Brecht in Hollywood Hangmen Also Die and the Anti-Nazi Film Gerd Gemünden Die beste Schule für Dialektik ist die Emigration. Die schärfsten Dialektiker sind die Flüchtlinge. —Bertolt Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche (, :) [The best school for dialectics is emigration. The refugees are the sharpest dialectic thinkers.] I Bertolt Brecht arrived in San Pedro, California, on July and de- parted from the United States on November , one day after his HUAC hearing in Washington, DC. Often referred to as an exile in paradise, Brecht’s stay in this country proved to be one of the most difficult times of his life. It also turned out to be one of Brecht’s most prolific periods, leading to an out- pouring of poetry and prose, and to the writing of many plays which, when first performed upon his return to Germany, established his world fame. From the very beginning of his stay, Brecht also wrote scripts, outlines, and treat- ments—more than in all (Gersch :–)—which he hoped to sell to the Hollywood film industry. Yet apart from his ill-fated collaboration with Fritz Lang, Hangmen Also Die (), none of them ever made it onto the screen. Most literary critics have considered Brecht’s scripts and film stories as insignificant, and very much inferior to the plays and poems written during his years of exile. Brecht himself set the tone for this interpretation, calling these writings bread-and-butter jobs to which he subjected himself, all the while scolding the industry for which they were written. We all know the fa- mous verses about the market where lies are sold, and about the stench of greed and misery that suffocates the city of angels. The fact that Brecht failed in Hollywood has mostly been read as the con- sequence of the incompatibility of the German Marxist émigré and the capi- talist film industry. It has been blamed, too, on Hollywood’s strict formulas governing film writing, which left no room for Brecht’s real talents, or, alter- nately, on Brecht’s refusal to meet the expectations of the studios by compro- mising the notions of realism and anti-illusionism which had made him a The Drama Review , (T), Winter . Copyright © New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263534 by guest on 24 September 2021 Gerd Gemünden . Gestapo Chief Haas (Tonio Selwart) questions Professor Novotny (Walter Brennan) in Hangmen Also Die (), written by Brecht in collaboration with Fritz Lang. (Photo copy- right United Artists Corp.; courtesy of the Mu- seum of Modern Art) successful modernist in Weimar Germany. Rather than adding my name to the long list of those who have commented on this issue by simply taking sides (mostly the side of Brecht; see, for example, Lyon :–), I am in- terested in analyzing the reasons for Brecht’s lack of success in Hollywood within the larger context of German exile cinema. That is to say, I want to claim Brecht here as a German film émigré—against his own self-understand- ing and self-representation as an exiled Stückeschreiber [playwright], and against the overwhelming majority of critics and commentators who have considered Brecht’s oeuvre exclusively within the parameters of “Exilliteratur.” This different contextualization has important implications because it allows us to question Brecht’s works in new and productive ways. Whereas the field of Exilliteratur sees Brecht’s scripts usually as a mere footnote to his literary work and confines itself to questioning how “successful” Brecht was—for ex- ample, in translating elements of epic theatre onto the screen—discussions of exile cinema, in contrast, give such notions of fidelity, authenticity, and artis- tic integrity secondary significance. First and foremost, genre films produced within the studio system can rarely be discussed in such auteurist terms. The work of film writers was considered the product and property of the film stu- dio and subject to endless revisions and rewritings, often involving numerous (noncredited) authors (see Schatz ). Furthermore, unlike the exiled writ- ers who, for the most part, continued writing in German, exile film profes- sionals worked in English, either cowriting with English-language writers, or having their work translated by the studios. More importantly, they wrote for an American audience on topics the studios considered profitable and in a mode of address recognizable and understandable by domestic filmgoers. While the exiled writers often understood themselves to be the representatives of a “better Germany” whose traditions needed to be upheld and continued abroad (not seldom because they considered them “culturally superior”), film émigrés could not claim such outsider status. They therefore faced much stronger pressures to assimilate to the host country. In the case of Brecht, who even after eight years of flight from Hitler still considered exile a transitory state, the resistance to assimilation was particularly strong, leading to tensions that far exceeded those of most other film émigrés. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263534 by guest on 24 September 2021 Brecht in Hollywood This essay attempts to analyze this tension—or dialectic, as Brecht claims in the motto quoted above—between assimilation and resistance as it is played out in the anti-Nazi film Hangmen Also Die. Like other exile films, this film reflects the experience of those exiles who fled Hitler—the struggle against Hitler, the flight from persecution, the looming spectre of the concentration camp—and the attempt to communicate this experience to a foreign audi- ence. But the film does more than that: it actively participates and intervenes in issues that were not only central to the exiles but also to contemporary American politics, including discussions about memory, national loyalty and cultural identity, and the American public’s participation in the fight against Nazi Germany. II Reading Brecht as a film émigré may not be going as much against the grain as it at first seems. To begin with, it is important to remember that Brecht was not one of the many exile writers who came to this country because of a con- tract from a studio that helped him secure entry papers. Unlike Heinrich Mann or Alfred Döblin, Brecht was not forced to waste time and energy in some scriptwriter’s office, but chose to write for the studios as a lucrative if highly unreliable way of supporting his family and himself. Despite his invec- tives against Hollywood, during his six years in Santa Monica, Brecht derived most of his income from work as an independent screenwriter. It is equally important to remember that when Brecht began writing scripts for Holly- wood, he did not change careers, but rather returned to his beginnings, which lie as much with film as with theatre. In the early s, Brecht was a prolific film-script writer. Even after turning his full attention to the stage after his successful Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) he remained interested in film and radio as technologies that should support the politicization of art. His film Kuhle Wampe, a collaboration with Slatan Dudow, is now widely considered a model of what left-wing film aesthetics could have looked like had Hitler not come to power. And even the legal aftermath of Hangmen Also Die, when Brecht unsuccessfully called upon the Screenwriter’s Guild to demand that he receive credit for his screenplay, finds a precursor in the trial following G.W. Pabst’s adaptation of The Threepenny Opera. Both confronta- tions revolve around questions of artistic property within the capitalist system of production (see Brewster ). It is no coincidence that Brecht’s first—and ultimately only—script to make it onto the screen was an anti-Nazi film. This subgenre of the war film and the spy film was initiated with the release of Confessions of a Nazi Spy but did not really attain any significance until the U.S. entered the war and obliged Hollywood to participate in the war effort. The rising importance of the genre coincided with the arrival of a large wave of émigrés from Europe eager to find work. Exiles were now asked to contribute their firsthand knowledge of history and politics, while German-language actors and actresses encountered a rare opportunity to perform when their accents became desirable—even if, ironically, Jews played SS commanders. It was the genre in which exiles proved economically most successful; they participated as producers, directors, writers, or actors in about one-third of the anti-Nazi films that were made in the U.S. between and (see Horak and ). Among them were such renowned films as The Mortal Storm, Man Hunt, To Be or Not to Be, The Cross of Lorraine, and The Seventh Cross. Like all Hollywood films, anti- Nazi films had to entertain and make a profit, but they had to do more than that—they had to explain and justify to the American public the reasons for American participation in the war. These didactic and propagandistic elements certainly matched Brecht’s long-standing interest in breaking down the barriers Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263534 by guest on 24 September 2021 Gerd Gemünden between art and politics. Clearly, more than money mattered to him when he decided to write a script with Lang about the May assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. The differences that arose between Brecht and Lang have received consider- able critical attention (see Brewster ; Grimm and Schmidt ). Since questions of authorship are only of secondary interest for my argument, most of these differences can be by-passed here. Instead, I want to focus on the politi- cal function of the anti-Nazi film as a genre and its effectiveness in s war- time propaganda film.