The Writing on the Screen: Images of Text in the German Cinema from 1920 to 1949

THE WRITING ON THE SCREEN: IMAGES OF TEXT IN THE GERMAN CINEMA FROM 1920 TO 1949 by Daniel Heinrich Wild BA (equiv.), University of Bonn, Germany, 1992 MA, University of Pittsburgh, 1995 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2006 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Daniel H. Wild It was defended on April 21, 2006 and approved by Paul A. Bové, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh Lucy Fischer, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh Linda Schulte-Sasse, Professor, Department of German Studies, Macalester College Dissertation Advisor: Marcia Landy, Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh ii Copyright © by Daniel H. Wild 2006 iii THE WRITING ON THE SCREEN: IMAGES OF TEXT IN THE GERMAN CINEMA FROM 1920 TO 1949 Daniel H. Wild, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2006 By establishing a crucial figural relation between image and text in the cinema, this dissertation offers a detailed analysis of the uses of writing through select canonical works of a significant period in the history of the German cinema. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory and Gilles Deleuze’s conceptions of the cinematic image, as well as a Derridean definition of writing, I argue that instances of written text in images of the German cinema are social hieroglyphs rendered as allegorical gestures, which inscribe questions of authority in the form of grammatological constellations within the movement of images. These hieroglyphic configurations, spelled out as writing on the screen, stand in reference to specific modalities which affirm the presence of a larger organizational regime of truth. Instances of writing thus constitute the inscriptions through which such structures of power acquire legibility and, conversely, become visible. Ultimately, this figural regime delineates questions of the political constitution of the state because the struggle for authority and its legitimacy as an organizational system become embodied in allegorical forms of writing that inscribe the body politic into filmic texts as subject positions. This approach is predicated on a subjunctive dimension that redefines the intrinsic relation of the text to its “outside.” Chapters discuss the figure of authority in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Kameradschaft, circularity in Fritz Lang’s M and his Mabuse films, titles and writing in early Weimar film censorship decisions, the star figure of Emil Jannings in the Nazi film Ohm Krüger, and the postwar films Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns and Rotation. An epilogue investigates the reconfigurations of writing on the screen in R.W. Fassbinder’s Die Dritte Generation (1979) and the 1998 hacker film 23. In all of these case studies, I contend that writing in film remains significant when the image as such must be augmented by gestures toward a figural language. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................ V PREFACE....................................................................................................................................VI CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION: WRITING, TEXT, AND FIGURATION IN THE CINEMA........................................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER TWO: THE FIGURE OF AUTHORITY IN THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI AND KAMERADSCHAFT ..................................................................................... 50 CHAPTER THREE: THE LETTER AND THE LAW: MOBILIZATION AND ARREST ACROSS FRITZ LANG’S MABUSE FILMS AND M ......................................................... 120 CHAPTER FOUR: TITLES AND WRITING IN EARLY WEIMAR CENSORSHIP DECISIONS............................................................................................................................... 176 CHAPTER FIVE: THE BODY OF THE STATE: ON OHM KRÜGER BECOMING EMIL JANNINGS .................................................................................................................... 254 CHAPTER SIX: REÏNSCRIPTIONS OF THE DISPLACED: READING THE WRITING IN WOLFGANG STAUDTE’S DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS AND ROTATION... 314 CHAPTER SEVEN: EPILOGUE: THE TERROR OF THE TEXT IN 23 AND DIE DRITTE GENERATION........................................................................................................... 387 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................... 414 v PREFACE … im Erdensturz dem Umbruch einer Zeile noch zugewandt, bis an den jüngsten Tag erfüllend jene heilige Satzung, wo es auf das Komma ankommt, mag ich stammelnd dereinst nicht wissen, was das Thema war. –– Karl Kraus, “Nach Zwanzig Jahren” (1919) (… At earth’s decline still facing the page- proof of a line, until Doomsday complying with that sacred statute where a comma matters, I, stammering, may one day no longer know what the subject was. –– “Twenty Years Later”) I am grateful for the profound guidance from my committee members. Above all, I am indebted to Marcia Landy, my Doktormutter, for her vision, wisdom, and patience. I would also like to thank Lucy Fischer and Paul A. Bové for their graduate seminars, where this project was first articulated, and for their productive comments, elegant critiques, and rigorous readings throughout. I appreciate the assistance offered by Sabine Hake in the early stages of the project’s development. And for Linda Schulte-Sasse, whose participation, interest, and kind encouragement came at a crucial time for my work, I am especially thankful. Over the years, at vi the University of Bonn and the University of Pittsburgh, I have been fortunate to be surrounded by many great thinkers. A few, however, have consistently managed to convince me that our intellectual labor, so often lonely and vain, is not only worth pursuing but can indeed be a magnificent endeavor. For their far-reaching inspiration and intangible support, I thank the late Stefan Germer, Frank Kearful, Dana Polan, Jonathan Arac, and especially Vladimir Padunov and Nancy Condee. While studying at Pitt, I have benefited from the friendship and counsel of many of my fellow graduate students. Barry Howell, Seth Graham, and Aparna Nayak will always be my intellectual companions. For their kind and collegial assistance, I thank Ute Maschke, Ithaca, Andreas Pütz, Frankfurt, Liza Shineko, New York, Amy Villarejo, Ithaca, and Simon Ward, Edinburgh. Support for the research, development, and completion of the dissertation was provided in part by the generous assistance of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies, The Office of the Provost, and the Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh. This work is dedicated, with immense gratitude, to Susan and our daughter Angela. vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION: WRITING, TEXT, AND FIGURATION IN THE CINEMA The following is borne out of the desire to reconcile the conflict between two critical aspects that stand in seemingly diametrical distance to each other, the self-evident conceptual significance of the history of German cinema on the one hand and the marginal relevance of the single filmic element of writing among so many categories on the other, and thereby to delineate an area of critical interest in which these two aspects do not invalidate or oppose each other but instead continue to oscillate in a state of productive tension. More than any other medium, save perhaps for printed matter itself, the German cinema has justifiably been taken to task and summoned for historical evidence given its central prominence for the conjunction of film and politics, where the imaginary on the screen finds its actual corollary on the streets, so to speak, and this vise-like yoking in which “the German nation is haunted by its cinema screen, and the films are haunted by German history,”1 as Thomas Elsaesser puts it, has structured the critical horizon of a scholarship haunted by these dual specters. The awareness of this haunting presence is a familiar assertion by now, so that it has become customary for critical endeavors to announce from the outset a necessary paradigmatic departure from the umbrage cast by these specters. In turn, this horizon is defined by two figures 1 Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 3- 4. 1 that determine the ideological fiction which, in a variation of Elsaesser’s terms, constitutes the “two halves of a whole that to this day spells Germany’s national cinema.”2 These figures are Siegfried Kracauer with his From Caligari to Hitler from 1947 and Lotte Eisner with her 1952 work The Haunted Screen, works that so profoundly influenced the understanding of German cinema that they seem to define it to this day.3 In this respect, as a gesture of contraposing their works from these two figures, Tim Bergfelder notes a shift from the “methodological stranglehold… that has begun to unhook German film historiography from its anchorage in a political master narrative of nation,”4 Sabine Hake vows to “move beyond symptomatic readings of a few canonical films and famous directors,”5 and Thomas Elsaesser diagnoses a “historical imaginary” that is defined by a “quasi-existential bond between a group of

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