less than 10 per cent of all films made) were for all intents and purposes entertainment films.³³ Although German film companies proved more than willing to cooperate with the regime, there were commercial and artistic limits to churning out overt propaganda. The fact that even so skilful a propaganda film as Triumph des Willens ran only three days in Berlin and, according to SPD agents, ‘exerted only a very slight attraction’, clearly showed the risks involved.³⁴ Ultimately, neither the industry nor the government had any interest in compromising the entertainment value of the cinema. Personnel factors might also have played a role, for despite the purges of 1933 the film world was probably the least Nazified segment of the cultural elite. Axel Eggebrecht, a former communist who was eventually allowed to work as a scriptwriter after his arrest in 1933, recalled that ‘nowhere, in no other surroundings ...did I feel as safe as among film people. Anyone who was a National Socialist there was so well known that one simply avoided them.’³⁵ Although the cinema was certainly not a politics-free zone within the Third Reich, it is nonetheless striking how ‘normal’ it appeared to many contemporaries. ‘One has to look a long time before one finds a cinema programme announcing a film with an obvious political slant,’ remarked the party’s youth journal Wille und Macht in 1937. ‘Even the most suspicious film-goers cannot claim that German films seek to hit them over the head with politics or to impose a world-view. Except for portions of the newsreels, cinema in a newly politicised Germany amounts to an unpolitical oasis.’ The SPD’s informants largely concurred, noting that ‘anything one could speak of as a new world-view is entirely absent’.³⁶ Interestingly enough, this assessment was even shared by many who suffered grievously at the hands of the regime. The Jewish Filmbühne, a cinematic ghetto established after Jews were banned from mainstream cinemas in November 1938, found nothing wrong with the bulk of German film productions; indeed they constituted well over two-thirds of its entire repertoire (alongside mainly US films).³⁷ Understandably, its audiences tended to prefer films that were set ³² See esp. L. Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich (Durham, NC, 1996); Rentschler, Ministry; Kreimeier, Ufa Story, 236–46. ³³ Welch, German Cinema, 42–3. ³⁴ Deutschland-Berichte, ii. 714. ³⁵ E. Offermanns, Internationalität und europäischer Hegemonialanspruch des Spielfilms der NS-Zeit (Hamburg, 2001), 60. ³⁶ Quotes from Rentschler, Ministry, 19; Deutschland-Berichte, iv. 911–12. ³⁷ E. Offermanns, Die deutschen Juden und der Spielfilm der NS-Zeit (Frankfurt a. M., 2005), 67–70. 314 Entertaining the National Community abroad or in the past rather than in current-day Germany. But as it happened this excluded only a small proportion of available pictures. So-called ‘Auslandsfilme’, that