POPULAR CINEMA OF THE THIRD REICH doc

POPULAR CINEMA
OF THE THIRD REICH
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Popular Cinema
of the Third Reich
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN
SABINE HAKE
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Copyright © 2001 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2001
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should
be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819,
Austin, TX 78713-7819.
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The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of
ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hake, Sabine, 1956–
Popular cinema of the Third Reich / Sabine Hake.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-292-73457-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—
isbn 0-292-73458-1 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. National socialism and motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures—
Germany—History. I. Title.
pn1995.9.n36 h34 2001

791.43Ј0943Ј09043—dc21 2001027790
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Preface vii
1. Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema:
A Definition of Terms 1
2. Made in 1933: German-Jewish Filmmakers and the
Forced Coordination of the Industry 23
3. Cinema, Set Design, and the Domestication of Modernism 46
4. At the Movies: Film Audiences and the Problem of Spectatorship 68
5. Stars: Heinz Rühmann and the Performance of the Ordinary 87
6. Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord (Final Chord, 1936):
A Case Study of Film Authorship 107
7. The Foreign and the Familiar:
On German-American Film Relations, 1933–1940 128
8. The Annexation of an Imaginary City:
The Topos “Vienna” and the Wien-Film AG 149
9. The Power of Thought:
Redefining Popular Cinema between Realism and Illusionism 172
10. A Question of Representation:
Working Women and Wartime Cinema 189
11. The Legacies of the Past in the Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 210
Notes 231
Select Bibliography 263
Index of German Titles and Names 267
CONTENTS
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Why another study on the cinema of the Third Reich, and why now? The
slow unification of both Germanys after the opening of the Berlin Wall and
the changing political landscape in Europe since the 1990s have brought a

renewed interest in the Third Reich, especially around issues of popular
culture and everyday life. Many factors have contributed to this develop-
ment: the revisionist histories of the Third Reich and their relevance to the
conception of postwar Germany; the confrontation with the legacies of the
German Democratic Republic and the old Federal Republic; the heated de-
bates around appropriate forms of public commemoration in relation to the
Holocaust and World War II; and the growing attention to questions of na-
tion and national identity in the new Berlin Republic.
In the cultural sphere, the return to conventional genre films since the
1990s has demonstrated the importance of indigenous popular traditions.
Contributing to this trend, German film scholars have turned to the cinema
of the Third Reich and begun to explore previously neglected areas and un-
charted territories in what is still regarded by many as a highly problematic
period of film history. Most initiatives have been informed by the desire
to move beyond deterministic theories of propaganda and ideology and
incorporate more film-specific methods and inquiries. The main focus has
been on the so-called Unterhaltungsfilme (literally, entertainment films)
that, more than anything, confirm the pervasive influence of popular cul-
ture. Among other things, this revisionist project has drawn attention to the
conflicts, contradictions, and compromises in a cinema all too often dis-
missed as escapist entertainment or vilified as mass manipulation. Yet what
still deserves to be examined in greater detail are the heterogeneous ele-
ments, including the social fantasies, cultural traditions, economic interests,
PREFACE
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and institutional pressures, that thrive even under the conditions of state
ownership or control.
It is in response to these larger debates that my study on popular cinema
in the Third Reich calls for the normalization of German film history. Un-
til unification, Third Reich cinema has been treated as the ultimate Other

of German cinema and its competing discourses of art cinema, popular cin-
ema, and national cinema. Especially the totalizing views of cinema and
propaganda, ideology, and the fascist imaginary have provided a substitute
for detailed historical research and political analysis. Likewise, the circular
reasoning behind much writing (e.g., cinema as ideology as cinema) has
produced the kind of extraterritorial space, or bifurcated narrative, that
makes possible the reconstruction of an untainted filmic tradition associ-
ated with Weimar cinema, exile cinema, DEFA cinema, and New German
cinema. The more Third Reich cinema is conceptualized in the homoge-
nizing terms of domination and conformity, the more the pre-1933 and
post-1945 years can be associated with a liberating heterogeneity. The iden-
tification of fascist mass culture with classical Hollywood cinema often has
a similar effect, with the blanket dismissal of these two extreme examples of
the culture industry opening up a space for the (often posthumous) valida-
tion of modernist practices and postmodern sensibilities. Normalization in
this overdetermined context therefore means the recognition of the conti-
nuities on the aesthetic, cultural, social, and economic levels that haunt the
history of German film beyond all ideological divisions and political rup-
tures; it also means an acute awareness of the paradoxical, asymmetrical,
and nonsynchronous relationship between cinema and politics both then
and now. As a result, Third Reich cinema can no longer be treated as an
aberration of the past but must be acknowledged as an integral part of the
aesthetic and ideological legacies of the twentieth century, including its
traumas and burdens.
The present book contributes to the reassessment of popular cinema in
the Third Reich by redefining both the subject and the method of inves-
tigation. Three basic assumptions inform my thinking about the material
to be presented on the following pages. First, cinema in the Third Reich was
above all a popular cinema sustained by well-established generic conven-
tions, cultural traditions, aesthetic sensibilities, social practices, and a highly

developed star system. Second, these popular forms and styles developed
through the selective incorporation of elements from the pre-1933 period
into post-1933 cultural practices and the ongoing transformation of these
viii Popular Cinema of the Third Reich
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elements in the productive encounter with other national cinemas, espe-
cially the dominant Hollywood model. Third, the discourses of the popular
and the political remained at odds with each other and, based on their dif-
ferent investment in the national and the international, and the modern and
the traditional, entered into highly unstable and invariably provisional al-
liances. Beyond the institutional and ideological pressures typical of any
state-controlled cinema, the often evoked specter of a media dictatorship
remained precisely that: a phantasmagoria. However, this phantasmagoria
also opened up a space for the convergence of popular traditions, cultural
ambitions, and international styles in the building of a public sphere pre-
sumably free of politics.
Paying equal attention to the constituent elements of popular cinema is
relevant not only for the rewriting of film history but also for a better un-
derstanding of the politics of entertainment during (and after) the Third
Reich. In light of these wider implications, the prevailing filmic forms and
practices can no longer be reduced to the opposition of entertainment vs.
propaganda, nor can they be examined solely through the intentions of the
Propaganda Ministry or the thematic overlaps with key ideas in Nazi ideol-
ogy. Instead the process of incorporation, transformation, and instrumen-
talization must be evaluated in the larger context of German cinema, in-
cluding its history and historiography. For this reason, I propose to shift the
terms of the debate from the study of individual films to the examination of
popular cinema as a social, cultural, economic, and political practice. That
means: to move beyond the text-based models shared by the earliest stud-
ies on film propaganda and the most recent theories of the fascist imaginary

and to develop further the contextual models that show popular cinema as
a historically specific articulation of social fantasies and mentalities and ex-
amine its relevance as an ongoing negotiation of conflicting positions and
influences. Key to this conceptual realignment is the insistence on cinema
as a material practice and historical force. Yet new insights into the simul-
taneously stabilizing and destabilizing function of popular cinema can only
be gained through approaches that recognize its multiple functions as a lo-
cal and national industry, a cultural institution, a public sphere, a social ex-
perience, and, of course, a fantasy machine.
Defining popular cinema as a dynamic process that involves aesthetic
styles and social practices, cultural traditions and economic products, pub-
lic institutions and private imaginations, and, last but not least, various no-
tions of “the popular” expands the area of investigation not only in relation
Preface ix
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to the constituent elements and processes. Greater awareness of the com-
plex nature of popular cinema and its privileged moments of crisis, contro-
versy, and compromise also forces us to rethink many of the tacit assump-
tions about the sociopsychological function of mass entertainment in the
Third Reich and, more generally, in modern Germany. In particular, the
event-based nature of cinema brings out the most effective forms of nego-
tiation and the most important areas of contention in the social and cultural
practices that are implicated in, but never reducible to, dominant ideology.
The theoretical implications of approaching popular cinema as a site
of ongoing struggle are far-reaching. In terms of German film history, the
focus on typical genres, tastes, and styles draws attention to the discontinu-
ous continuities—that is, the prevailing modes of representation and their
changing critical and aesthetic investments—that defined classical genre
cinema from the late 1920s to the 1950s. Moreover, the attention to indus-
try practices and audience expectations highlights the extensive exchanges,

again with the necessary modifications, between a self-consciously national
(and nationalistic) cinema and the kind of international tendencies and de-
velopments associated with Hollywood. In terms of modern German his-
tory, the emphasis on popular traditions shifts the terms of the debate from
a deterministic relationship between cinema and ideology to the often in-
consistent articulation of that relationship in economic strategies, political
measures, artistic traditions, social movements, and, perhaps most impor-
tantly, popular tastes and mentalities. And in terms of film studies, the
combination of textual and historical analysis moves the study of popular
cinema beyond the binaries of propagandistic vs. escapist, subversive vs.
affirmative, or innovative vs. conformist that continue to influence the de-
bates on the fascist imaginary in often unproductive ways.
As I want to argue, popular cinema in the Third Reich must be ap-
proached through its inherent contradictions. On the one hand, its most
successful genres and most popular stars confirm the formative influence
of the early Weimar sound period and point to even stronger connections
with the classical Hollywood cinema of the 1930s. On the other hand, the
Gleichschaltung (forced coordination) of the industry in 1933 completed the
institutional alignment with the ideology of National Socialism, primarily
through the new anti-Semitic measures and the creation of a highly politi-
cized genre, the so-called Staatsauftragsfilm (state-commissioned film). On
the one hand, the identification of popular cinema with escapist entertain-
ment helped to maintain the institutional divisions between high and low
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culture and between the public and private sphere of which cinema had al-
ways been an integral part. On the other hand, the affinities of popular cin-
ema with consumerism, urbanism, and everyday life dissolved these bour-
geois categories of distinction into more elusive configurations between
aesthetics and politics, power and desire. On the one hand, the emphasis on

fantasy and illusion made popular cinema a privileged site for the imaginary
resolution of social and psychological conflicts and therefore instrumental
to the preservation of the status quo. On the other hand, the cinematic ex-
perience in the widest sense gave rise to other meanings and effects that,
while not subversive as such, often threatened the overall system of prohi-
bitions, restrictions, and controlled transgressions.
Articulating some of these contradictions, the book is organized around
different aspects of popular cinema and, by extension, elements of film
analysis (e.g., genres, stars, directors, audiences). By exposing Third Reich
cinema to these categories, the following eleven chapters try to shed light
on the cinema’s precarious position between political, social, and economic
interests; regional, national, and international influences; high and low cul-
ture, as well as modern and antimodern definitions of art and design; petit
bourgeois, popular, populist, and völkisch traditions; and the various ide-
ologies that sustained classical narrative cinema during the 1930s and early
1940s, including the ideology of National Socialism. In such an expanded
definition of popular cinema, the popular and its affiliated terms (e.g., pop-
ulist, folkloric, petit bourgeois) open up a new perspective not only on Ger-
man cinema before 1933 and after 1945 but also on the function of film
history and, by extension, of cultural history in the conceptualization of
popular culture in relation to national culture, regional culture, and folk
culture.
Several assumptions entered into the selection and presentation of the
historical material. First, only a context-based definition of popular cinema
is able to reconstruct the processes of appropriation, incorporation, and
transformation that connected filmic practices after 1933 to the Weimar pe-
riod and to classical Hollywood cinema and that facilitated the many over-
laps with musical, literary, and theatrical culture. Second, the mass appeal
of popular cinema must be examined through the functioning of cinema
as social experience and public event and, furthermore, through its affini-

ties with modern design, urban lifestyles, and other mass media practices.
Third, the ideological functions of popular cinema, whether in relation to
classical narrative cinema or the fascist public sphere, have to be assessed
Preface xi
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primarily through its successes and failures—that is, through those moments
where the plans about political indoctrination and mass manipulation are
implemented, modified, or abandoned altogether.
While taking the form of self-contained essays, the individual chapters
are organized in a roughly chronological fashion that acknowledges the
considerable differences between the prewar and war years and pays close
attention to the filmic legacies associated with the years before 1933 and af-
ter 1945. In the selection of the material, I have tried to strike a balance be-
tween relatively unknown topics (e.g., film theory in the Third Reich) and
topics with heightened relevance to film theoretical debates (e.g., Detlef
Sierck and authorship). Moreover, I have made an effort to include a wide
variety of primary and secondary sources that, in ranging from star biogra-
phies to studio histories and reception studies, are bound to bring out the
complexities and contradictions of the historical period under investiga-
tion. Finally, I have emphasized the perspective of the typical, the average,
and the ordinary in order to move away from the few privileged texts that
have been enlisted in the creation of a new symptomatology of fascism.
Accordingly, Chapter 1 looks at the peripheral role of popular cinema
in the existing scholarship on propaganda and ideology and proposes a crit-
ical reassessment of ambiguous terms such as “escapist” and “entertain-
ment” and their discursive function in the context of national cinema and
popular culture. Chapter 2 reflects on the historical designation “made in
1933” by measuring the impact of anti-Semitism through the thematization
of exclusion in two romantic comedies by German-Jewish directors. Chap-
ter 3 considers the legacies of high modernism in the work of several famous

set designers from the Weimar years and traces the domestication of the
modern style from the technological thrillers of the early 1930s to the
women’s films of the early 1940s. Chapter 4 gives an overview of the exten-
sive debates on audiences in the trade press and in academic scholarship
and shows to what degree mass-psychological theories served to address
persistent concerns about the elusive conditions of film reception. Chapter
5 enlists the screen persona of Heinz Rühmann and his approach to comic
acting in a sustained reflection on the crisis of modern masculinity and pe-
tit bourgeois consciousness.
To continue with this brief overview, Chapter 6 uses a close reading
of Detlef Sierck’s Schlußakkord to look at film authorship in relation to the
stylistic possibilities of melodrama and the genre’s precarious alliance with
artistic and cultural ambitions after 1933. Chapter 7 expands the concept of
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national cinema into international practices by comparing the undimin-
ished appeal of Hollywood films during the 1930s and the very different sit-
uation of German films in U.S. markets. Chapter 8 follows the changing
meaning of “Vienna” as an important cultural and political topos in Ger-
man and Austrian films made before and after the annexation, with special
attention paid to Willi Forst’s Vienna Trilogy. Chapter 9 approaches the
extensive writings on film during the Third Reich as part of an ongoing,
and ultimately failed, effort to incorporate older discourses of filmic realism
into a more flexible aesthetic of reception indebted to fascist notions of pop-
ulism and folk culture. Chapter 10 analyzes the overdetermined function of
women, and the problem of modern femininity, by looking at the represen-
tation of working women in wartime cinema. And Chapter 11 considers the
diverse attempts at coming to terms with the cinema’s own past in a num-
ber of postwar films about, and with, famous stars from the Third Reich.
The individual chapters are designed in the form of case studies that,

while contributing to a coherent argument about the highly adaptable na-
ture of popular cinema, cannot be reduced to one particular thematic fo-
cus or conceptual category. In response to the particular difficulties of
writing about cinema in the Third Reich, I have chosen an approach that
articulates my resistance to totalizing models on both the conceptual and
analytical levels. Aiming at a kaleidoscopic effect, as it were, every chapter
is structured around one particular problem or problematic. To give an ex-
ample, Chapter 4 on film audiences focuses on the prevailing debates on
audience preferences during the Third Reich but also considers the wider
implications of introducing a category like reception into the study of a cin-
ema often described as totalitarian. Ideally every critical category sheds
light on all the other categories and, in so doing, contributes to the process
of historical revision that draws attention to the economic, ideological,
cultural, and social influences and the pervasiveness of institutional and
aesthetic compromises. Moreover, every aspect of popular cinema interacts
with all the other aspects in order to bring out the multitude of filmic prac-
tices that can neither be reduced to, nor separated from, the ideological and
institutional pressures associated with National Socialism, the Propaganda
Ministry, and the film industry during the Third Reich.
Within this kaleidoscopic structure, the individual chapters are none-
theless connected to each other through a number of recurring themes: the
generic and stylistic traditions that link filmic practices in the Third Reich
to the Weimar period and the postwar years (2 and 11); the centrality of clas-
Preface xiii
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sical narrative cinema and the star system (7 and 11); the persistent prob-
lems in defining the project of national cinema against the dominance of
Hollywood and through alliances with other German-speaking cinemas
(7 and 9); the almost compulsive concern with identity, especially in rela-
tion to gender and class (1 and 10); the preoccupation with audiences and

questions of spectatorship (4 and 9); the strong ties between popular cin-
ema and musical culture and the heavy reliance on literary and theatrical
traditions (6 and 9); and, last but not least, the continuous compromises on
all levels between film as art, entertainment, commodity, and propaganda
(5 and 6).
As regards the wider implications of this study, my reasons for creating
these kaleidoscopic effects can be summarized as follows: First, by focusing
on popular cinema, I hope to move beyond the conceptual models that sub-
ordinate filmic practices to theories of fascism or the culture industry, and,
in so doing, stabilize their more problematic qualities through the aesthetic
and ideological effects attributed to popular cinema. Second, by organizing
my argument around the main elements of cinema, rather than those of pol-
itics and ideology, I want to emphasize what I have earlier described as dis-
continuous continuities in German cinema before 1933 and after 1945 and
in international developments during the 1930s and early 1940s. From such
a perspective, what is at stake is no longer just the cinema of the Third
Reich, but German cinema as a whole.
Of course, my intention is neither to depict popular cinema in the Third
Reich as merely an artistically inferior or ideologically more insidious ver-
sion of Hollywood; nor to disregard the conditions of production and re-
ception in a state-controlled cinema and incorporate its films into an un-
differentiated body of work—that is, of mass entertainment—available to
changing forms of cultural consumption. On the contrary, it is my belief
that only this process of historical revision will bring into relief the partic-
ular characteristics—the Otherness—of German cinema after 1933, and do
so precisely through the practices shared with other national cinemas of
the period. Only by moving beyond the double dangers of demonization
and banalization can we engage productively with the continuous challenge
of the Third Reich to present-day debates on popular culture and political
ideology.

In the writing of the book, many friends and colleagues have generously
offered their support during various stages of the project, and I would like
to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to them: Lucy Fischer,
xiv Popular Cinema of the Third Reich
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Mary-Beth O’Brien, Stephen Brockmann, Fred Evans, Gerd Gemünden,
Alice Kuzniar, Marcia Klotz, Marcia Landy, Barbara McCloskey, Stephen
Lowry, Johannes von Moltke, Annette Kuhn, Thomas Saunders, and Katie
Trumpener. For their willingness to listen to preliminary thoughts on the
subject, I want to thank sympathetic audiences at the German Studies As-
sociation Annual Convention and at the Hollins Colloquium on German
Film. Parts of chapters have profited from the critical comments of col-
leagues at conferences and at lecture series at the Universität Dresden, the
University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Southampton, the
University of Warwick, and Dartmouth College. Discussions with graduate
students at the University of Pittsburgh have helped me to clarify my argu-
ment; I am particularly indebted to Daniel Wild. Bozena Goscilo provided
valuable editorial advice. Jan McInroy and Jim Burr at the University of
Texas Press were very supportive; Paul Spragens provided meticulous copy-
editing. Last, but not least, I am grateful to the staffs of the Margaret Her-
rick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly
Hills; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Stiftung Deutsche
Kinemathek and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin; and the Interli-
brary Loan Office at Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh. Parts of this
research have been supported by a DAAD Study Visit Grant, as well as a
Hewlett International Grant and a Small Research Grant from the Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh. It is with great joy and deep gratitude that I dedicate this
book to Fred Nutt.
An earlier German version of Chapter 5 appeared as “Heinz Rühmann
und die Inszenierung des ‘kleinen Mannes,’” in montage a/v 7, no. 1 (1998):

33–56. An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared as “The Melodramatic
Imagination of Detlef Sierck: Final Chord (1936) and Its Resonances,” in
Screen 38, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 129–148.
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Until recently, the cinema of the Third Reich has been treated as the ulti-
mate Other of world cinema. Excluded from standard film historical and
theoretical analyses, the more than one thousand feature films produced
during the period have remained closely identified with the critical para-
digms of propaganda studies and ideology critique. Both have generated the
kind of summary treatments, captured in terms like “Nazi cinema” or “Nazi
film,” that often include sweeping conclusions about mass manipulation,
popular entertainment, and fascist aesthetics but divulge little about the
constituent elements of popular cinema: the leading stars and directors, the
1
POPULAR CINEMA,
NATIONAL CINEMA,
NAZI CINEMA
A DEFINITION OF TERMS
I.
01-T1832 9/10/2001 4:17 PM Page 1
popular genres and styles, the favorite studios and theaters, and so forth.
Klaus Kanzog has recently concluded that “we have long ago reached con-
sensus over the ideological premises of the films and even feel satisfaction
about having more or less closed the chapter on ‘National Socialism and
Film.’”
1
Nothing could be further from the truth. The cinema of the Third
Reich has never been exposed to the full range of critical perspectives avail-
able within film studies. Much of the basic research still needs to be done,
and many of the questions have not even been asked.

In this chapter, I want to develop new critical perspectives based on the
aesthetic, social, cultural, and economic practices associated with popular
cinema. As a way of introducing the larger project, I begin with the defini-
tions of “popular cinema” in the existing scholarship and examine some of
the hidden assumptions behind the two main elements, “popular” and “cin-
ema,” that have sustained this seemingly self-evident but also curiously un-
dertheorized term. The second and third parts then consider some of the
other terms, including “national cinema,” that contributed to the specific
qualities of popular cinema in the German tradition and that, in combina-
tion with recent debates on the meaning of the popular in film studies and
cultural studies, might be enlisted in a different history and historiography
of popular cinema in the Third Reich.
2
To summarize a prevailing trend in the scholarship from the 1970s
to the 1980s: The more that was written about the propaganda films, the
less became known—and appeared worth knowing—about those countless
genre films categorized as “mere entertainment”; that is to say, films that
were considered neither part of art nor propaganda and that often seemed
closer to other rituals of mass consumption than to legitimate cultural forms
and practices. The more some scholars concentrated on the filmic represen-
tation of key concepts in Nazi ideology, the less they paid attention to the
vast body of work that presumably only served escapist functions and had
no aesthetic value or social significance on its own. And the more other
scholars speculated about the fascist aesthetics, the less they were willing to
consider the continuities of classical narrative cinema in an international
context or to take into account the historical conditions of film production
and reception. Even the turn to cultural studies in the last decade has not
resulted in radically new approaches that, by moving from textual to con-
textual models, might be better suited to trace the complicated processes
within popular cinema as an economic, social, and cultural practice.

Historically, the conceptualization of entertainment and propaganda as
2 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich
01-T1832 9/10/2001 4:17 PM Page 2
a kind of figure-ground effect must be traced back to Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels, who, in his public talks, always made the distinction be-
tween the 20 percent big-budget films with clear propagandistic intentions
and “the 80 percent good, decent entertainment films on a high artistic
level.”
3
Exile film critics were the first to challenge this division and draw
attention to its political function. In a pamphlet written for the “purposes
of psychological warfare,” Siegfried Kracauer asserted that “all Nazi films
were more or less propaganda films—even the mere entertainment pictures
which seem to be remote from politics.”
4
The same argumentation in-
formed Hans Wollenberg’s more tentative conclusion, also from the 1940s,
that “even apparently harmless subjects, comedies or even musicals, have
somehow a tendency to advance Nazi ideologies.”
5
Relying on an episte-
mology of suspicion through qualifiers like “more or less” and “somehow,”
Kracauer and Wollenberg laid the foundation for the conception of popular
cinema as simultaneously separated from, and implicated in, the Nazi prop-
aganda machine. In most subsequent descriptions of this undistinguished,
formless mass called “entertainment films,” aesthetic and moral judgment
usually takes the place of close analysis, a move that is legitimated with ref-
erence to the escapist nature of the films in question. And in all cases, the
unquestioned assumptions about the total control of the Propaganda Min-
istry over the filmic imagination serve to protect against uncomfortable

questions about the continuities of popular cinema and the social practices,
attitudes, and mentalities that sustain it and, in turn, are sustained by it.
The indifference toward, and ignorance of, the so-called entertainment
films fulfill three distinct but related functions, all of which bear witness to
the films’ problematic status in German film history and social histories of
the Third Reich. On the most obvious level, the argument about apolitical
entertainment provides justification for the pervasive presence of these
films in today’s culture, whether in the form of television programming,
video releases, or film retrospectives. The insistence on a sharp distinction
between politics and entertainment allows audiences both young and old to
indulge freely in nostalgic celebrations of what has become known as “the
golden days of UFA [Universum Film AG].”
6
The countless memoirs by
writers, actors, and directors have further contributed to such patterns of
reception. To mention only two examples, screenwriter Axel Eggebrecht
insists that “to a large degree, films in the Nazi state were not at all Nazi
films.”
7
And director Herbert Maisch cites the regular television reruns of
one of his films from the early 1940s as proof that the work remained “un-
Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 3
01-T1832 9/10/2001 4:17 PM Page 3
blemished by the times in which it was produced.”
8
Thus it should not sur-
prise that even an unrepentant fan like Karlheinz Wendtland asserts that
“the penetration of every single feature film with Nazi ideology has never
been proven.”
9

Yet no matter whether the films are enlisted in acts of ritu-
alistic deconstruction or ironic appropriation (e.g., Zarah Leander as a gay
icon) or exposed to redemptive readings that focus only on formal qualities
and directorial styles (e.g., Veit Harlan as an unacknowledged auteur), they
still remain cultural products of, and historical documents from, the Third
Reich. It is precisely for this reason that the historical and contemporary
relevance of these films cannot be explained through the false oppositions
of art, entertainment, and politics that have accompanied their critical re-
ception from the beginning.
Secondly, the unwillingness of scholars to deal with popular cinema
masks an elitist contempt for mass cultural productions and their presum-
ably passive consumers; hence the derogatory tone in many discussions of
escapism and illusionism. In the same way that moral indignation about the
Propaganda Ministry’s insidious manipulations is predicated on the model
of a liberal public sphere, the aesthetic dismissal of “mass entertainment”
betrays two equally bourgeois notions, the aesthetic superiority of autono-
mous art and the affirmative character of the culture industry. Thirdly, the
tendency to see popular cinema only in the context of hegemonic practices
distracts from the differences and contradictions within popular culture and
often ends up supporting reactionary views on modern mass culture as an
insidious form of controlling private fantasies and desires—of course, not
those of educated individuals but only of “the masses.” Similar patterns of
argumentation can even be found in early Marxist studies on popular cin-
ema that treat its mass-produced fantasies as a manifestation of false con-
sciousness and the kind of petit bourgeois culture that allegedly poses a se-
rious threat to the authentic culture of the working class.
Within these argumentative patterns, the forms and functions of pop-
ular cinema tend to be examined either through the notion of political
propaganda or in the context of ideology critique. To begin with the early
studies on film and propaganda, most analyses assume an institutionalized

relationship between propaganda and entertainment (i.e., Goebbels’s
20 percent–80 percent model) that can be studied through conceptual op-
positions such as overt vs. covert, latent vs. manifest, textual vs. contextual,
and so forth.
10
In the earliest and still most extensive quantitative study
4 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich
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published to this day, Gerhard Albrecht relies on such a conceptual model
in distinguishing between the few infamous films with a manifest political-
propagandistic function and the overwhelming majority of entertainment
films with a latent political-propagandistic function. According to Albrecht,
the latent meanings in what he categorized as serious, humorous, and
action-oriented films can be uncovered through a combination of textual
and contextual factors, including narrative content, production history, and
critical reception.
11
Most studies on film and propaganda determine the propagandistic
function of the so-called entertainment film by looking either at the work
itself, the conditions of production, or the conditions of reception. Some-
times the distinction between political propaganda and apolitical entertain-
ment is based on essential textual differences that manifest themselves in
the thematic concerns of individual films. This approach is exemplified by
David Stuart Hull, who cites the Allied Control Commission’s findings that
as few as 141 of a total of 700 suspect feature films were “politically objec-
tionable” to conclude that “only a small number of films made during the
Third Reich contained propaganda.”
12
Dissolving the meaning of propa-
ganda entirely into the conditions of production, Richard Taylor offers a

radically different definition, namely that if the “conscious purpose is to lull
the audience in order to manipulate its opinions for political ends, then we
are concerned with film propaganda: if not, then we are concerned with en-
tertainment pure and simple.”
13
At first, David Welch’s observations on “the
majority of ‘escapist’ films that were produced . . . principally for entertain-
ment purposes”
14
sounds surprisingly like Taylor’s, given the same refer-
ence to “purposes” (i.e., intentionality). Yet Welch ultimately places greater
weight on the actualization of these intended meanings by different audi-
ences. Accordingly, he dismisses the official distinction between entertain-
ment and propaganda as yet another attempt by the Propaganda Ministry
to achieve full control over the cinema, its fantasies, and, perhaps even more
important, its discourses as well. Where Hull relies on manifest content and
thematic classifications in order to defend the majority of films against ac-
cusations of ideological contamination, Welch turns to the rituals of movie-
going to assess the contribution of the division between the “political” and
the “apolitical” to the preservation of the status quo. In his view, the mass
appeal of the so-called entertainment films hinged on a carefully con-
structed illusion about everyday life, for “by visiting the cinema, people
Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 5
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could pretend that fascist ideology or principles, as disseminated in films,
did not meaningfully impinge on everyday life or force them to restructure
their system of values radically.”
15
The most radical challenge to the propaganda model and its conceptual
binaries has been developed in the context of ideology critique. Here the

contribution by Stephen Neale is worth quoting at some length. For it iden-
tifies the basic contradiction at the core of all those contributions that
constantly hover between conceiving entertainment films as non-
ideological and escapist and therefore performing an ideological
function in not confronting “reality,” or else as embodying Nazi ide-
ology in a hidden way through particular modes of characterisation
or the portrayal of validated narrative actions. The latter are differ-
entiated from propaganda because they are somehow not “overt” or
were not produced at Goebbels’s behest. However, if they are not
“overt” it is still assumed that they can be read in the covertly in-
scribed manner . . . that this will always be so, and this because of an
intentionality that remains, in essence, in the film, rather than be-
cause the nature of the specific conjuncture in which the films were
first made and viewed forces that reading.
16
According to Neale, an expanded notion of ideology avoids such im-
passes in the theorizing of popular cinema, especially if its products and
practices are conceived not in the sense of deceptions and illusions but as
part of a fully developed theory of filmic representation and social reality.
Defined in that sense, ideology establishes symbolic systems that take the
form of cultural institutions, aesthetic practices, and critical discourses.
Popular cinema represents one of the most important sites of negotiation for
the conflicting forces that define the relationship between individual and
society. In its infinite capacity for creating, circulating, and controlling pri-
vate and public fantasies, classic narrative relies on specific patterns of
identification in order to establish subject positions that actualize and inte-
grate these conflicting forces. The resultant subject effects, as it were, give
rise to the fantasy of a coherent, unified self and, in so doing, contribute to
the production of social consensus and political hegemony. Yet it should al-
ways be remembered that, to quote Fredric Jameson, “the production of

aesthetic or narrative forms is to be seen as an ideological act in its own
6 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich
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right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to un-
resolvable social contradictions.”
17
Stephen Lowry has been one of the first to utilize such an extended no-
tion of ideology in a thorough analysis of what he, somewhat surprisingly,
still describes as “shallow, seemingly apolitical entertainment films.”
18
Fol-
lowing Jameson, Lowry approaches ideology in Nazi cinema not through
particular contents, but through the mobilization of emotions and desires
and their imaginary reconciliation in accordance with the changing de-
mands of culture and society; hence his conclusion that “we need to shift
our perspective from a narrowly political definition of ideology which asks
what ‘message’ films might have had, and instead scrutinize how films actu-
ally negotiated cultural and ideological conflicts.”
19
According to Lowry,
the question about the specifically fascist nature of these films can only be
answered through historical contextualization, including greater attention
to the close connections between new mass cultural forms and established
cultural practices within the fascist public sphere.
Such affinities undoubtedly confirm popular cinema as an integral part
of the process of modernization and the experience of modernity, but only
if cinema is fundamentally redefined as a practice and event. The proposals
by Lowry and others for what is alternately referred to as historical con-
textualization, interdisciplinary approaches, or cultural-studies readings re-
main incomplete as long as they fail to achieve the conceptual shift from

Ideology to ideologies. Above all, this requires greater attention to the com-
plicated relationship of popular cinema to high and low culture, as well
as to regional, national, and international culture in the context of institu-
tional practices, aesthetic forms, and cultural traditions. Otherwise the
study of cinema and ideology will end up with new conceptual impasses
caused by, on the one hand, the radical expansion of the fascist imaginary
into popular culture and everyday life and, on the other hand, the equally
problematic identification of cinema under fascism with the ideology of
classical narrative cinema.
Resisting such temptations, Karsten Witte has perhaps gone furthest in
opening up the field of inquiry to a variety of popular genres, especially the
revue films and the romantic comedies; he also has been most willing to defy
the conventions that have made research in this area such a difficult and of-
ten inhibiting endeavor. His intellectual commitments are captured in the
surprisingly simple and, for that reason, all the more provocative proposi-
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tion that, “Instead of determining which features constitute a fascist film,
we need to examine how films functioned under fascism or rather, in the
context of fascism.”
20
Continuing along similar lines, though in very differ-
ent theoretical contexts, Linda Schulte-Sasse has recently suggested that
“rather than taking ideology as the starting point and looking at how movies
show ideology, we can perhaps take movies as the starting point and exam-
ine how they harbor, transform, exceed, and undermine political ideol-
ogy.”
21
Her focus on fantasy as a framework in which desire becomes pos-
sible, even if it remains an impossible desire, has shed new light on the

affective structures that dissolve the political into the experiential and, for
that reason, can only be understood through a similar conceptual shift from
the “management of ideas” to the “management of desire.”
22
The growing attention to the formal aspects of classical narrative cin-
ema has contributed significantly to the long overdue mapping of popular
cinema and its hidden attractions. However, the continuous privileging of
the filmic text in the conceptual trajectory from “manipulation” (i.e., in the
propaganda model) to “interpellation” (i.e., in ideology critique) and “fan-
tasy production” (i.e., through psychoanalytic readings) also raises new
questions. For instance, it might be argued that these contributions have
only updated the terms of analysis by enlisting the symptomatic nature of
“Nazi cinema” in the new constellations of mass culture, modernity, and
postmodernity. A thus expanded notion of fascist fantasy production, which
finds its ideal manifestation in the Hollywood dream factory, is bound to
distract from, if not act against, the historical specificity in the filmic artic-
ulation of power and pleasure. Accordingly, Schulte-Sasse’s emphasis on the
close affinities between the subject effects of fascism and classical narrative
cinema culminates in a typical postmodern reading of “National Socialism
as virtually synonymous with illusion, theater, or spectacle.”
23
But behind
the theories of subjectivity, her study on fantasies and subject effects also
perpetuates the vilification of classic narrative found in more familiar argu-
ments against film propaganda as well as Hollywood cinema. Following a
similar pattern of argumentation, Eric Rentschler uses a series of individ-
ual readings to conjure up the image of a cinema of illusions that, in his
view, must be described less as the culmination of the dialectics of moder-
nity than as “a preview of postmodern attractions.”
24

Yet this new theoret-
ical alliance does not prevent him from denouncing Nazi cinema as “a cul-
ture industry in the service of mass deception” where the films “offered
only an illusion of escape from the Nazi status quo.”
25
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Based on the groundbreaking work of Witte, Rentschler, and Schulte-
Sasse, a younger generation of American scholars interested in cultural
studies has begun to study aspects of popular cinema in the context of other
cultural practices, discourses, and traditions, including the persistent appeal
of American mass culture, the phantasmagoria of German colonialism, and
the predominance of the star system.
26
All contributions are informed by
the desire to move beyond the conceptual divides that have limited much
early scholarship to totalizing models of explanation, whether they are
called propaganda, ideology, or the fascist imaginary. My study hopes to
contribute to this trend by presenting a number of critical concepts and
models for thinking about popular cinema along social, cultural, political,
and economic lines. While open to interdisciplinary approaches, I rely pri-
marily on film studies as a discipline perfectly suited to provide the basic
terms of analysis in what must be regarded as a crucial moment of histori-
cal and theoretical reassessment. And while I am not denying the attrac-
tiveness of a delineation of the postmodern that begins with Hitler’s appro-
priation of Hollywood, as it were, I also take seriously the historical legacies
of modernization and modernity after 1933 and pay close attention to their
changing interpretations in the aesthetic, economic, political, and social
practices that constituted popular cinema in the Third Reich.
II.

After this overview of the existing scholarship, my goal is to outline an
alternative model that locates the specificity of cinema in the Third Reich
not in some stable ideological system or institutional structure but in actual
filmic practices. In order to define these practices in a larger social and cul-
tural context, I want to use the second part of this chapter to consider some
of the historical conditions that made popular cinema such an important
medium, both of conflict and compromise, in the articulation of modern
lifestyles and contemporary sensibilities after 1933. Three factors, I believe,
are central to its undisputed ascendancy: the complicated relationship to
the project of mass culture and modernity, including the progressive lega-
cies from the Weimar years; the heavy reliance on the conventions of clas-
sical narrative cinema both in its Germanized and Americanized versions;
and the inherent tension between a market-driven economy and a dictato-
rial political regime.
Throughout the period in question, the cinema’s direct appeal to petit
bourgeois consciousness, including its social insecurities and rigid moral
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