The_Triumph_of_Propaganda_Film_&_National_Socialism_Hilmar_Hoffmann

86 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 87Nazi movement—not simply to escape material hardship, but to large segment of the upwardly mobile \"new middle class,\" thefind a w a y out of what Georg Simmel, in describing conditions so-called white collar proletariat {Stehkragenproletariat).after 1900, called \"the crisis of the soul.\" Already in 1932, TheodorGeiger had analyzed the social makeup of Hitler's supporters. The Aside from the terrorism that had already begun. Hitler owedsocial crisis that developed toward the end of the Weimar repub­ his electoral success in 1933 to the multitudes of voters w h o feltlic as a result of unemployment and the Depression played into totally confused by the overwhelming number of parties andHitler's hands and helped him to give people a sense that the party platforms that were a result of the use of proportional rep­Nazis would take care of and protect them from \"society's natural resentation in elections to the Reichstag. In addition, he garnereddisasters\": \"[The Party] tightened the knots of the social [safety] the votes of anybody who was disgruntled over Germany's bat­net to catch everything (and everybody) and insure protection tered international reputation. Hitler admitted that Germany wasagainst the universal fear of falling through the mesh and slipping positively panting for order during these momentous days ofinto poverty.\" decision. Parliamentarism seemed to have reached the point of absurdity when in 1932 just thirteen meetings of the Reichstag Hitler and the groups close to him clearly understood how to were deemed necessary and the legislature had in effect been abol­create the impression that only the radical forces that he repre­ ished as a result of the frequent use of presidential emergencysented and that were determined to change the system could, in decrees {Notverordnungen). The Nazis promised to lead the m a s s e sfact, turn the catastrophic economic and social situation around out of this vale of woe. Moreover, Hitler understood how to capi­for the better. They claimed that under Hitler the kind of devas­ talize on the bankruptcy of other parties.tating inflation that took place from 1922 to 1923 would not recur.Using every means of propaganda at his disposal. Hitler commu­ Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich refer to the \"interde-nicated to people the hope that under his rule fascism would pendencies\" that played an important part in the whirlpool effectbecome totalist and thus better able to solve all of society's prob­ of the mass media campaign to mislead and that furthered thelems. [Fascist] totalism, he said, would prove to be a good and notion of \"the helpless man in the street being passively sweptbeneficial solution—^not to mention the correct one. along.\" The Mitscherlich's are correct in recognizing that con­ sideration of the problem should begin, not with the period of The propagandists sought to justify their shrill and effective catastrophe, but \"with the state of untroubled harmony that pre­appeal to injured national pride and historical instincts by point­ viously existed between people and dictator.\" Broad segments ofing to w h a t Hifler called t h e \"shameful diktat of Versailles.\" the German population were, after all, very much in favor of aIndeed, the peace treaty of 1918 forced Germany to suffer consid­ leadership \"that ... succeeded in combining typical Teutonicerable losses of territory. Alsace Lorraine, taken after the Franco- ideals with national self-esteem. It gave people the chance toPrussian War, was returned to France. The Saar coal region embody their self-importance in a uniform. Authorities, visiblyremained under French administration until 1935, the Rhineland organized in ranks and hierarchies, suddenly appeared in profu­demilitarized until 1936. East Prussia was separated from the rest sion before the eyes of 'fellow Germans' long disillusioned byof Germany by a wide strip of territory ruiming through West 'party squabbles.' The readiness and promptness of our GermanicPrussia to Poland. The German Baltic port of Danzig was trans­ obedience was duly tested, and an almost unbounded will toformed into an internationalized free city under the League of show ourselves worthy of the Führer's hopes spread quickly.\"'^Nations. Large parts of Upper Silesia were lost to the reconstitutedPolish state. Finally, the occupation of the Ruhr by French and Bel­ The Nazis pronüsed to set an example and undertake punitivegian troops remained a thorn in the side of national pride, with expeditions against the \"initiators\" of the ever-present crises inpainful long-term effects. people's personal lives, i.e., against Bolsheviks, Marxists, and cap­ italists—the three collective enemies of the people—and, above In addition to the veterans of World War I and the army of all, against the Jews, again and again, against the Jews. Anti-Semi­six million unemployed, the Nazis drew their massive social tism became the centerpiece of National Socialist propaganda,strength from the ranks of the declasse lower middle class a n d a and the Nazis used any occasion to stir the flames of hatred against the Jews.

The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 89 By airing similar themes in the press, on radio, in films and In bringing together the various virtues designed to stabilizepublic speeches, the Nazis fulfilled what A d o m o called the \"col­ Nazi power, Saul Friedländer sees a \"singular expression of a flowlective power fantasies\" of people who were powerless as indi­ of ideas, emotions, and phantasms\" that are kept separate in allviduals and \"considered themselves somebody only in terms of a other m o d e m W e s t e m societies. National Socialism, he writes, \"inpowerful collectivity.\" This is w h y the stab-in-the-back legend, as its singularity, as in its general aspects, is the result of a large n u m ­Hitler adapted it for propaganda purposes, fell on such fertile soil, ber of social, economic, and political factors, of the coming to a headespecially in view of the fact that it was linked to the promise of of frequently analyzed ideological currents, and of the meeting ofrevenge. The Nazis were determined to generate a new national the m o s t archaic myths and the most m o d e m means of terror. \"^^self-confidence in which every individual would share. Thenational humiliation of Versailles would be erased; the all-cor­ The Nazis allowed their followers to work off their pent-up orrupting influence of the Jews eliminated, along with the initiators stirred-up aggressions, unhindered and with impunity, againstof corruption themselves; the class warfare stirred up by capital­ anyone deemed by Hitler to be a \"representative of the system\"ists and communists would end; the working class, threatened by (the Weimar republic) and therefore fair game. Jews suffered thea decline in its social status, and the notoriously disgruntled lower most in this regard. Hitler had, in his own words, \"fanaticized themiddle class would be absorbed into a new egalitarian German masses\" in order to make them a tool of his policy. The masses werenational-racial c o m m u n i t y {Volksgemeinschaft). to be \"swept along\" by the emotional appeal of the movement. However, since it was not as easy to do away with capitalism as The Ministry for Popular Enlightenmentit was to get rid of communists—at least for the time being—cap­ and Propagandaitalists were enlisted to work for the national cause. The Nazisconsidered they had done their socialist duty by establishing the Only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will theGerman Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront or DAF), which sup­ masses finally remember them.ported the government, and by setting up a classless nationalcommunity. Therefore, they had no need to interfere with private Adolf Hitler^oownership or \"creative Aryan capital.\" Hitler's bequest to his people—a bequest fraught with g r a v e con­ Nationalist sentiment, once inflamed, called for a red flag to sequences—was one of total submissiveness, as evidenced by thegive it cohesion, a flag \"with a big swastika for the little m a n \" enthusiasm of the masses for certain aspects of his destructive(Bertolt Brecht). With its völkisch ideology a n d its v a r i o u s organi­ Utopia a n d their acquiescence in his v a g u e promises. To replacezations, the Nazi Party was able to \"combine symbols that were the previous state of confusion, the Nazis prescribed a set of polit­effective in persuading the masses and revolutionary in style with ical \"convictions\" and their own code of ethics for the masses.a doctrine that masked the reactionary class structure of German Since National Socialism was incapable of developing a coherentsociety. Uniforms and ranks, medals and decorations were used ideology of its own, the Nazis proceeded to plunder other ideolo­for the purpose of integrating people and opening up opportuni­ gies and create surrogate religions by means of a kind of aggres­ties for 'individuals to rise' in the newly created militarized hier­ sive anti-ideology, the purpose of which was to maintain the newarchy.... Thus numerous opportunities were created to promote social order and keep themselves in power. In essence, there wasand satisfy individual ambitions without threatening private no ideology to propagandize. Propaganda was a substitute forproperty rights.\"^^ ideology. Propaganda itself was the message, down to and includ­ ing school textbooks. On 11 March 1933, six weeks after the so- Along with the new social hierarchy, there also existed a new called Machtergreifung o r \"seizure of power,\" the Nazis set u p thehierarchy of mutually dependent fascist virtues that served as the \"Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.\" On 13foundation of the new state: loyalty, honor, comradeship, obedi­ March Joseph Goebbels was named to head the ministry and wasence, willingness to make sacrifices, fighting spirit, bravery. TheNazis used these martial values to legitimize their efforts to exter­minate anyone who opposed their fascist scale of values.

90 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 91sworn in the following day. A decree issued by President von Hin­ form and content of propaganda \"must be geared to the broaddenburg that same day outlined the mission of the new ministry mass.\" Therefore, \"all propaganda must be popular and its intel­whose very name was a perversion of the concept of enlighten­ lectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligencement. \"The Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda has been among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the massestablished for the purpose of enlightening and propagandizing it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level willthe people with regard to the policies of the Reich government h a v e to be.\"^^ Hitler's cynical estimation of the intellectual level ofand the national reconstruction of the German fatherland.\" the people who applauded his actions was outstripped by reality and in that sense confirmed the \"correctness\" of his view that pro­ The supreme demagogue of the ministry announced the pro­ paganda \"must be measured exclusively by the effect of its suc­grammatic objectives of total mass persuasion: \"The great initia­ cesses.\" The first Reichstag elections in the one-party state on 12tives must come from here. There are two ways to make a November 1933 confirmed the Nazis' calculations and gave themrevolution. You can blast your enemy with machine guns until he 92 percent of the vote: \"The battle has been fought and victoryacknowledges the superiority of those holding the machine guns. achieved. Just yesterday on Sunday the flags and banners wereThat is the easy way. Or you can transform the nation through a waving ... to invite every German to do his duty, and today theyrevolution of the spirit, and instead of destroying your enemy, win w a v e as beacons of jubilation and victory.\"^^him over. We National Socialists have taken the latter approachand will continue to do so. The noblest goal of this ministry is to By the same token, however, propaganda revealed the \"intel­w i n the entire nation over to the n e w state.\" Gleichschaltung or lectual level\" of those like Goebbels and Rosenberg who \"mar­bringing everyone into line was now the chief task of the newly keted\" ideology using every device at their disposal and in a waycreated ministry, and Bernhard Rust, a Reich Commissioner in the that was unsurpassed in its lack of moral scruples. In his bookPrussian Culture Ministry, was quite frank when he described the Blut und Ehre (Blood a n d H o n o r ) , Rosenberg c a m e to the conclu­process on 12 M a y 1933: \"Our [policy of] Gleichschaltung m e a n s sion that in comparison with the other arts \"film, because of itsthat the n e w G e r m a n v i e w of the w o r l d (Weltanschauung), simply capacity to affect primarily the emotions and the poetic [side ofby dint of the fact that it has the force of law, takes precedence man], i.e., nonintellectuals, has a particularly forceful and endur­over any other view.\" ing impact on the psychology of the masses and in propaganda.\"^ It soon b e c a m e patently clear that Gleichschaltung w a s simply a For Goebbels, too, the first commandment of the cinema waseuphemism for annihilation. Those who resisted being brought \"not to practice psychology, but to tell a story through pictures.\"^*into line were forced to back down. In fact, radio had become so H e tried to downplay Hitler's actions by calling them \"a processthoroughly attuned to the Nazi world-view within just a matter of for d e v e l o p i n g a n opinion\" (Willensbildung). In actuality, ofa few weeks that even Dr. Goebbels felt obliged the following year course. Hitler's actions were based on a well thought-out planto reprimand broadcasters for their \"vigorous politicization.\" whose aim was to create total dependence and subordination. InApparently, zealous party members had gone overboard in trying Hitler's own words: \"All effective propaganda must be limited toto achieve their goals. a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to under­ A short time later, the cinema, the theater, the press, and every stand b y y o u r slogan. \"^^other branch of journalistic, artistic, and scientific activity subordi­nated itself to the dictates of propaganda. What had now come to The \"very few points\" enunciated in 1933 differed from thefruition was perfectly consistent with what Hitler had formulated arguments advanced during Hitler's wars of conquest. Likewise,in Mein Kampf in 1 9 2 5 . Although t w o million copies of the book the arguments brought forward during the middle period ofwere in circulation in 1933 (one of the most bought and least read Hitler's regime differed from those advanced during its finalbooks in Germany), even those few who were familiar with its con­ phase, when the Nazi rulers \"put them to use as slogans\" in thetents evidently did not take seriously the consequences of Hitler's disintegrating Third Reich. During the first six years of thehateful a n d cynical theories. In Mein Kampf Hitler h a d plainly regime, in other words, until Hitler's attack on Poland, the intentanticipated the role of propaganda in a National Socialist state. The of the Nazis' propaganda slogans was to anesthetize the Germans

92 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 93ideologically, that is, to instill into the national consciousness the four existing newsreel companies (Ufa, Tobis, Deulig, and Fox)dubious criteria formulated to prove the innate superiority of the under the control of his ministry and merged them to form a sin­Germans over other races, criteria that were proclaimed as new gle w a r newsreel, the Deutsche Wochenschau. \"News policy is anational virtues. Propaganda formulas accessible to all Germans weapon of w a r in wartime. It is used to w a g e war, not to providegave birth to clever catch phrases that were used to arouse the information,\" Goebbels noted in his diary.\"masses' most basic instincts\" (Goebbels). As the fortunes of war began to turn against Hitler after the Scientifically untenable claims and elitist ideas regarding defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, Goebbels's propaganda and prevari­\"racial purity,\" and \"Aryan blood\" were put forward to highlight cation machine constantly ground out new slogans about the needthe Nazis' negative image of Jews and to warn the Germans of the to \"hold out\" against all o d d s {Durchhalten), w h i c h h e convinc­mortal national danger posed by \"subhumans.\" ingly \"authenticated\" with the aid of \"film documents.\" Newsreel propaganda reveled in the outpourings of hate about \"German The Nazis took control of the arts by imposing their own soldiers horribly mutilated by Soviet beasts\" and \"women rapedNational Socialist ideals and dictating which artists were to be the by eastern subhumans,\" as it sought to mobilize the last reservesobject of public adulation. They laid the groundwork for the in the homeland against Germany's mortal enemy. These \"docu­takeover by juxtaposing so-called \"degenerate art\" and Nazi- ments,\" which were never described more specifically, werea p p r o v e d \"völkisch culture.\" Hitler w a s \"absolutely\" c o n v i n c e d important in maintaining the will to endure. The propagandiststhat all culture was \"almost exclusively the creative product of the wanted every German man to see his own mother, wife, or sister,Aryan.\"^^ Verbal montages such as \"German culture,\" \"the Ger­ and every German woman to see her own husband, son, brother,man national community,\" \"German youth,\" \"the German or father in the figure of the d e a d fellow G e r m a n projected on thewoman,\" \"German blood,\" etc., implicitly belittled anything that screen. This kind of atrocity propaganda was not the least of thewas not German. Only Germans were endowed with the most reasons that Hitler was able to prolong the war until May 1945.noble virtues, e.g., cleanliness, discipline, courage, the spirit ofsacrifice, loyalty, honor. \"Loyalty is m y honor\" {\"Meine Ehre heißt When Germans greeted or saluted each other, they did so in theTreue\") w a s the m o t t o inscribed on the belt buckle of e v e r y SS name of the Führer (\"Heil Hitler\"); and when they died, they wereman. The thousand-year Reich was to be made up of men imbued prepared to die with his name on their lips. Virtually every officerwith these sorts of hyped virtues. The Nazis generated catchy trainee in the trenches carried a c o p y of Hölderlin's novel Hyper­metaphors to prepare the nation for Hitler's wars of conquest, to ion in his knapsack a n d could quote the line in which the famousjustify them as legitimate acts of defense, and to mobilize the army poet glorified sacrificing one's life for one's country: \"Now her­of fellow-travelers for the purpose of achieving \"final victory.\" alds of victory descend: the battle is ours. Live on high, O Father­H a n s Grinun's n o v e l Volk ohne Raum ( N a t i o n W i t h o u t Space)^^ land. And count not the dead! For you. Beloved, not one too manyoffered arguments to justify the conquest of territories in Eastern has fallen!\" In his Christmas Eve radio address on 24 DecemberE u r o p e . The \"shameful diktat of Versailles\" w a s u s e d to legitimize 1942, Goebbels sought to mitigate the idea of dying on the battle­the invasion of France. \"What could you do with the Versailles field b y s h o w i n g that Hölderlin's w o r d s reflected \"[one of the]peace treaty?\" Hitler asked rhetorically. His answer: \"[The harsh but courageous lessons of war, a lesson that offers comforttreaty's] boundless repressiveness and shameless demands [have and strength, only in a loftier sense.\"produced] the greatest propaganda weapon for rousing thenation's dormant spirit of survival.\" Propagandists had prepared the road to destruction so well, dis­ guising it as a kind of Götterdämmerung, that soldiers on the front To make the German masses aware of the need for launching a line and the party faithful on the home front proceeded down itpreventive war against the \"plutocracies\" that were controlled by with a mixture of fatalism and fanaticism. Using the example of\"the enemies of the people,\" the Nazis conjured up the horror sce­ songs such as \"Volk ans Gewehr\" (\"People: To A r m s \" ) , w h i c h henario of a \"conspiracy between World Jewry and Freemasonry considered fascist exhortations, Theodor Adorno concluded thatdirected against Hitler's Germany.\" In order to maximize the use feelings hoisted up \"to an irrational enthusiasm for death\" couldof the film medium in the coming war, Goebbels in 1940 put the be drilled into people mechanically.^* For propaganda purposes

94 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 95the Nazis denied the fact that taking pleasure in one's own Since Nazism was not an intellectual but rather a \"spiritualdestruction, i.e, the longing for death, was an inherent part of fas­ m o v e m e n t , one c a n n o t c o m p r e h e n d it intellectually (mit Argu­cism. The Nazis harked back to the traditions of archaic cults as menten).\" In fact, the intellect w a s of value only to the extent that thethey developed their own special self-promoting rituals and cere­ movement increased in size as a result of using the intellect (Wil­monial style in an effort to create m e a n i n g from the past (Sinnge­ helm Stapel). The goal of mass persuasion was to conceal the vacu-bung), c a p t u r e the soul of the G e r m a n s , a n d stir their emotions. ousness of all those things that had been m a d e an official part of theRitual and style were combined with an eye to \"mind-raping\" the political l a n d s c a p e (politische Heimat) a n d w h i c h w e r e includedmasses. One example of the kind of mass demonstration designed under the broad heading of \"the movement.\" This goal was to beto capture the emotions was the quasi-religious ceremony sol­ reached primarily through the use of the visual media and the arts,emnly performed to the accompaniment of men bearing standards and Leni Riefenstahl exploited them to develop the prototype ofand waving banners: the ritual of the \"blood flag.\" It proceeded as her aesthetic in Triumph des Willens (1934). Whether masqueradingfollows: first, a song about the flag; then a poem about the flag; a as art or as artfully arranged slices of reality, \"the movement\" waspledge to the flag; a march-past of flags; finally, the consecration of intent on expanding its influence. Goebbels believed that only spec­rows of flags and standards as Hitler solemnly touched the new taculars that met these criteria deserved the distinction marksflags with the old \"blood flag,\" culminating in the singing of the (Prädikate) \"artistically valuable\" or \"educational.\" L o n g before, L e oHorst Wessel song by all those present (\"Hold high the flag . . . \" ) . Tolstoy knew that the influence of art—which he termed its \"infec­Many of the symbolic forms of expression used in Nazi ideology, tiousness\"—^was not simply \"a sure sign of art, but the degree ofespecially in the case of Himmler's SS, were geared to tribal-Ger­ infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.\"manic customs and to masquerading as ancient Germans. LeniRiefenstahl developed a cinematic aesthetic of Nazi iconography According to Goebbels, the cinema was \"one of the most mod­out of this melange of pagan mythology and magic symbols. The ern means of mass persuasion\" and therefore \"could not be left toGermans were prohibited from using their reason in formulating its own devices\" (Goebbels, 9 February 1934). These principles ledtheir thoughts; instead, they were to use their emotions. Goebbels to pronounce his infamous credo: \"We are not one of those secretive types with a silly childish fear of words like 'pro­ Totalitarian propaganda also took possession of the deepest p a g a n d a ' a n d 'overtly political' (Tendenz) (Goebbels, 5 N o v e m b e rrecesses of the subconscious. The ideal Nazi would never indulge 1 9 3 9 ) . In 1 9 3 3 the N a z i tilm p r o p a g a n d i s t H a n s Traub definedin formulating his own arguments or critical judgments. He inter­ \"pro-active propaganda\" as the \"intentional application of overtlynalized prepackaged role models and standardized beliefs and political means to achieve a political end, to make a [particular]acted in uncompromising conformity with them. According to ideology (Gesinnung) a goal.\"^Hermann Glaser, the real aim of propaganda was to \"erase peo­ple's identity and individuality.\" People were to be manipulated Goebbels, like Hitler, was fond of displaying his interest in the\"like a bundle of reflexes on the basis of their instincts, urges, and cinema. He demonstrated this during an evening function, held'gut feelings.' Nazi propagandists felt that they were operating fourteen days after his appointment as propaganda minister, tothe control panel of the human psyche.\"^' Propaganda, however, w h i c h h e h a d invited the Filmwelt or the top representatives of thedoes not create a new transcendence; it merely substitutes for tran­ G e r m a n c i n e m a . These included the Dachorganisation filmschaf-scendence. In order successfully to mislead the \"national psyche,\" fender Künstler Deutschlands o r D A C H O , the industry's officialGoebbels had developed an efficient aesthetic that he imposed on t r a d e union, the Reichsverband deutscher Filmtheaterbesitzer, the cin­the audio-visual media, an aesthetic that worked subliminally. e m a o w n e r s ' association, and the Spitzenorganisationen der Film­The documentary film seemed particularly well suited for this wirtschaft or SPIO, the industry's m a i n professional representativepurpose. Since it used authentic-looking pictures, it was the genre body. That evening Goebbels praised himself as a man \"who hadthat could most persuasively represent lies as truth. The Nazis always had a close relationship to the German film.\" In fact, hehad realized that \"the best w a y to tell lies is to use facts,\" Hans w a s \"an inveterate film addict.\" Of course, h e also issued a clearRichter noted in \"Der politische Film.\" warning: \"Should the cinema develop in a dangerous direction, the state has a duty to intervene and take matters in hand.\"

96 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 97 Several years earlier, in 1930, Goebbels's thugs demonstrated movement.\" As for the reaction to Goebbels's speech by thosewhat the propaganda minister meant by \"intervening and taking w h o w e r e there, the journal Die Filmwoche reported: \"Thunderousmatters in hand\" when, in December, they disrupted the Berlin applause for the Reich Minister rang out from all those present.premiere of L e w i s Milestone's m o v i e version of All Quiet on the The members of the party who were in attendance broke into aWestern Front. The city's reactionary chief of police prohibited the rendition of the Horst Wessel song, and the assembled filmmakersfilm from being shown because of the threat to public safety. That rose to their feet and listened.\"s a m e y e a r Carl v o n Ossietzky objected in the journal Weltbühne tothe banning of the film in \"the obscure censorship office\" and Joseph Goebbels did not try to win Hitler's confidence in thewrote: \"Against the National Socialist rabble party we have only efficiency of his propaganda machine simply by making bellicoseone logic: the heavy knout; to tame them, we have only one doc­ speeches. He also used more concrete means, such as the passingtrine: A un corsaire—corsaire et demiV'^^ W i t h its realistic battle of legislation. On 14 July 1933, for example, he enacted a \"lawscenes. Milestone's film was even more persuasive than G. W. establishing an interim film chamber.\" This allowed him, amongPabst's G e r m a n anti-war m o v e Westfront 1918—made the s a m e other things, to cancel all of Ufa's contracts with its Jewish staffyear—in demythologizing war. members and with Jewish artists and be under no obligation to give them notice. \"No individual, be he at the top or on the bot­ All Quiet on the Western Front w a s a cinematic plea for pacifism. tom, has the right to use his personal freedom at the expense of theIt told of the experiences of seven German boys as they matured nation's freedom. This applies to the creative artist as well.\" Sofrom students avid for the glory of war to weary war veterans said Goebbels on 15 November 1933 at the opening of the Reichwho learned that war was no more than a living hell, by which Chamber of Culture. Ten weeks later Goebbels did not mincetime only one of them was still alive. Erich Maria Remarque's words when he addressed members of the specialty advisorynovel exposed the stab-in-the-back legend propagated by Hin­ council on film (Reichsfachschafl Film). H e w a s convinced, he said,denburg and Ludendorff for the lie that it was. What had dis­ \"that film was one of the most m o d e m and far-reaching means forgusted Goebbels, the \"clubfooted psychopath\" (Ossietzky), about influencing the public that has ever existed.\"the book was magnified many times over through the film'srelentless realism. As promised, the Nazis did not leave the film medium to its own devices. Applying direct and indirect censorship to every Immediately after Hitler became chancellor, Goebbels banned detail of form and content, the Nazis eventually created the kindFritz L a n g ' s film Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Last Will of Dr. of film that Goebbels envisaged in 1934: \"We intend to give film aMabuse, 1932/33), an eerie allegory of the strife-torn political con­ German face.\" \"May the bright flame of enthusiasm neverditions in contemporary Weimar Germany. The analogy between expire,\" Goebbels proclaimed to the hundred thousand faithful atthe paranoid Führer and the psychopathic demagogue Dr. Mabuse the 1934 Nuremberg Party congress. \"It is this flame alone thatappeared m u c h too obvious to the Nazis. (The censorship office gives brightness and warmth to the creative art of m o d e m politi­that enabled the Nazis to ban the film had been established during cal propaganda.\"the Weimar republic as part of the Reich Cinema Law passed bythe National Assembly on 12 May 1920.) In 1 9 4 2 a giant holding c o m p a n y , Ufa-Film-GmbH (Ufa F i l m Corporation), assumed control of the entire German film industry Shortly before banning Dr. Mabuse, Goebbels, in a speech to and its foreign subsidiaries, creating a truly state-owned enter­r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s of the G e r m a n film industry, h a d p r a i s e d Die prise. The following example will show the constantly increasingNibelungen (The Nibelungs, 1 9 2 2 / 2 4 ) , another m o v i e b y the s a m e importance that propaganda strategists accorded to the filmdirector, as a model of cinematic art. Goebbels went on to men­ medium. On 30 January 1945, the day of its premiere in Berlin, ation that Die Nibelungen w a s one of the films that \" m a d e a lasting print of Veit Harlan's epic Kolberg w a s flown into the beleagueredimpression on me.\" \"In this instance the story projected on the fortress of L a Rochelle to lift the morale of the defenders andscreen has not been separated from what's happening today; it encourage them to hold out to the bitter end.is so m o d e r n , contemporary, and up-to-date that it wouldeven move those who are fighting for the National Socialist

98 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 99 The Youth Film Hours of the Hitler Youth discovered their own world huddled around the bonfires of sum­ mer solstice celebrations or in camping out, reading Stefan George Remember, whenever you see the flag waving, it isn't some inconse­ a n d Rainer Maria Rilke, singing the songs of the Bündische Jugend quential piece of cloth. Remember, that behind this flag stands the will (The German Youth Movement), reciting archaic texts from the of millions of people bound to Germany in loyalty, bravery, and fervent hoary past, and enjoying the fellowship of like-minded convrades, love. You must remain inseparably bound to this flag, in good times occasionally homosexual ones as well. Many of them expounded and bad. You must defend it when it is attacked and, if need be, cover it \"a pantheistic love of nature and mystical love of the fatherland.\"^ with your young bodies when you die, just as your comrades did in the Great War and during [the Party's] time of struggle in decades past. Characteristically, the preface to the Zupfgeigenhansl [the Zupf­ geige being a dialect t e r m for the guitar or mandolin—^Transl.], a Baldur von Schirach, during the dedication of the Hitler Youth's compilation of folksongs popular during the Weimar period, began Bann^^ flags in the P o t s d a m Garrison C h u r c h on 2 4 J a n u a r y 1 9 3 4 as follows: \"And because we are the disinherited, because at our stage of life w e feel more strongly within ourselves the spur and\"These yoimg people are learning nothing other than to think Ger­ desire to achieve total harmony with mankind, folksongs are a balmman, to act German, and after these boys have come into our orga­ and a comfort for us, indispensable and irreplaceable treasures.\"''^nizations at age ten and gotten their first breath of fresh air there,they m o v e four y e a r s later from the Jungvolk to the Hitler Youth, The Nazis cleverly exploited and turned to Hitler's advantagewhere w e keep t h e m for another four years, by w h i c h time the last the latent desire of this generation for a different w a y of life andthing w e want to do is hand them back to the old originators of their longing to be independent of their parents. They took theo u r [social] classes a n d estates [Stände], so [we] take t h e m i m m e ­ conglomeration of unfulfilled wishes and forged them into an ide­diately into the Party, into the Labor Front, into the SA or the SS, ology of adolescence that ultimately found organizational expres­into the NSKK and so forth. And after they have been there for sion in the Hitler Youth.two years or a year and a half and they still have not become trueNational Socialists, we put them in the Labor Service and drill The ten- to fourteen-year-olds, or Pimpfe, w e r e the m o s t impres­them for six or seven months—all under one symbol, the German sionable age group throughout the entire period of Nazi rule.spade. And any class-consciousness or pride in one's social posi­ Since they were naive, they were easy prey for the new move­tion still remaining after six or seven months will be taken over for ment. The Nazis captured the hearts of these children with catchyfurther treatment b y the Wehrmacht for t w o years, a n d w h e n they slogans borrowed from the fascist catechism. They mixed thec o m e back after t w o , three, or four years then we take them back v o c a b u l a r y of Prussian militarism with the p r o g r a m of the Bün­immediately into the SA, SS, and so on to prevent any relapse, and they dische Jugend to p r o d u c e a n e w w a y of thinking that w o u l d strikewill never again be free for the rest of their lives\" (Adolf Hitler).^^ a chord with young people. Given the alternatives offered by the Nazis, young people felt that they could dispense with religious The German Youth Movement expanded its activities during instruction and the values it imparted. The Nazis channeled thethe late 1920s against the somber background of a republic scorned natural enthusiasm and naive trust of youth into areas where theyas chaotic and deliberately destabilized as a result of the prolifera­ could generate activities and expend their pent-up energies whiletion of political parties. The majority of the disillusioned young at the same time feeling that they were members of a winningpeople searching for absolute beauty and the innocence of nature team. The inflation in the number of badges of honor and wirmers'came from the middle class. Their motivations for joining youth medals took place against this psychological backdrop. The Hitlerm o v e m e n t s such as the Wandervögel [literally, w a n d e r i n g or m i g r a ­ Youth developed a dazzling variety of programs to meet youngtory birds—^Transl.] were more emotional than rational. They were people's need for comradeship and to satisfy their desire to makeseeking an affective substitute for the freedom that had been sacrifices. Scouting games, cross-country expeditions, team sports,denied them. More and more of them viewed the world from a camps, summer solstice celebrations, and sun worship sparkedperspective informed with the romantic values of the past. They the enthusiasm of the young, an enthusiasm that carried over to a higher cause that was shrouded in romantic mysticism. Their sym­ bol w a s the swastika flag. U n d e r the heading \"War G a m e s 'Round

100 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 101 the H Y Banner,\" Deulig newsreel no. 2 7 5 of 7 April 1 9 3 7 p r o v i d e s By the end of that same year, the task of disseminating Party a graphic example of the utter seriousness with which the Hitler p r o p a g a n d a w a s assigned exclusively to the Kulturfilm, the d o c u ­ Youth regarded this quasi-religious relic. In the tormented Weimar mentary, and the newsreel. Goebbels believed that authentic pic­ republic, many middle- and working-class young people were tures of the \"new reality\" would be better able to persuade attracted to s o m e of the i m p o r t a n t c o m p o n e n t s of völkisch t h o u g h t audiences than would feature films. Whereas the purpose of a adopted by the Nazis—secularized myths and tribal-Germanic rit­ short subject would be to monopolize people's thoughts, the sole uals—viewing them as glamorous alternatives to the values, atti­ task of the feature-length film in the future w o u l d be to offer p e o ­ tudes, folkways, etc., through which they had earlier become ple \"lively entertainment\" so as to assure the Führer that his peo­ integrated into German society. The new beliefs seemed more nat­ ple would always be in a good mood. It soon became obvious that ural to them \"than traditional Christian values which were, admit­ adolescents greatly preferred short subjects and Riefenstahl docu­ tedly, derivatives [of these more ancient religions].\"^* mentaries to so-called \"serious films.\" In analyzing this psychological phenomenon, however, it is Goebbels's film propagandists derived some of their insights impossible \"to find any specifically fascist e l e m e n t . . . The special from a dissertation written in 1933, stating that \"the majority of character [of this phenomenon] lies not in its individual compo­ young people even then liked natural, pure, and unaffected films nents, b u t in their configuration.\" In the preface to Inszenierung der that reflected the spirit of the nation more than so-called 'love Machfi'^ a n u m b e r of factors are credited with fostering a climate in stories' or run-of-the-mill movies.... The responses of young peo­ which \"individuals were exempted from any social liability for ple clearly showed that youth was becoming enthusiastic about their actions because they had voluntarily become part of a system qualities such as beauty, strength, naturalness, and heroism.... In {Gefüge).\" Given their n e w sense of community, adolescents felt general, young people are attracted to anything that is fast- powerful, destined to fulfill a higher purpose. Two factors—\"a paced, exciting, or sensational, which reflects the growing need sensuality akin to happiness and successful collective change\"— to be active and seek new experiences that is characteristic of thisfacilitated their integration into the movement and their conver­ age group.\"'\"'sion into its most faithful followers. Evening get-togethers{Heimabende)^ a n d school lessons alone, however, w e r e not suffi­ To exploit in d e m a g o g i c fashion an aesthetic m e d i u m like film,cient to instill the Nazi ideology and the determination to \"strug­ Goebbels needed young people who were susceptible to everygle for survival as a group.\" To accomplish this, other means were t y p e of kitschy, \"beautiful\" fiction. H o w could a m e a n s of indoc­called for. trination such as film be m a d e accessible to y o u n g people on a regular basis? Since the short subjects and documentaries that Nazi educators would have to project role models onto the were included in the weekly movie bills were not very popularmovie screen and bring them to life in the minds of spectators. In with the viewing public, special screenings were organized for theother words, the experience of seeing these role models must leave Hitler Youth in which entire groups, not just individual boys andan impression that could be recalled in the course of a lifelong girls, w o u l d b e b r o u g h t together to see films. The journal Derlearning process. The first party-sponsored films to accomplish deutsche Film stated in its December 1937 issue that only w h e n athis objective w e r e Hitlerjunge Quex (1933), SA-Mann Brand (1933), \"strong sense of community\" has been established could filma n d Hans Westmar (1933). All three p r o p a g a n d a figures p r o d u c e d truly become a vital experience, that is, \"only when the audienceeffects that went beyond the aesthetic enjoyment of the film. The thinks homogeneously, when—how should one put it—it sharesappearance in these films of actors who were popular before the the s a m e v i e w of the world; a n d w h e n a film is shown, its point ofNazis came to power, such as Berta Drews, Heinrich George, and view nürrors that of the community.\" Film gives expression to theHermann Speelmans, induced even non-Party members to see forces that go to form a community, but only \"when the [idea of]them. A film like Hitlerjunge Quex s h o w e d just h o w d e t e r m i n e d a community has already been planted in viewers' minds anddirector Hans Steinhoff was \"to continue the brief tradition of the only w h e n film acts to e n h a n c e that community, i.e., w h e n it hasW e i m a r proletarian film a n d use familiar things to c o m m u n i c a t e an ideological message to communicate. We believe the 'Youththe n e w Weltanschauung.\"^^ Film H o u r s ' {Jugendfilmstunden) of the Hitier Youth d o both.\"

102 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 103 The grandiose premiere of the Youth Film Hour took place in position of a Supreme Reich Authority with headquarters in BerlinCologne on 20 April 1934, the Führer's birthday. The Film Hours and is directly responsible to the Führer and Reich Chancellor.were not subsidized by the state; the government expected them §4. The Führer and Reich Chancellor will issue the requisite decreesto be self-supporting. At 20 pfermigs per show the price of a ticket and regulations for enforcing and amending this law.was low, the return on investment in terms of fellowship high.Fanfares, drumrolls, the singing of the Horst Wessel song, and the Berlin, 1 December 1936reading of stirring Nazi poems were some of the elements that The Führer and Reich Chancellorhelped create a quasi-religious atmosphere, which for many Adolf Hitlerb e c a m e a substitute for c h u r c h services. W h e n a film \"is provided State Secretary and Head of the Reich Chancellerywith a framework in keeping with its contents, its impact is Dr Lammersenhanced and its feeling for what is genuine, valuable, and beau­tiful is roused, especially by reference to things outside itself.\"*^ Even before membership became compulsory, the Hitler YouthPerformances such as these completely satisfied the need for and its subdivisions enjoyed great popularity. From the end of\"affirmation and self-validation\" (Habermas). The Hitler Youth's 1932 to the end of 1934, membership in the Hitler Youth rose frommarch to the theater in close-order formation under the swastika 107,956 boys to 3.577 million; membership in the League offlag \"was a very special prelude to any visit to a Hitler Youth Film German Girls during the same period increased from 24,000 toHour and gave it a very special flavor.\" \"After being seated, the 1.334 mimon.43young demonstrated the unique power of the Youth Film Hour tobuild a community as they sang the songs that play such an During the initial year of the Youth Film Hours in 1934, atten­important part in the Hitler Youth, since they were born out of dance was approximately 300,000, even though the Hitler Youththese y o u n g people's spirit of nationalism (aus dem volkbewußten had launched them in just a few big cities. During the 1 9 3 8 / 3 9Geiste).'\"^^ \"You belong to the Führer, too!\" w a s the slogan on a season, the number of attendees had grown to over 2.5 million;poster with a n index finger pointing at a Jungmädel, a subdivision the number of performances was 4,885 that season. Later, almostof the Bund Deutscher Mädel ( L e a g u e of G e r m a n Girls) for girls ten all of the 5,275 cinemas in Germany with an average seatingto fourteen. capacity of more 750 made their facilities available for Youth Film Hours every month. Goebbels's success statistics of 29 September With the promulgation of the Youth Service L a w (Jugenddienst­ 1940 counted a total of 9,411,318 young attendees at 19,694 Youthpflicht) on 1 December 1936, Hitler imposed the state's control over Film Hours from 1934 to 1940 \"within the framework of the Win­most yoimg people, including almost all boys and girls between the ter Aid campaigns\" alone. The highest attendance figure was dur­ages of ten and eighteen. Of the total number of 8.87 million youths ing the 1942/43 season when 11.2 million young people visitedb o m between 1921 and 1931,8.7 million were obliged, beginning in 45,290 performances.^*1939, to become members of Nazi youth organizations, for \"thefuture of the German people depends on its young people.\" The In rural areas where, in contrast to the cities, there were virtu­preamble to the law stated that all young Germans \"must therefore ally no cultural diversions, not even a cinema, the Youth Filmbe prepared [to fulfill] their future obligations,\" specifically: Hours that were held in school houses, inns, and church halls were much appreciated sources of entertainment. In the 1 9 4 2 / 4 3 §1. All German young people are to be included in the Hitler Youth. season alone there were approximately 18,250 performances §2. Except for the parental home and the school, all German young attended by nearly 2.5 million Hitler Youth and BDM girls in areas people are to be educated physically, spiritually, and morally in the without cinemas, while in cities with cinemas there were 24,100 spirit of National Socialism for service to the nation and the screenings with 8,355,000 attendees during the same period. national commimity. In 1 9 4 2 / 4 3 , 1,500 mobile film units traveled around the coun­ §3. The responsibility for educating all German young people in the t r y s i d e to s p r e a d the F ü h r e r ' s w o r d . A secret Sicherheitsdienst Hitler Youth is assigned to the Reich Youth Leader of the NSDAR He (Security Service) report*^ dated 3 April 1941 informed \"higher is thereby the Youth Leader of the German Reich. He occupies the authorities\" that these film presentations were particularly popu­ lar in rural areas where there were no cinemas, since they were

104 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 105often the only source of entertainment and information. German innumerable great names of German history, the greatest must becinema owners were obliged \"on the basis of a directive from the picked out and introduced to the youth so persistently that theyReich Film Chamber to make their theaters available once a month become pillars of an unshakable national sentiment.\"*'on Sunday or, as local conditions require, twice monthly, for thepurpose of holding Youth Film Hours.\"^ Beginning in the 1940s, anti-Semitism had an important part to p l a y in the Youth Film H o u r s . Films like Der ewige Jude (The Eter­ Though attendance at the Sunday performances was not nal Jew, 1 9 4 0 ) , Jud Süss (Jew Süss, 1940), Leinen aus Irland (Irishm a n d a t o r y , w h e n e v e r a Hitler Youth Stammfiihrer or a B D M Ring- Linen, 1939), a n d Die Rothschilds (The Rothschilds, 1940) sought toführerin invited their c h a r g e s to see films s u c h as Das große Eis create an aura of historical authenticity. In the words of Hitler,(Kulturfilm d o c u m e n t a r y about Prof. Alfred W e g e n e r ' s expedition \"the crown of the folkish state's entire work of education andto Greenland, 1936), Nanga Parbat ( d o c u m e n t a r y about a G e r m a n training must be to b u m the racial sense and racial feeling into themountaineering expedition to the Western H i m a l a y a s , 1936), Tri­ instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youngumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935), Fest der Jugend (Festi­ entrusted to it. N o boy and no girl must leave school without hav­v a l of Youth) or Fest der Schönheit (Festival of Beauty, 1938), Hitlers ing been led to an ultimate realization of the necessity and essence50. Geburtstag (Hitler's 50th Birthday, 1939), Feldzug in Polen ( C a m ­ of blood purity.p a i g n in P o l a n d , 1 9 3 9 ) or Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West,1941), young people turned up in droves, occupying every seat in The war gave rise to a series of combat spectaculars and warthe house. hero films, all characterized by a bellicose chauvinism. They r a n g e d f r o m Stukas ( 1 9 4 1 ) t h r o u g h U-Boote westwärts ( U - B o a t s Of course, feature films such as Fridericus Rex (1936), Der große W e s t w a r d s , 1941) a n d Kampfgeschwader Lützow (Battle SquadronKönig (The Great King, 1942), Bismarck (1940), a n d Die Entlassung L ü t z o w , 1 9 4 1 ) to the epic Kolberg, w h i c h premiered in M a r c h 1 9 4 5(The Dismissal, 1942) were also shown, for as Hitler said, \"our to bolster the population's endurance in the face of overwhelmingeducational system lacked the art of picking a few names out of odds. With regard to young people, the purpose of these films wasthe historical development of our people and making them the to help render t h e m fit for military service and inspire t h e m withcommon property of the whole German nation, thus through like the courage to die, to prepare them psychologically to sacrificeknowledge and like enthusiasm tying a uniform, uniting bond their lives.around the entire nation.... They were not able to raise what wasglorious for the nation in the various subjects of instruction above Even before war broke out—in fact, from the inception of thethe level of objective presentation, and fire the national pride by Nazi regime—films considered pacifist or \"effeminate\" weresuch gleaming examples.\"*^ strictly taboo for the Hitler Youth. \"Healthy young people, con­ cerned about their fitness for military service and the defense of The Nazis were skilled in persuading people that the dreary, their [nation's] borders, young people educated in this spirit, aremythless era represented by the \"bourgeois,\" \"Marxist,\" \"Jewi- immune to the effects of pacifist war movies. Indeed, this wholefied\" Weimar republic was in urgent need of bright shining role question is only of historical interest for us Germans, since,models w h o would lead the w a y to the \"light.\" It was an era that because of their wholehearted commitment and unambiguouscalled for \"Luther types\" (as Rosenberg termed the purveyors of portrayals, the nationally minded films of the new Germany dealmyth) \"to lift people's hearts in this chaos ... [and] deliberately with the issue of their psychological impact in a much moreremagnetize them.\"** straightforward w a y than the films of the past, especially since they are confronted with young people who are more [than ever] Great scientists, inventors, and artists as well were portrayed in of one mind and one will.\"^'films such as Robert Koch: der Bekämpfer des Todes (1939), FriedrichSchiller (1940), Friedemann Bach ( 1 9 4 0 / 4 1 ) , Andreas Schlüter (1942), The subordination of the Hitler Youth to the dictates of \"totala n d Diesel (1942), for \"an inventor m u s t not only s e e m great as an war\" was not so much a matter of collecting woolens for the win­inventor, but must seem even greater as a national comrade. Our ter on the eastern front, scrap metal for the latest battle, or potatoadmiration of every great deed must be bathed in pride that its beetles for the purpose of saving crops. Rather, it meant sendingfortunate performer is a member of our own people. From all the entire high school classes to help man anti-aircraft batteries during

106 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 107air raids. And it culminated in the creation on 24 June 1943 of the speech in a movie theater as it was broadcast that Sunday would12th SS Panzer Division, the Hitler Youth Division of the Waffen- not also liked to have grown \"several inches\"?SS, for the final battle in France. Ten thousand sixteen-year-oldyouths were sent to their death in the desperate German counter- After the war, Bernhard Wicki used the motion picture cameraoffensives on 6 July and 4 September near Caen and Yvoir de with brutal effectiveness in his film Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1 9 5 9 )Meuse. By the time Field Marshal von Rundstedt lamented, \"It's a to examine the misguided heroism and idealism of \"Hitler's chil­crying shame that these trusting young people are being slaugh­ dren\" and the horrible absurdity of sacrificing young lives as Ger­tered in such hopeless circumstances,\" the situation was already many's defenses crumbled. He showed schoolboys throwingbeyond help. themselves in the path of advancing American tanks, only to die pointlessly two days before the end of the war.^* The Pimpfe, the y o u n g e s t m e m b e r s of the Hitler Youth, w e r enever shown this \"storm of steel\" during Youth Film Hours. \"Nazism never gave people ... anything but power. You stillInstead, they heard newsreel commentaries such as the following: have to ask w h y it was, if this regime was nothing but a bloody\"In one sector of the front we see the Hitler Youth Division of the dictatorship, that on 3 M a y 1945 there were still Germans w h oWaffen-SS engaged in c o m b a t . . . as they advance, they pass burn­ fought to the last drop of blood—whether these people didn'ting American tanks. German tanks roll onward\" (July 1944). What h a v e s o m e form of emotional attachment to power. \"^^the newsreel commentator did not say was that they were rollingtoward certain death. Before that happened, though, they knocked Goebbels recalled a valiant Hitler Youth who was still breathingout twenty-eight Canadian tanks. A British tank commander as he was pulled out of a burning tank: \"Unconscious for most ofrecalled that they sprang at Allied tanks \"like wolves, until w e three days, no word of complaint ever crossed his lips; and then asw e r e forced to kill t h e m against our will.\"^^ he gave up the ghost, he whispered a greeting to the Führer. If Schopenhauer's dictum is correct that you can judge a man in part On orders from the Reich Youth Leader dated 27 February by h o w he dies, this boy was ... a real man.\"^*1 9 4 5 , even y o u n g e r boys, a r m e d w i t h Panzerfäuste [a primitiveweapon modeled on the American \"bazooka\"—Transl.] and anti­ Just four weeks after the Battle of Stalingrad, Goebbels assignedtank mines, were pushed into the final battle—a battle that was the Youth Film Hours the mission of making \"real men\" out of thelost even before it had been fought—in order to serve their hero Hitler Youth (at least as Hitler understood the concept) and show­Adolf Hitler to the last day of the war \"with love for and loyalty ing films that would prepare them for sacrificing their young livesto the Führer and our flag,\" as the Hitler Youth pledge com­ on the battlefield like their movie heroes. The kitschy romanti-manded. The war movies shown during the Youth Film Hours cization of warfare expressed in songs and poems lent emotionalwere not the least of the reasons they were willing to make the support to the Film Hours as they celebrated heroic sacrifice. Theultimate sacrifice. poem below is representative of their quality: When Goebbels spoke on German radio to the young people of N o w let the flags wavethe Reich at the opening of the 1942/43 Youth Film Hours on 25 against the great red sky of morningOctober 1942, he said nothing regarding the subject of film; how­ lighting our way to victoryever, he had a great deal to say about the heroic ethos of German or burning us to death!boys in the war. The Propaganda Minister was intoxicated by arecent visit of \"some thirty Hitler Youth between the ages of ten E v e n if w e fall in battle,and seventeen ... who were without exception [decorated] with our state will stand like a mighty cathedral!the Iron Cross or the War Service Cross.\" Two of the boys had A nation takes in himdreds of harvestseach shot down a British fighter plane and \"had been decorated and sows many hundreds of times.with the same medals awarded to soldiers at the front.\" Because oftheir \"service to the nation,\" they had grown \"several inches in Look at us, Germany, death in battlet e r m s of morale. \"^^ W h o a m o n g the boys listening to Goebbels's is the least we can offer you! Should the grim reaper cut down our ranks, we will become the seeds of the future! Hans Baumarm

108 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 109 Whenever a Youth Film Hour was held, the newsreel for that that was strictly taboo. As Nietzsche said, \"art exists so that theweek was also shown. To Goebbels, newsreels were \"make- bow won't break.\" In the case of the film medium, the art was inbelieve reality.\" Especially during the war, weekly newsreels ful­ what was omitted.filled a special function in the propagation of Hitler's war aims. In1941 Goebbels noted in his diary that \"the newsreel is the best However, since young people \"also [have] a right to laugh, themeans w e have for leading the people.\"^'' Newsreels were m a d e Youth Film Hours feature comedies as well.\" According to film jour­more effective by skillfully combining them with appropriate fea­ nalist Hans Joachim Sachsze, \"National Socialist youth education isture films, \"cinematic epics of German heroism\" (Goebbels) that not oriented in an angry, violent, or rigid way to any particular ide­would ensure a continuing supply of \"heroes.\" The party news­ ological concept of 'heroism.' Rather, the Hitler Youth recognizesp a p e r Das Reichr^ of 8 June 1 9 4 1 , devoted a lead article to the sub­ the need of young people to relax and lead healthy lives. \"^ject of film as a propaganda medium in wartime. Among otherthings, it stated that \"the newsreel reports on the Polish campaign Among the comedies produced during the war, the followinggave individuals for the first time the exciting sensation of being were shown during Youth Film Hours: Arthur Maria Rabenalt'splaced in the middle of events as they were unfolding. As a result Weißer Flieder ( W h i t e Lilac, 1 9 3 9 ) , K u r t H o f f m a n n ' s Quax, derof this experience with newsreels, audiences began to practice an Bruchpilot ( Q u a x the C r a s h Pilot, 1941), H e l m u t K ä u t n e r ' s Kleiderunconscious but very effective film policy that they no doubt pur­ machen Leute (Clothes M a k e the M a n , 1940) a n d Wir machen Musiksued most energetically during the surrmier of 1940. In terms of (We M a k e Music, 1942), H e l m u t Weiß and Heinrich Spoerl's Diecontent, technique, and effectiveness, these films were very closely Feuerzangenbowle ( H o t W i n e P u n c h , 1 9 4 4 ) , H e i n z R ü h m a n n ' srelated to the newsreel.\" The films referred to were features such Sophienlund (1943), a n d Willi Forst's Wiener Blut (Vienna Life). \"Inas KoTpf hoch, Johannes ( C h i n U p , J o h n , 1 9 4 1 ) , Wunschkonzert addition to getting a spiritual uplift and boost, [young people(Request C o n c e r t , 1940), Feinde (Enemies, 1940), Kampfgeschwader must be able] to relax from the harsh daily grind of wartime whenLützow (Battle Squadron Lützow, 1941), Stukas (1941), a n d U-Boote they go to see a movie \" (Goebbels).westwärts ( U - B o a t s W e s t w a r d s , 1941). M o r e i m p o r t a n t than theinclusion of documentary footage in these features was the fact The government conducted periodic surveys to determine thethat the newsreel had \"clearly\" become \"their leavening agent. popularity of films and gauge the extent of young people's interestLike [the newsreel] these films put the moviegoer directly within in political events and subjects, with the aim of increasing the effec­the experiential vicinity of events ... There are scenes that plainly tiveness of state-sponsored film productions. In responding to theshow the close connection of this film genre to the newsreel.\" question \"Which movies did you like best?\" young people came out unequivocally in favor of the following films, which the press Since the German people had become spoiled as a result of h a d also given top marks for both style and content. They are listedhearing nothing but announcements of victory, Goebbels had to in descending numerical order based on number of votes received:be extremely careful not to squander the trust built up through the Der große König (The Great King, 1942), Bismarck (1940), Die Ent­newsreels by fabricating victories when there were nothing but lassung (The Dismissal, 1 9 4 2 ) , Friedrich Schiller (1940), Heimkehrdefeats to report (\"enemy\" radio stations, of course, kept German (Homecortdng, 1941), Ohm Krüger (Uncle Krüger, 1941), ... reitetlisteners updated with regard to the military situation). Conse­ für Deutschland (Riding for G e r m a n y , 1 9 4 1 ) , Andreas Schlüterquently, Goebbels concealed huge retreats from the public by (1942), Stukas (1941), Kadetten (Cadets, 1941), Diesel (1942), Wun­shifting the news to reports of \"victories\" achieved by combat schkonzert (Request Concert, 1940), a n d Kampfgeschwader Lützowpatrols, U-boats, and individual airplane and tank crews. The (Battle Squadron Lützow, 1941). Way down on the list, by the way,cumulative effect of these minor triumphs created the impression c a m e the anti-Semitic Jud Süss (Jew Süss, 1940), which received 92of a massive \"forward defense\" punctuated by occasional \"tactical v o t e s , a s c o m p a r e d to 1,115 for Der große König.^retreats\" and efforts to \"straighten the front,\" that is, by relativelypositive events. However, to the very last, the film propagandists Propaganda films, of course, were shown not only at Youthnever went so far as to show German soldiers dying on the screen; Film Hours. They were also screened wherever school-age young people gathered on a daily basis, namely, in classrooms and school auditoriums, where they may have been received with even greater enthusiasm. Even during the Weimar period there were

110 ! The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 111enterprising u r b a n a n d regional educational picture centers {Stadt­ the experience of participating in the great political events of ourbildstellen, Landesbildstellen) that h a d both a well-diversified assort­ day through film. In this way, it was possible to bring the issues ofment of films and portable 16 m m projectors so that they could our times in a lively format to the twenty-five million people whopresent films in any classroom, in any university seminar room, or live outside the large population centers and away from the majorat any evening social function. Bernhard Rust, who was appointed traffic routes.\"^^Reich Minister for Science, Education, and Public Instruction on30 April 1934, was interested in using audio-visual aids primarily Letter from an Old Soldier on the Siegfried Lineto educate students in the spirit of militarism, German national­ to His Sixteen-Year-Old Sonism, and anti-Semitism: \"We need a new Aryan generation ... orwe will forfeit the future.\" Come on, comrades, come on! When at the end of this war, on the day of our great victory, the Führer looks around, may he see beside his In order to win the future, Nazi ideological training would armies the shining banners of his Hitler Youth.have to begin in childhood. The schools would be responsible forthe total adaptation of the individual to the new politically regi­ Refrain of the Hitler Youth war service song from themented society. The inculcation of political attitudes \"would take d o c u m e n t a r y Junges Europa II [Young E u r o p e II, 1942],place before and during the time when young people are tryinghardest to come to terms with their own identity and individual­ directed by Alfred Weidenmannity, i.e., puberty.\"\" \"I'm so proud of you, my boy! You've become the standard-bearer On 26 June 1934 Bernhard Rust issued a directive to introduce of y o u r Jungbann. N o other n e w s from y o u could m a k e m e h a p ­political films into schools for the purpose of education: \"The pier than this. I a m grateful to Providence for allowing me, an oldNational Socialist state asks the schools of Germany to assume soldier, to fulfill m y destiny so proudly. W h e n I w a s about thenew and important responsibilities. To carry them out they must same age you are today, m y son, I was allowed to march off to theavail themselves of every educational and technical aid. Educa­ Great War. I was permitted to join the wall of bodies ringing thetional films are among the most important aids. Only the new Fatherland, a wall that was sunk deep into enemy soil, bravingstate was able fully to overcome the psychological irüiibitions to every hailstorm of iron and every hurricane of fire, defending thethe use of the technological achievements of film, and it is deter­ homeland, for days, weeks, months, years. Then suddenly it wasm i n e d to enlist the film m e d i u m in the service of its Weltanschau­ all over. We had to return home and were derided for all our sac­ung. This m u s t take place primarily in the schools a n d , moreover, rifices. Our flags were torn down, the flags in which all we everas an integral part of classroom instruction.\" saw was the homeland. We were forced to feed these sacred pieces of cloth to the flames to prevent them from being desecrated. We In 1943 the regional educational picture centers had thirty-seven returned to a topsy-turvy world, one that they called a world ofcenters throughout Germany and were optimally placed to dis­ peace, but was nothing more than a total humiliation. Many of ustribute their propaganda films. The regional centers were further who for four years withstood every hell of this worldwide confla­subdivided into urban and rural districts numbering 1,242, ensur­ gration were shattered by feelings of revulsion and contempt.ing the delivery of films to any desired target group. Moreover, by Many clenched their teeth and managed to pick up the pieces of1936 the Propaganda Ministry had 32 Regional Party Film Centers their lives. Some like me were compelled to set out again, to the{Gaufilmstellen), 771 District P a r t y Film Centers {Kreisfilmstellen), Baltics, U p p e r Silesia ... You know the stations of m y life as a sol­a n d 22,357 smaller p a r t y film centers {Ortsgruppenfilmstellen).^'^ dier, my son. Reichshauptstellenleiter der NSDAP C u r t Belling, o n e of the \"But while we mourned, feared, despaired, and defended our­P a r t y ' s official spokesmen on film m a t t e r s , reported in the Film- selves, there arose from our midst, from the army of unknownKurier of 31 D e c e m b e r 1 9 3 6 in a n article titled \"Film a n d theParty\": \"Over three hundred mobile cinemas, fitted out with themost modern equipment, travel around the country every day,and wherever they appear hundreds of Germans gather to share

112 The Triumph of Propaganda Film Propaganda in the Third Reich 113soldiers w h o had passed through all the horrors of war, one man: 6. Quoted in Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germanythe Führer. (London, 1979), p. 22. \"... In the midst of the doubters and the hopeless he hoisted a flag, a 7. Erich Ludendorff, Meine Kriegerinnerungen (Berlin, 1919), pp. 285f., Englishnew flag w i t h the old sacred colors and symbols, theflag of a united Reich translation Ludendorff's Own Story, August 1914-November 1918, 2 vols. (Newand a united people. With a few loyal followers rallied a r o u n d h i m , York, 1920); My War Memories, 1914-1918,2 vols. (New York, 1920).he marched off to d o battle on behalf of a great and distant ideal. 8. Oskar Kalbus, Pioniere des Kulturfilms (Karlsruhe, 1956), pp. 18f. \" A r o u n d the time y o u w e r e born, m y boy, theflrst casualties c o n ­ 9. Siegfried Kracauer, Von Caligari bis Hitler, p. 26.s e c r a t e d this flag with their blood. T h e r e w e r e sixteen of them; t h e y 10. Hans Traub, ed.. Die Ufa, p. 35.w e r e the flrst to give their lives because they believed in this flag. 11. Jürgen Spiker, Film und Kapital (Berlin, 1975), p. 34. 12. Gottlieb Hermes, \"Politische Auslandsfilme\" in Heinrich Pfeiffer, ed.. Das \"In a dogged, infinitely arduous struggle fraught with sacri­fice, the Führer won his people over. And he built the Reich, the deutsche Lichtbildbuch (Berlin, 1924), p. 35.great, strong, eternal Reich. He became the Führer and father of 13. Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie der Massen (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 18f., Enghsh trans­all Germans. lation The Crowd (New York, 1896). \"The flag of this Reich n o w waves, a n d no power on earth can pull itdown. Driven into the heart of every German, its staff stands unshak­ 14. Ibid., p. 20.able—in m e n a n d w o m e n , o l d p e o p l e a n d c h i l d r e n — a n entire 15. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Stockholm, 1947), English translation Doctcrrnation bearing the standard. Faustus (New York, 1948). \"While w e wait for the enemy here on the Siegfried Line, m y 16. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 2, p. 11.thoughts turn back to the homeland. And they are different from 17. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagenwhat they were twenty-five years ago; they are tranquil, more joy­ful, certain of victory. Pure of heart and with strong hands, m y des kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich, 1967), English translation The Inability toboy, c a r r y the flag of the Jungbann in front of the t h o u s a n d s u p o n Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York, 1978).t h o u s a n d s of y o u r y o u n g c o m r a d e s . Only the best, the strongest, thebravest, the most valiant shall be standard-bearers! This y o u know. 18. Iring Fetscher, Kunst im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), p. 8. 19. Saul Friedländer, Kitsch und Tod, p. 118. \"In this spirit, greetings from 20. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol.1, p. 6. Your Father, F e b r u a r y 1 9 4 0 . \" ^ 21. Ibid., p. 197. 22. Licht-Bild-Bühne (Berlin), 13 November 1933. Notes 23. Alfred Rosenberg, Blut und Ehre (Munich, 1940), p. 214. 24. Film-Kurier (Berlin), 29 March 1933. 1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 654. 25. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 198. 2. Wolf Schneider, Wörter machen Leute: Magie und Macht der Sprache (Hamburg, 26. Ibid., p. 317. 27. Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Raum (Leipzig, 1926). 1982), p. 121. 28. Theodor Adomo, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1968), 3. Hans Traub, ed.. Die Ufa: ein Beitrag zur Entwicklung des deutschen Filmschaffens p. 60, English translation Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York, 1989). (Berlin 1943), p. 26. 29. Hermann Glaser, Das dritte Reich (Freiburg, 1961), p. 54. 4. Kurt Tucholsky, \"Chaplin in Kopenhagen\" in Die Weltbühne (Berlin), 7 June 30. Hans Traub, Der Film als politisches Machtmittel (Munich, 1933), p. 26. 31. Quoted in Peter Gay, Die Republik der Außenseiter, pp. 107f., English original 1927 (under the pseudonym Peter Panter); in Kurt Tucholsky, Gesammelte Werke., vol. 5 (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1975), p. 226. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968). 5. Hans Traub, ed.. Die Ufa, p. 29. 32. [The Hitler Youth was divided regionally into six Obergebiete, each containing six Gebiete and a maximum of eight. Each Gebiet, depending on size, contained several HY Banne. By 1943 there were 42 Gebiete and 223 Banne.—Trarxsl.] 33. Adolf Hitler in a speech on 4 December in Reichenberg, quoted in Völkischer Beobachter (Munich), 4 December 1938. 34. Peter Gay, Die Republik der Außenseiter, pp. 107f. 35. Quoted in Werner Kindt, comp., Grundschriften der deutschen Jugendbe­ wegung (Düsseldorf, 1963), p. 66 (Preface by Hans Breuer to the lOth ed. of the Zupfgeigenhansl). 36. Götz von Olenhusen, jugendreich, Gottesreich, Deutsches Reich (Cologne, 1987) (Archiv der deutschen Judgendbewegung, 2), p. 8. 37. F. Wagner and G. Linke, eds.. Die Inszenierung der Macht: äesthetische Faszination im Faschismus (Berlin, 1987).

114 The Triumph of Propaganda + 5+38. [Heimabende were obligatory Hitler Youth meetings held during the evening THE NONFICTIONAL GENRES OF hours. They consisted of a prescribed program of ideological indoctrination NAZI FILM PROPAGANDA and activities such as singing and making things for Winter Relief (Winterhilfs- zverk). See Christian Zentner and Friedemann Bedürftig, eds.. Das grosse The Cultural and Educational Film Lexikon des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1985), p. 243.—Transl.] The harmonically educated man should, as was true of Goethe, he well39. Karsten Witte, \"Der Apfel und der Stamm\" in Schock und Schöpfung (Darm­ versed in representational as well as abstract thinking. Cultural films stadt, 1986), p. 306. are therefore a culturally desirable counterweight to the excessive growth of abstract thinking and against the one-sidedness of a pre­40. Hans Joachim Sachsze, \"Filmpublikum von morgen\" in Der deutsche Film dominantly intellectual education. (Berlin), vol. 2, no. 6,1937, pp. 168f. Das Kulturfilmbuch, 1924^41. Ibid., p. 199.42. Curt Belling and Alfred Schütze, Der Film in der Hitlerjugend (Berlin, 1937), p. 62. \"Aunt Ufa's\" Culture43. Arno Klönne, Jugend im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1982), p. 34.44. Armeliese Ursula Sander, Jugend und Film (Berlin,1944) (Das junge Deutschland: Not merely the aesthetics of the cultural film present a typically G e r m a n p h e n o m e n o n , b u t the notion of Kulturfilm as well. F r o m Sonderveröffentlichung, 6), p. 72. the cellular division of an amoeba to an artistic giant such as45. Secret report of the SD [Sicherheitsdienst], 3 April 1941 in: Bundesarchiv IVlichelangelo, the cultural film deals with everything that is being investigated by biology and medicine, by research and technol­ Koblenz R 58/159. ogy, art and literature, ethnology and geography and incorporates46. W. Hacker, \"Der Aufstieg der Jugendfilmarbeit\" in Das junge Deutschland, it all into a more elevated w a y of looking at the world that is pecu­ liar to this genre. G e r m a n y ' s Kulturfilm-makeis demystify creation Amtliches Organ des Jugendführers des deutschen Reiches (Berlin), no. 10, and cosmos. The French respectfully called the German cultural 1943, p. 235. film \"film de niveau\"; the A m e r i c a n s spoke of \"oddities.\" B e t w e e n47. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 471. 1926 and 1929, the United States charmeled some one hundred48. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1930), p. German cultural films in thousands of copies through its largest 521, English translation The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the cinema chains. Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (Torrance, Calif., 1982).49. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 473f. A s Rudolf Oertel put it in 1941:50. Ibid., p. 118. Among the many gifts that the movie gave us, none seems to be51. Alois Funk, Film und Jugend (Doctoral thesis, Munich University, 1934), p. 97. more precious and exhilarating than the gaze into the miraculous52. Hannsjoachim Wolfgang Koch, Geschichte der Hitlerjugend, p. 173. world of the universe.... The immense richness of microscopic life53. Ibid., p. 173.54. Cf. Hilmar Hoffmann, \"Die Brücke\" [review of Bernhard Wicki's film] in Rheinischer Merkur/Christ und Welt (Bonn), no. 7 , 1 2 February 1988.55. Interview with Michel Foucault in Cahier du Cinema (Paris), no. 2 5 1 / 2 5 2 , July-August 1974, p. 19.56. Joseph Goebbels, Der steile Außtieg, pp. 45 and 48.57. Diary entry by Joseph Goebbels, 23 July 1941 in: Bundesarchiv Koblenz BA NL 118.58. Das Reich (Berlin), no. 2 3 , 8 June 1941.59. Hans Joachim Sachsze, Filmpublikum von morgen, p. 199.60. Armeliese Ursula Sander, Jugend und Film, p. 118.61. Kurt-Ingo Flessau, Schule der Diktatur: Lehrpläne und Schulbücher des National­ sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), p. 117.62. Curt Belhng, Der Film in Staat und Partei (Berlin, 1936).63. Curt Belling, \"Film und Partei\" in Film-Kurier (Berlin), 31 December 1936.64. Horst Kerutt and Wolfram M. Wegener, eds.. Die Fahne ist mehr als der Tod: ein deutsches Fahnenbuch (Munich, 1943), pp. 139-41.

116 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 117in a water hole, the struggle for survival, the multiplications of invis­ twenty-one different fields. The preface to this catalogue containsible microbes, the slow growth, blossoming, wilting of plagts,^je^^^ the following telling passage: \"The wpurias that the war has^Vtx^i^WAf^^n^trability of the noctuiiial^es, the stars, the reali^of the\" inÖicfed can be healed only b y fulfilling^e'cultura^tasks in t|:iis /clouds, the light raj^s, the cun-ents ^ energy, the circulation of the i^^j^ world. Arnohg them is to be found the recon'slÄcfion'of ins^tfe^:'^^^^blood, the penetrating eyes of x-rays, the physician's operating s k i l l s % ^ )but no less so the grandiose world of modem factories ... the infiiute^ tion and of humane education that has been badly aff&:te^y thecosmos and the small universe of humans.... The cultural film is the war.\" In 1918 there existed in Germany no less than 3,130 perma­great magician who shows us secrets that even our most daring ^ 5 nent cinemas, iA^one m o v i e theater per 18,000 inhabitants.imagination could not visualize more magnificently arid colorfully.^ ^uM-'ii^ Ufa w a s ihdebted'to Ulrich K. T. Schulz for the first edition of a biological Kulturfilm, the popular-scientific movie Der HirschkäferSpeaking at the \"Filmforum\" in 1 9 5 5 , Nicholas^ K a u f m a n n , for (The Stag Beetle, 1920/21), which, screened at the Tauentzien- Palast, inauguraiea the supporting film. Having perfected the n;\any y e a r s director of Ufa's c u l t u ^ filin divisioii,'^pi'ojviddeedd c, , ,^ ^ time accelerator method in cooperation with his cameraman \"^mneHShat m o r e solber reiTfoossppe'cefcftvrev^asss'elssmernftt of this genre's \"J , Krien, Schulz developed the first microscopic filin cai^era* -^gerlesis.^ During the reign of E m p e r o r Wilhelm II, the g o v e r n m e n t together with Zeiss, the optical engineering company, in o r d e r to'^^ reveal th^ \"mysteries\" of the microcosmos. W h a t filmmakers w e r eh a d taken a stake,o^i^jwjf^ty-five million g o l d m a r k s in the found­ still lacking on their journey into^the unknown w a s the telephoto lens with which to capture elusive wild animals on a forest clear­ing of U f a OTt'condition that a special d e p a r t m e n t b e established ing o r the distant flight of exotic birds. A s E . W. M . Lichtwark r e m e m b e r e d it, in 1 9 2 5 Schulz a n d Krien \"created their first tele-for the production of films to instruct, enlighten, and educate the p h o t o lens from a n old c a m e r a . The first p h o t o hunt for deer w a sp o p u l a t i o n . Since this kind of film w a s controlled b y ^the Kul- successfully started.\"^turpflege d e p a r t m e n t of the Reich Ministry of the I5itefior, it w a ssimply renamed Ufa \"cultural department\" after 1 July 1918, andits p r o d u c t s w e r e thenceferfSR called \"cultural films.\" In 1 9 2 5 , headded, the leading as'soaatlon of the German film industry (SPIO)defined this genre n a r r o w l y as a triad oif ed'ucrational filrn^^^^ir^tific film, and film purely concerned w i t h l a n d s c a p k ^ In becoming m o r e perfected technically, the cultural film hoped to emancipate itself from the one-dimensional character of theAs late as 1947, a Swiss encyclopedia offered the following newsreel, not merely artistically, but also thematically. In contrast to the newsreel camera that cannot reproduce more than what isdescription: \"Cultural film is a cafcli-all for all films that have cul­ seen b y the h u m a n eye, the cultural film aimed to s h o w all those things that the eye cannot see: the variety of the world beyond thetural objectives: fjlrns on scientific research, educational films for visible a n d the secrets of nature. A c c o r d i n g t o K a u f m a n n , the Kul­ turfilm alone offers \"unique d o c u m e n t s of life in the star-studdedcoitünunity colleges and universities, films about expeditions and skies above.\" In order to m a k e these discoveries, the filmmaker n e e d e d the x-ray screen, a tiqie accelerator, slow motion^ c a m e r a s ,reportage, films to enlighten and advertise, documentaries. Cul- telepKotb and wide-angle lenses. People began to revel in the tech­ n i c a l l a n g u a g e of \" p a n c h r o m a t i c film\" (e.g., R. Reinert's Dertural nlms m a stricter sense are snorts siipporting the main pro­ geheimnisvolle Spiegel [The Mysterious Mirror, 1928]), of \"Schlieren\"gram for the purposes of entertainment and education.\" In other c i n e m a t o g r a p h y (e.g., Martin Rikli's Unsichtbare Wolken [Invisible Clouds, 1932]) or of \"insect perspectives\" as first developed inwords, the term comprised ä hodge-p'odgfe of diverse subgenres 1929 (e.g., Ulrich K. T. Schulte's Der Ameisenstaat [State of the Ants, 1934] which was awarded a prize at Venice a year later). Panchro­on the one hand, and was used as a br^cfef'lor^^ütonomÖus gen­ matic film^ a r e films that are sensitive to all colors a n d the full spectral range. The \"Schlieren\" optic w a s an invention of A. Toep-res, such as documentaries, reportage films, or marketing films, on ler and E. Abbe and facilitates the nuanced visibility of materialsthe other. ^''v. Supported by Wilhelm Prager, Kaufmann had decisivelys h a p e d t h e aesthetics of the G e r m a n Kulturfilm w i t h t h e 1 9 2 5m o v i e Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit ( P a t h s t o w a r d P o w e r a n dBeauty). A s he'sfi'e'ssed in Kis postwar assessment, this genre w a snot invetTited b y tike Nazis. H e referred to the catalogue of \"sup­porting films sui^ble for screening in public cinemas\" that asearly as 1919 listbd eighty-seven completed cultural films andanother forty-foi|r that were in production relating to some

118 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 119of divergent transparency, such as condensations, clouds, or gases;! demands that Nelson Goodman belatedly postulated in 1967: theit also captures irregular light and pictures of moving currents. | scientific goal was insight; the aesthetic goal was satisfaction. ^ In 1955 Kaufmann put his memories of this period before 1945| Next to Ufa, companies like Bavaria, Tobis, Wien-Film and oth­into the following words: \"We had three axioms. The first was:! ers also p r o d u c e d cultural films. Bavaria's Germanen gegen Pharao­'The world is m y domain.' This meant that there were no limits a^ nen (Teutons v e r s u s P h a r a o h s , 1 9 3 9 ) , for e x a m p l e , a t t e m p t e d tofar as the subject matter was concerned.\" In order to support hi^ illuminate man's early history by comparing the cultural monu­o w n de-Nazification, he enumerated innocuous cultural films] ments of ancient Egypt and Germany. What the objects cannotwith biological, natural-lyrical, and scientific topics listed in the] deliver in ideological terms is complemented by actors on the1 9 4 1 - 4 4 catalogues, such as Tiergarten Südamerika (Zoological Gar-j stage. At the time of the Nazi seizure of power, Svend Noldan'sd e n of South A m e r i c a ) ; In Obedska Bara; Meerestiere in der Adria^ Was ist die Welt? ( W h a t Is the World?, 1933) attracted considerable(Marine Life in the Adriatic Sea); Das Sinnleben der Pflanzen (The; attention. It was the story of creation in nine acts that surpassedInner Life of the Plants); Können Tiere denken? (Are A n i m a l s Capa-! even the high \"Ufa standard\" of the time. The famous physicistble of Thinking?); Unsichtbare Wolken (Invisible Clouds); Unend-^ M a x Planck is said to have been no little astonished by the techni­licher Weltraum (Infinite O u t e r Space); Röntgenstrahlen ( X - R a y s ) ; cal feats and stunts of this film as a result of which Noldan suc­Radium. T h e s e w e r e the kinds of films in w h i c h p e o p l e c o u l d ceeded in \"giving visual expression\" to developments \"that indevelop a \"truly genuine creativity\" {wurzelechtes Schöpfertum) ä reality took millions of years\" to evolve. Planck was convincedla Goebbels. \"that such films appeal not only to a small circle of so-called intel­ lectuals, but could also give much to the broadest sections of the These wonders of nature that could be seen ever more fre-j population.\" This all the more so because \"the ordinary man isquently during the war on the screens of an ever more ravaged^ longing to fulfill his life, is longing for the opportunity to under­country were designed to distract. The untouched purity of nature' stand life and genesis that he sees around him in a deeper sense.\"was juxtaposed to wartime destruction; they were a feast for eyesi To the m u s i c of Beethoven's Die Himmel rühmen des Ewigen Ehre,that had become accustomed to seeing the somber images of war. i planet Earth recedes into space as a barely visible speck. Kaufmann's second axiom reads: \"Seize hold of the fullness o^ Since its founding in July 1918, Ernst Krieger was the director oflife; it is interesting, if you film it properly.\" Accordingly, he listsj the Ufa cultural division—\"a major from the front line with many(unpolitical?) strips like Jugend im Tanz (Dancing Youth); Jagd unter' war wounds and a regimental comrade of Ufa director Grau.\"Wasser ( U n d e r w a t e r H u n t ) ; Der Zirkus kommt (The Circus Is C o m - j According to Oskar Kalbus's testimony \"this old drilling-grounding); a n d Der Geisbub (The B o y Shepherd). connection was extraordinarily important.\"* Between 1919 and 1926 Kalbus was responsible for the econonüc and public relations The third Ufa a x i o m is set in Latin: \"Suum cuicjuel\" b y w h i c h | side of Ufa's cultural film division.Kaufmann implied that each topic was to be staged in such a wayas was appropriate to its essence. The department dealing with scientific films was led by two medical doctors. Curt Thomalla and Nicholas Kaufmann. They On 1 July 1918, Ufa founded its own division for cultural and jointly p r o d u c e d Ufa's first medical blockbusters: Die Geschlechts­educational film. On the Ufa grounds in Berlin-Babelsberg, this' krankheiten und ihre Folgen (Venereal Diseases a n d their C o n s e ­division had several studios and equipment that was always up to q u e n c e s ) ; Die Pocken, ihre Gefahren und deren Bekämpfungdate. For example, it had a fully equipped microlab that guaranteed (Smallpox, Its D a n g e r s a n d the Fight Against It); Die weisse Seuchethe high standard of film on biological subjects. Movies such asj (The W h i t e E p i d e m i c ) ; Krüppelnot und Krüppelhilfe (The Plight ofKraftleistung der Pflanzen (The P o w e r of Plants); Der Bienenstaat (The • the Invalids a n d H o w to Help Them); Säuglingspflege (Infant Care).State of the Bees); Mysterium des Lebens (The M y s t e r y of Life); Natur]und Technik (Nature a n d Technology); Hochzeiten im Tierreich (Ani-! Within the first five years alone, Ufa's cultural film divisionm a l Weddings); Bunte Kriechwelt (The Colorful World of Creepy-! produced a total of 135 films on medical and pharmaceutical sub­Crawlies); Können Tiere denken? (Are Animals Capable of Thinking);! jects. However, the division soon got into financial difficultiesor Tiergarten des Meeres (Maritime Z o o ) set, if nothing else, stan-|dards of perfection. Even in their time these films lived up to twoi

120 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 121since these films were not box office successes and turned out to Willy Stuhlfeld pleaded for the nationalization of all Bavarian cin­be too sophisticated for use in schools. emas that he characterized as \"gold mines.\" If nationalization or communalization never materialized, this was probably also due In April 1919 the Central Institute for Education and Instruction to the sharp protest by the powerful Ufa trust which, on 11established a film archive and office for the promotion of educa­ November 1919, conjured up the specter of \"grave dangers for thetional and instructional films designed for schools. As the Minis­ continued existence of our society and hence also a threat to theter for Cultural Affairs put it when speaking before the Prussian Reich's stake in our c o m p a n y \" if cinemas were communalized.Diet: \"The Government is nonetheless of the opinion that there isno better investment today than to sink as much money as possi­ Moreover, for a long time—indeed until 1926—the develop­ble into popular education, especially at the primary level. Recon­ ment of the German cultural film was impeded by the economicstruction a n d the inner r e c o v e r y of the national b o d y (Volkskörper) repercussions of the entertainment tax decree of 9 June 1921. Sud­must start from within Germany's schools.\" denly, local governments pocketed between 25 and 80 percent of cinema profits as quasi-sleeping partners of the industry. In 1926, Up to the end of the inflationary period in 1923, Ufa's cultural t h e j o u r n a l Bildwart, w i t h b a r e l y v e i l e d irony, c o m p a r e d thisfilm division had produced over four hundred educational and \"immoral\" source of income to nude shows whose entertainmentcultural films suitable for schools. Previously, the Kulturfilm h a d value was being taxed at a mere 5 percent. According to Hansbeen treated as a negligible quantity in schools and at best had Traub, Ufa during its financial year 1921/22 paid ticket sales taxesbeen deemed suitable for screening on the Kaiser's birthday or on to the tune of 63 million marks, amounting to \"more than the totalSedan Day, celebrating Prussia's 1870 victory over France. Hyper­ net profit.\" This downward spiral was stopped only on 10 Juneinflation then put a temporary stop to this development. The Law 1926, when the Reich Council issued a decree that linked theof 13 October 1 9 2 3 , w h i c h introduced the Rentenmark as the t e m ­ entertainment tax to an equalization mechanism: the tax maxi­porary currency, was designed to stabilize the German currency m u m was pegged at 15 percent of the gross income. Furthermore,system. Many smaller film companies went broke in this period. the screening of cultural films was made attractive to cinema own­To prevent further bankruptcies, the Reich government intro­ ers by guaranteeing them a lucrative tax reduction. The pejorativeduced by decree the so-called quota system: a German film was to term \"tax grinder,\" used in connection with program pictures,be made for every film imported from abroad. originates in this period. The financial crisis of the cultural film coincided with a general Looking back from a Nazi perspective, Leopold Gutterer, thelull in moviegoing. A n attempt was made to make a virtue out of chairman of the Ufa supervisory board and state secretary in thenecessity and to nationalize the film industry. As M. Pfeiffer, a con­ Reich Propaganda Ministry, judged the reduced entertainment taxservative Reichstag deputy, had declared as early as 1917, \"The to be in line with \"the essence of the [Weimar] system period\":privately owned cinema is dependent on the needs and expecta­ \"First of all, it was based on purely material considerations; sec­tions of the population. A publicly funded cinema, by contrast, ondly, it w a s a half-measure; and thirdly, it achieved the oppositecan remain impervious to changing tastes and fashions.\"'' Two of what it w a s designed to accomplish.... This was the time wheny e a r s later, Fritz Tejessy, a socialist, writing in Die Glocke, also the n a m e Kulturfilm b e c a m e popular for films relating to naturedemanded that all cinemas be rigorously taken into communal and research—sadly in an often negative sense.\"'public ownership, like in \"Soviet Hungary.\" He claimed that \"theflooding [of the market] with disreputable films\" had assumed After 1926 the water-hole, insect and bird films mushroomed:catastrophic proportions. Die verborgenen Wunder unserer Gewässer (The H i d d e n W o n d e r s of O u r Inland Waters); Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer (Bee M a y a a n d During the \"tempestuous year of the communalization move­ Its Adventures), directed by Wolfram Junghans and based onm e n t in 1 9 1 9 , \" the Kulturfilm \"optimists\" h a d envisaged a v a s t W a l d e m a r Bonsel's book; Bengt Berg's Mit den Zugvögeln nacharray of communal cinemas, Urania theaters, church cinemas, and Afrika (To Africa with the M i g r a t o r y Birds); or Erich Waschneck'scinema clubs. They dreamed of showcases that would screen noth­ Kampf um die Scholle (The Struggle for the Soil). However, there areing but cultural films and would one day generate an \"enormous other typical subjects—art as reality of a secondary kind. In 1919d e m a n d \" for such movies.^ In his Der Wagenlenker (The Driver),

122 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 123Hans Cürlis founded his Institute for Cultural Research and Soul). Under Pabst's direction, cameraman Guido Seeber suc­invoked the Geist der Gothik (Spirit of the Gothic) a n d the Dom über ceeded in producing a fascinating visualization of dream images.der Stadt (The C a t h e d r a l a b o v e the City). H e d e m o n s t r a t e d the With the help of expressionist stylistic elements, the human soulotherness of the world of art—a world that is elevated above life was given images that opened up a new dimension of film aes­and put on a pedestal. thetics. Three years earlier another famous director had trans­ posed a dream into images with extraordinary filmic means. Many of the hypocritical, parareligious films depicting the little Walter Ruttmann produced Kriemhild's \"dream of the falcon\"pomposities of the fitness movement would today draw that anticipated Siegfried's death in Fritz Lang's 1923 two-partridicule—films such as Insel der Seligen (Island of the Blessed), Die film Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs). (In the Third Reich, p a r t oneGrazilen (The Graceful O n e s ) , a n d Licht, Luft, Leben (Light, Air, w a s t u r n e d into a s o u n d m o v i e u n d e r the title Siegfrieds TodLife). Kurt Tucholsky reviled as having nothing to do with art [Siegfried's Death], while part two was deposited in an archive.)those Najades who were bathing their beautiful nude bodies inM a x Reinhardt's first film p o e m Insel der Seligen (1913).^° The jour­ The year 1926 was a year of major change also in the sense thatnal Film und Bild felt at least able to identify the \"embodiment of R u t t m a n n ' s Berlin—Symphonie einer Großstadt (Berlin—Symphonyan idea\" in this movie. \"Here this idea has been pushed to utmost of a City) left the bounds of the cultural film and established theperfection, and the principle of a viewing value (as the funda­ d o c u m e n t a r y as a c a t e g o r y sui generis. It also p r o d u c e d the style ofmental concept of the movie) has been realized to a high degree.\"'^ Neue Sachlichkeit ( N e w Sobriety). The enthusiasm for naked reality was inspired by the desire \"to see things objectively and in their Restrained as they were, these films were modest precursors of material substance, without burdening t h e m a priori with ideas.\"\"the P r a g e r - K a u f m a n n film Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (Paths to Through their Berlin symphony, Ruttmann and his coauthor andVigor and Beauty) which, released in 1925, used the skin as the cameraman Karl Freund created the prototype of the synchronicmessage. In 1926 Ufa alone satisfied the demand for artistic film: apart from Berlin's skyline, the film captures the inner phys­movies by producing some 90 cultural films and over 850 educa­ iognomy of the hustle and bustle of a metropolis, its social con­tional and instructional ones. Yet, however successful these films flicts and the human beings affected by them. Through the rhythmm a y have been from an artistic point of view, profitability left of sequences that is structured like a symphony and that translatesm u c h to be desired. A c c o r d i n g to Ufa-Dienst of 11 J a n u a r y 1927, Berlin's hectic daily life into the dynamic of a film, the viewer isthe company's cultural film division was disbanded \"for reasons sucked into the eddy of images. The mobility of objects and anof reorganization.\" It was only when Ufa and Deulig merged in unfettered camera by which even spaces are being shifted, pro­the spring of 1927 that things began to look up again. duced a fascinating picture of pure movement. Greatest attention and corresponding financial support was Also in 1926 movie enthusiasts were captivated by two othergiven to the scientific film and its more popular versions. By synchronic films with analogous dynamic elements: Bertholdrecruiting well-known scientists, the German scientific and popu­ Viertel's Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheines (The A d v e n t u r e s oflar-scientific movies gained broad appeal as genres that were both a Ten-Mark Bill) and Alberto Calvacanti's portrait of Paris, titlededucational and thrilling. Even Albert Einstein, whose relativity Rien que les hemes (Nothing But the H o u r s ) . Viertel's Berlin m o v i etheory—though still controversial at this time—^was produced as was scripted by Bela Balasz and produced with Karl Freunda trilogy, praised cultural films, arguing that they provided \"a behind the camera. A ten-mark bill provided the \"red thread\" byvaluable enrichment for city dwellers\" because the visual experi­ fluttering from sequence to sequence through the \"texture of life\"ences of the latter \"mostly tend to be of great monotony.\"^^ (Balasz) within which people meet merely coincidentally. Chang­ ing kaleidoscopically on the hour, Calvacanti's movie represents a Films of this t)^e, and in particular the scientific insights con­ stroll through the rhythmically charged asphalt labyrinth of Paris.tained in them, also earned the German cultural film respectabroad. No less a person than G. W. Pabst put himself at the ser­ Ruttmann, Balasz, and Calvacanti had all been studying thevice of this genre. In 1926 and in cooperation with two pupils of m o n t a g e s in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925). A n d yet realitySigmund Freud, he made two films about the latter's p s y c h o - r a - gets lost in the rapid sequence of the images. As Siegfried Kracauerlytical m e t h o d s , titled Das Geheimnis der Seele (The M y s t e r y of the

124 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 125put it, \"Life in its transient form, street crowds, unintended ges­ films and documentaries for the purposes of self-portrayal,tures and other ephemeral impressions provide the main diet of publicity, campaigning, and propaganda. Thus, the Socialthe cinema.\"^\"* J o h n Grierson first used the t e r m \" d o c u m e n t a r y Democrats commissioned Ernö Metzner in 1928 to make a senu-film\" in his 1 9 2 9 m o v i e Drifters, or m o r e precisely in his critique of d o c u m e n t a r y , entitled Im Anfang war das Wort (In the BeginningRobert Flaherty's Moana m a d e in 1926. Was the Word), which dealt with the consequences of Bismarck's anti-Socialist laws. In 1930 M. Harder was asked to do a social When, with the rise of right-wing nationalist parties and asso­ study, Lohnbuchhalter Kremke (Bookkeeper K r e m k e ) . The t w o doc­ciations, films, too, drifted into nationalist waters, left-wing and u m e n t a r i e s Bau am Staat ( W o r k i n g on the State, 1 9 2 9 ) , w i t h aliberal artists and writers founded the People's Association of speech by the Social Democrat Reich Chancellor Hermann Müller,Film Art in 1928. Heinrich Mann, G. W. Pabst, and Erwin Piscator a n d Ins Dritte Reich (Into the Third Reich) t w o years later w e r eformed its presidium. They wanted to unmask the \"hypocrisy\" of more or less limp statements in the style of manifestoes. Short car­cultural films and newsreels. When their enthusiasm went no fur­ toons, like Was wählst Du? ( W h a t A r e You Going to Vote F o r ? ,ther than verbal actionism, film directors associated with Hans 1927) a n d Dem deutschen Volke (To the G e r m a n People, 1 9 3 0 ) , thatRichter founded the G e r m a n L e a g u e for the Independent Film.^^ were inspired by Social Democratic ideas, proved more attractive.After the Invention of Sound Film The Nazi Party had founded its own Reich Film Office as early as 1 November 1930. As early as 1925, Hitler had noted in his book It is in the nature of its technology that the movie has abolished the Mein Kampf t h a t visual i m a g e s t r a n s m i t information instantly, distance between the viewer and a world of art that is itself secluded. unlike the written word that requires slow reading.^^ Nazi termi­ There is an inexorable revolutionary tendency in the destruction of the nology and strong visual images notwithstanding, the NSDAP solemn distance ofthat cultic representation that surrounded the the­ evidently was more successful in this market than others, as ater The film's gaze is the closeup gaze of the participant. d e m o n s t r a t e d b y films such as Zeitprobleme. Wie der Arbeiter wohnt (Problems of the Time. H o w the Worker Lives, 1931) or Hitler über Bela Balasz^* Deutschland (Hitler over Germany, 1932). In the place of analyti­ cally sharpened criticism of the Weimar state, these movies pro­Just as all technological innovations were first tried out in cultural vided straight polemics.films before they became perfected in feature films, Ufa's firstsound film experiment also was made with this genre. The movie In 1 9 2 7 the H i n d e n b u r g C o m m i t t e e p r o d u c e d Unser Hinden-Gläserne Wundertiere (Transparent Miracles) w a s p r e m i e r e d o n 2 burg (Our Hindenburg), which inaugurated a repetitive series ofAugust 1929 at the Universum Cinema in Berlin. This was two tired films for the Field Marshal's and Reich President's glory. Ity e a r s after Holl)rwood h a d d e c l a r e d the s h o r t film What Price marketed the hero of the Battle of Tannenberg in World War I as anGlory a n d later Lights of New York (1928), the first feature film with image of steel that transcended the ages. This was not historyrunning dialogue, to be the beginnings of sound film. Similarly, writing the script, but historicizing manipulation. The Germanthe first G e r m a n color film w a s a Kulturfilm titled Bunte Tierwelt Nationalist People's Party (DNVP) tried to keep up in this com­(Colorful Animal World), which premiered in December 1931 and petition for filmic ideas a n d p r o g r a m s by commissioning Wohinfully lived up to its title. No more than a total of sixteen color fea­ wir treiben (Whither We A r e Drifting, 1931).tures were made up to the end of World War II. Owing to the newsynchronization techniques, film also became more interesting to Between the invention of sound film and its use in party pro­political parties for the verbal transmission of propaganda than paganda on the one hand, and Hitler's seizure of power in 1933had earlier been the case, when its agitational potential had con­ on the other, there remained little time for audiovisual produc­sisted only in moving pictures. tions opposing the Nazi movement. In 1932 the Communists won o v e r Slatan D u d o w to p r o d u c e Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Even before the start of sound film. Social Democrats, Com­ Welt (Kuhle W a m p e or: To W h o m Does the World Belong), a fea­munists, Conservative Nationalists, and Nazis used short ture film with artistic ambitions, which was directed less against the Nazis than against the Social Democrats, and indeed quite

126 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 127 massively so. The film censors released Kuhle Wampe only after Even if due credit is given to Noldan's strenuous efforts that pre­ radical cuts had been made. This propaganda film, which cun­ date the Nazi period by three years and to the almost perfect way ningly mobilized emotions with the help of Brecht-style alienation in which scientific knowledge was transmitted, the pompous nar­ effects and Harms Eisler's ballads sung by Helene Weigel, repre­ rative is nonetheless a nuisance. Against the background of sented materialist hedonism pure and simple; but it is worth see­ Beethoven's Die Himmel rühmen des Ewigen Ehre the pathos of the ing to this day. Weltenwende (The Beginning of a N e w World) a n d commentary reduced science to a question of fate and faith. Was wollen die Kommunisten? ( W h a t Is It T h a t the C o m m u n i s t s Want?), both made in 1928 by Carl Junghans, by contrast offered For the purposes of Nazi propaganda, cultural films were ofworthy propaganda which in compilatory fashion operated with interest only to the extent that they could be \"appreciated withdissociative elements. Junghans denied responsibility for another interest by viewers of all educational and occupational back­ 1928 C o m m u n i s t film, titled Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag), with grounds.\"^^ The monies that Goebbels invested in this genre—which he had been credited. These films demonstrate nothing amounting to at least 30,000 marks per 10- to 15-minute film—more than the interchangeability of parts that were in themselves were assumed to be paying off through popular appeal. By view­homogeneous and that represented a present turned into history. ing cultural films, everyone was to have an opportunity to \"study the few laws of nature\" and to \"inform himself\" of \"what is hap­ With the help of a pub owner and a number of unpaid Czech pening in the infinite realm of nature.\" As Fritz Hippler added inactors, Junghans had made a name for himself after shooting a his Betrachtungen zum Filmschaffen w h a t \"concerns all of us directlysocial-critical film of the life of a w a s h e r w o m a n , titled So ist das is becoming evident all over in most varied forms: the great polar­Leben/Takovy je zivot (This Is W h a t Life Is Like, 1 9 2 9 / 3 0 ) . This w a s ity of life, the law of inertia, gravity, and striving for the center, ofa silent film with a tragic ending that sided with the downtrodden fighting and conception, of growth and aging, of giving birth andworking class in an unsentimental way. In terms of film history, it dying, of killing and devouring. The great law, the inexorablemust be seen as part of the brief but impressive phase of movies necessity that never disappears exists ever)rwhere and in every­about the proletariat. Its artistic success was also due to the intel­ thing; it is an infinite world that, its pitilessness notwithstanding,ligent editing techniques that Junghans later perfected into a is still so beautiful.\"^' Hippler saw the cultural film as a kind ofdynamic montage, when he produced a documentary about the healing water from which man can gain, \"beyond insight and cog­1 9 3 6 W i n t e r O l y m p i c s entitled Jugend der Welt ( Y o u t h of the nition, strength and faith to deal with his daily jobs and with theWorld). Similarly, he refined the art of alienation ä la Brecht great objectives of the struggle.\"through the use of well-positioned intermediate titles. After 1933,Junghans had to make certain concessions to avoid having to sub­ Struggle in a n d with nature becomes one of the Nazi Kulturfilm'smit to the regimentation of Nazi filmmaking. inexhaustible themes, deemed to be \"significant from a state-polit­ ical point of view and valuable for popular education.\" Indeed, is In 1 9 3 2 the powerful Stahlhelm v e t e r a n s association c o m m i s ­ 'chere another subject with which to justify more easily the Socialsioned films like Freiwillige vor (Volunteers Step F o r w a r d ) or Der Darwinist ideology of eahng and being eaten, of racist wars ofStahlhelm marschiert (The Stahlhelm Is M a r c h i n g ) w h o s e images extermination against what is \"un-German\" and \"degenerate\" thanand texts c a m e across in the staccato style of machine-gun fire; by reference to nature which provides a seemingly fitting analogy.during the s a m e year, the H i n d e n b u r g C o m m i t t e e p r o d u c e d Einer It was not mentioned that calculated murder and the systematicfür alle (One M a n for All). All these movies represented nothing liquidation of ethnic, religious, or social minorities is unique only tob u t the noisy w a r cries of barbarism (Unkultur). the human species. Other strategists of the Nazi cultural film, fas­ cinated with power, either did not recognize this anymore, or they A m o n g the unpolitical Kulturfilm spectacles, Svend Noldan's tried to drown it in a romantic and misconceived sentimentality.1934 genesis film Was ist die Welt? m u s t be seen as an important stepin the evolution of the genre. Even Käthe Kollwitz confessed to hav­ Ufa's cultural films for the first time gave artistic expression toing been \"captivated\" by it; it was, she added, as a result of this film living nature; or to quote Georg Lukäcs, \"the rushing water, thethat she had become conscious of \"the enormity of the Creation\" breeze moving through the trees, the silence of sunset and the roarthat Noldan had presented \"through the eyes\" to \"the senses.\" of a thunderstorm as natural events are being transformed here

128 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 129into art, though not, as in painting, by means of artistic values that room for the dark sides of this world in the shadowless light \"atare taken from other worlds. Man has lost his soul, but he gains the peak of the skies\" (Riefenstahl). She had to be \"'on top' at allhis body instead; its grandeur and poetic power lies in the force of costs.\" In her view, the idyllic setting of the mountains ä la Stifterhis skill to overcome physical obstacles and its humor consists in symbolized the beautiful. Margarete Mitscherlich called it ahow he succumbs to them. \"2° metaphor of \"the heroic, of the masculine principle that radiated eternal glamour.\"^^ For Riefenstahl, the mountains represented theThe Popularity of the Mountaineering Film metaphysical. However, she shared with many other contempo­ raries her worship of the mystical and eternal of the world of A sharp incline lies before us. But we believe that it can be mastered mountains. Thus, when Thomas Marm describes the cloud-cov­ more easily by a people that through many years of tough exercise is ered Alps as \"the experience of eternity, of nothingness and of trained in the tribulations of mountaineering than by a people that has death, a metaphysical dream ... [as something] elementary in the learned its mountaineering skills in the plains.... We fully appreciate sense of ultimate and untamed extrahuman grandeur,\"^^ he pre­ our tasks, but also our opportunities. We know what we want. But sents a wide spectrum of possible experiences. And Fanck, what is even more important: we also want what we know. Trenker, and Riefenstahl then selected one particular facet that, given their tendency to mystify things from the position of their Joseph Goebbels^^ life philosophy, no longer allowed for critical distance.The lyrical portrayal of the Alps reached a culmination well before Riefenstahl, after a lot of trouble with philistine party and filmthe advent of the Third Reich. The world was initiated to the industry functionaries would have \"loved nothing more\" than tomountaineering film by Arnold Fanck. It was also he w h o take refuge \"in the mountains.\" But, she added naively, \"unfortu­declared the mountain peaks to be the symbolic expressions of a nately I first had to finish the film of the [1935 Nuremberg] Partyworld-view and w h o created a new type of film that combined the rally.\"^* To quote Klaus Theweleit's sarcastic assessment: \"Whatfeature with the documentary. It is wonderfully easy to extend the the elevated individual, what the higher culture lacks to achievehorizon of meaning by adopting the panoramic view from atop beatific totality, to gain bodily wholeness, is a 'beneath' that it canthe mountain. With films like Wunder des Schneeschuhs (The Snow- subjugate.\"^^ Riefenstahl expressed this \"beneath\" that is to beshoe W o n d e r , 1 9 2 0 ) , Der Berg des Schicksals ( M o u n t a i n of F a t e , subjugated more convincingly than anyone else before her. In1924), Der heilige Berg (The H o l y Mountain, 1926), or S.O.S. Eisberg Theweleit's psychoanalysis of fascism, the \"beneath\" is repre­(S.O.S. Iceberg, 1933), Fanck promoted the Nazis' fuzzy philoso­ sented by the unordered chaotic world of male sexual drives. Thisphy of nature, as did Luis Trenker. The latter, a native of the Alps, world does not appear in Riefenstahl's movies. She—a w o m a n —likewise tended to make the high ascent into the glaciers' paradise has probably been most consistent in cleansing her artistic worldswith his films Der Kampf ums Matterhorn (Struggle for the Matter- cf the filth of the \"beneath.\" Her stories are set on top of theh o r n , 1 9 2 8 ) , Der Sohn vom weissen Berge (The Son f r o m W h i t e whitest peaks; her figurative images stretch upward into the light;Mountain, 1930), Berge in Flammen (Mountains in Flames, 1931), or her gaze is that of the leader of the masses who merely notes themDer Rebell (The Rebel, 1932). as well-ordered formations, linear columns, and imposing line­ ups. The masses (the \"beneath\") are so suppressed in Riefenstahl's Both giants of this genre helped Leni Riefenstahl rise from a w o r k that they seemingly no longer appear in it, or if they do,lowly career as a dancer to a continuous success in filmmaking. they appear in a highly cultivated form. They appear as nonliter-N o t only did she play the lead parts in Fanck's Der heilige Berg a n d ary formations, as shock troops. The massive appearance of theTrenker's S.O.S. Eisberg as well as Die weisse Hölle von Piz Palu (The \"beneath\" is so clean that it no longer presents a danger to \"theWhite Hell of Piz Palu, 1929); she also devoted her own talent as a man of higher culture;\" on the contrary, it makes him \"shudder.\"director to the cultivation of the frigid soul and to the delusion of This is what Riefenstahl's films do to this day, though for differentunadulterated beauty w h e n in 1932 she filmed Das blaue Licht (The reasons. At his Berghof retreat near Berchtesgaden, Hitler onceBlue Light) in the Dolomites high above the clouds. There was no p r a i s e d F a n c k ' s t r a s h y a n d d i s h o n e s t film Der heilige Berg, in

130 The Triumph of Propagar\da Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 131 which Riefenstahl acted the lead part, as \"the most beautiful that was said by this journalist to have become \"a general German I have ever seen on screen.\" symbol of the will to overcome all difficulties of life in order to reach the light.\"^^ Titles like Der Aufstieg aus der Tiefe empor (Ascent Above all, however, it was the cultural film that invariably rose from the Depths, 1 9 1 2 ) or Uns zieht es zu höherem hinauf (We A r e to lofty heights that, in its strenuous attempt to create a lyric of Attracted Toward Something Higher, 1916) accordingly represent nature, mostly failed to excel artistically whenever its makers, fol­ allegorical transfigurations of a lower ideology into the higher lowing Ufa's Alpen p r o t o t 5 ^ e , p r o d u c e d in 1918 b y F. L a m p e , built spheres of belief. These examples also demonstrate how the cul­ a sublime w o r l d o f its o w n , as c a n b e found in Majestät der Berge tural film, walking a tightrope t o w a r d the documentary, b e c a m e a (Majesty of the M o u n t a i n s ) , Bergbauern ( H i g h l a n d F a r m e r s ) , Nazi organ, a party organ. Heuzug im Allgäu ( H a y H a r v e s t in the Allgäu) or else in Hitler Youth m o v i e s like Hitlerjugend in den Bergen (Hitler Y o u t h in the Technical Perfection with the Aim of Increasing Visibility Mountains, 1932), Bergsommer (Mountain Summer, 1936), Aus der Geschichte des Florian Geyer ( F r o m Florian G e y e r ' s Story, 1 9 4 0 ) , In this sense the moviegoer not only participates in what is being Hochland HJ (Highland Hitler Youth, 1 9 4 1 ) , or finally p l o d d i n g offered to him substantively, but also in the technical means by which w a r m o v i e s like Alpenkorps im Angrijf {Alpine C o r p s on the Offen­ things are being transmitted. This participation is justified. sive, 1 9 3 9 ) , Die Funker mit dem Edelweiss (The Wireless O p e r a t o r s w i t h the Edelweiss Flower, 1939), a n d In Fels und Firn (Rocks a n d Alfred Kerr^» Permanent Snow, 1943). These are just a few typical examples of movies in which the line between the cultural film and the docu­ Like abstract and expressionist art, imagination was banned in the m e n t a r y h a d b e e n m o v e d in favor of the latter. In the period prior Third Reich as something critical and dangerous. The Nazis per­ to the N a z i film, m a n y m o v i e s that w e r e called \"Kulturfilm\" defy ceived that they might lose control over content and over what strict classification in this category. constituted beauty if forms and the \"natural\" gestalt of things became open to interpretation. As early as 1918, Max Weber had It was only after 1933 that the documentary can be clearly denounced expressionism as an \"intellectual narcotic.\" defined as a one-sided propaganda device. Even the subcategories of this genre, such as art film, educational film, travel film, etc., How much more vigorously did the Nazi arbiters of art identifycame to be put in the service of a higher ideological mission. In this sin against the prevailing spirit of the times with the destruc­those cases where the ideology cannot be explicitly discerned, it is tion of order—in the eyes of any dictatorship, the most seriousnonetheless present in every foot of film. Accordingly paragraph sacrilege. Consequently, it was wrong to \"allow imagination to2, section 5 of the Film Law of 16 February 1934 reads: \"The Reich run wild! Imagination must be bound to the eternal laws ofF i l m P r o d u c e r [Reichsfilmdramaturg] has the following tasks: ... nature, a n d the Utopian vision of such films must provide its own[He is expected] to prevent in good time topics from being treated corrective. Senseless fantasies w o u l d result in a type of film thatthat run counter to the spirit of the age.\"^* w e s a w so frequently in earlier d a y s a n d in w h i c h Unkultur w a s given free rein.\"^' F r a n k Leberecht, in his Der Kampf um den Himalaya (The Strug­gle for the Himalayas, 1937), celebrated the courage of the Ger­ The cultural film, by contrast, took a Goethean view of life:man Nanga Parbat expedition to conquer the unconquerable. As \" W h e n y o u get it, it is interesting.\" The Kulturfilm's striving forthe forward song went: \"Even if the goal is unreachable—youth universality confronted it \"with new tasks every day.\" These werewill still c o n q u e r it.\" W h a t the c o r r e s p o n d e n t of the journal Der \"to transmit on film in comprehensible fashion what would oth­deutsche Film o n c e w r o t e w i t h o u t a sense o f irony applies to all erwise not be accessible to the eyes of millions of its enthusiasts.\"those Alpine roped parties of German directors. He argued that it The cultural film's c a m e r a \"made us the partners of the m o s t elu­was less a matter of merely documenting dangerous climbing sive beings on this planet; its time accelerator allowed us to expe­expeditions than of highlighting a \"mental attitude\" and \"an idea rience the miracle of plant growth from the germinating seed toto which the climbers were sworn\" that flared up when they full blossom; its slow-motion technique made it possible to cap-wrestled with the mountains. Thus, Der Kampf um den Himalaya

132; The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 133 ture the flying bird in the air; with the help of x - r a y s it p e n e t r a t e d i Sontag believes that \"the purpose of art is not to help us with the the secrets of life; and in the science lab w e witnessed h o w nature finding of truth, be it a particular and historical truth or an eternal and its laws were being outwitted.\" one,\"^^ artistic ambition should nonetheless not obscure the sub­ stance and content of what is contained as immanent truth in those Probably n o less suited to u n d e r w r i t e the G e r m a n Kulturfilm's pictures or of what they demonstrate and of what can be objec­mission is another observation by Goethe in which he rejects a tively transmitted. Instead, the aesthetic element will h a v e to con­ \"separation of art and science.\" As Heinrich Koch and Heinrich fine itself to the role that becomes the overriding factor under theB r a u n e a d d e d : \"The cultural film has discovered o u r h o m e l a n d , heading of transmission. The tension between art and real life, theand under the magic touch of the camera even monuments in confusion of appearance and reality that we frequently encounterm a r b l e c o m e to life.\" This g e n r e \"is a m u c h m o r e i m p o r t a n t in N a z i films, h a d been dissolved into social d o c u m e n t s in the doc­aspect of contemporary life than we surmise. As an educator of umentaries of early pioneers like Vertov, Flaherty, and Ivens whichmillions of people, it has profoundly changed our conceptions m a y be taken as yardsticks. Quite as Richter defined it, the docu­about the mysteries of life a n d given the coup de grace to m a n y mentary should \"draw concrete life into the artistic sphere\" so as tosuperstitious prejudices.\"3° promote \"the cognition of living relationships.\"^^ The optical and mechanical systems for improving visibility What Richter understood to be the inclusion of \"concrete lifementioned above (telephoto, time accelerator, slow-motion, into the artistic sphere\" the Nazis did not wish to see confusednucrophotography, etc.) took an important step with the further with attempts to individualize through aesthetic means. To them,d e v e l o p m e n t of the time lens which, from 1 9 3 7 , o p e n e d u p n e w \"concrete life\" w a s a useful life only if it w a s lived in the anony­fields for scientific-technical cultural films. To optimize frequency m o u s n a t i o n a l c o m m u n i t y (Volksgemeinschaft). F i l m w a s toand to facilitate extremely slow-motion pictures, prisms are put strengthen the conviction that had become increasingly virulent inbefore the existing camera lens that permit a fracturing of incom­ Germany that only the individual who had joined the Nazi move­ing light. As a result, the object that is being viewed appears in an ment was capable of realizing himself—as a part of the whole. Thearray of identical images. The staggered individual images are documentary in particular was expected to make its persuasivethen sequentially exposed. Thus, by taking some 300 pictures per contribution to this self-assessment gained through self-insight.second it becomes possible to observe a falling raindrop; at 30,000 The common denominator was the notion that the individual waspictures per second w e can study the tensions in a crystal at the nothing and the nation was everything. As Peter von Werdermoment of rupture. At 80,000 pictures per second we can trace the defined the \"secret leitmotiv of films\" in 1943: \"Put in a nutshell,trajectory of a bullet. This w a s also the titie of a film (80.000 Bilder the self-image of the individual and the conception of the natural,in einer Sekunde [80,000 Pictures per Second]), p r o d u c e d b y the cultural, and civilizational environment may be reduced, espe­A E G electrical engineering firm in 1 9 3 8 , that g a v e a g o o d impres­ cially in the field of artistic expression, to one basic denominator.sion of such an event. This is the image of man that predominates in a particular piece of art that represents at the s a m e time the telos of a race, of a nation, The educational film that provided exact data and scientific d o c ­ of an ideological m o v e m e n t , or of a social stratum. \"^^ H e believed,umentation satisfied a quest for learning in an age that developed as he continued sibyllinically, that such a simplification is calleda craving for compensatory covmterimages to the uniform and ide­ for whenever \"a range of individual traits is to be scanned over inologically anaesthetizing pictures that the Nazi regime presented. order to recognize basic lines and to discuss matters of style.\"There is a world of difference between the idealistic definition ofthe cultural film as \"an educator of miUions of people\" a n d the Kulturfilm Weeks w e r e organized in all major cities of the Reichsocial function of the documentary as defined, for example, by with the aim of deploying this genre as a morale booster toHans Richter who postulated the development of a \"societally counter a defeatist mentality that w a s being predicted in wartime.responsible film.\" Since the growing wealth of information con­ Cultural films were used prophylactically but also as part of astantly augments man's interest in recognizing the reality around strategy of distraction. Two films gained general admiration inhim, the documentary opens up an opportunity to provide this this respect. Bunte Kriechwelt a n d Thüringen. Both w e r e p r o d u c e dlatent cogiutive interest with information that is true. Even if Susan

134 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 135in Agfa Color in 1940 and launched in September 1941 in Munich The Documentaryanud much publicity. The second \"Reich Week for the GermanKulturfilm\" in N o v e m b e r 1 9 4 2 registered a mainly allergic reaction What complicates the situation so much is that any simple \"repro­to the p r e d o m i n a n c e of p r o p a g a n d a films, such as the trashy p a r a ­ duction of reality\" says less and less about that reality. A photo of thetrooper epic Sprung in den Feind Qump into E n e m y Country, 1941) Krupp Works or of AEG tells us virtually nothing about these com­b y Wilhelm Stöppler. The 1 9 4 3 Film Week, held in the Künstlerhaus panies. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reificationat Munich's Lenbach Square, had a better reception. With over of human relations, as, for example, a factory, will no longer let theseone h u n d r e d films subndtted, it b e c a m e a sort of short film festi­ relations go. There is hence a building job to be done for somethingval, featuring m a n y deja vu topics. Accordingly, Goebbels a w a r d e d \"artificial,\" for something that is \"put up.\"prizes to rather unexciting movies like Welt im Kleinsten (Micro-W o r l d ) , Netz aus Seide (Silk N e t ) , Dämmerung über dem Teufelsmoor Bertolt Brecht^^(Dusk o v e r Devil's Bog), Kopernikus, Künstler bei der Arbeit (Artistat Work), as well as the color a n i m a t e d films Verwitterte Melodie The Forerunners( F a d e d M e l o d y ) a n d Armer Hansi (Poor Jack). All these films w e r emarked by the conspicuous absence of the swastika flag. Films The first sixty-foot German documentary was made at the end ofloyal to the party line did not receive prizes this time, among them the last century by the German film pioneer Oskar Messter when,Das deutsche Wort (The G e r m a n Word). Cultural films m a d e at the on a sunny November afternoon in 1897, he put up his tripod invery end of the Third Reich provided an even bigger escape into front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. Messter had introduced thethe idyllic: Im Reich der Wichtelmänner (In the R e a l m of the Malteser Cross in Germany the year before and had thus facilitatedDwarfs), Kraniche ziehen gen Süden (The C r a n e s A r e Flying South­ flicker-free screening. His n u m b e r one film is described as followsw a r d ) , Hochzeit im Korallenmeer (Wedding in the C o r a l Sea), Der in the 115-page catalogue in which he announced some eighty-fourletzte Einbaum ( T h e L a s t D u g o u t ) , Romantisches Burgenland of his o w n films: \"At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The columns(Romantic Burgenland), or Im Tal der hundert Mühlen (In the Vale of the Brandenburg Gate are visible in the background.\"^^of the Hundred Mills). Messter had recognized even before his foreign colleagues the The replacement of Reich Film Superintendent Fritz Hippler v a l u e of film as a biographical document. The \"writing\" of livelyby SS-Gruppenführer Hans Hinkel in the spring of 1944 no longer history became possible only with the development of the docu­had a visible impact. It is, in any case, difficult to see how the cynic mentary. What kind of visual images would we have today ofHinkel, w h o h a d been responsible for the production of Der ewige great statesmen and inventors without it? As early as 1897, Mess­Jude (The Eternal J e w ) , could h a v e been outdone. ter portrayed Emperor Wilhelm II in a \"living photo\" and later he also did one of Bismarck in retirement. He was the first to use the closeup a n d the time-accelerator dramaturgically. In 1902 the Ger­ man princes had \"their picture taken mutoscopically by order of the All Highest [the Kaiser].\" Only the town of Posen is revealed in the simple report about the Imperial splendor when, \"headed by His Most Serene and Royal Highness Prince Albrecht of Prussia,\" people arrived on 5 July 1902 at Marienburg which had just been restored. Ten years later, the Kaiser hovered at length in the aura above the people on the occasion of the twenty-fifth armversary of his coming to the throne. Eight different production companies w e r e involved in the making of Der deutsche Kaiser im Film (The German Emperor in Film, 1912), Max Reinhardt's Ambrosia-Film

136 \ The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 137among them.-'* The members of the royal house w h o can be seen fictive worlds that appealed to contemporary tastes.^* In 1912strutting through the contemporary world almost as a matter of Egon Friedeil, the cultural critic, characterized the cinema as giv­course give the appearance of exotic stopgaps for the real novelties ing aesthetic expression to the spirit of the age: \"To begin with, itthat newsreels evidently could not get hold of. is brief, fast, and put in code words, and it does not linger. There is something curt, precise, military about it. This fits our age which From the early period of the silent film, Hans Cürlis has left us is an age of extracts.\"^'shorts of the portrait-painting Liebermann, of Slevogt, Corinth,and Zilie, and it was only in 1957 that he put them together in his Soon after the beginning of World War I, feature films with aSchaffende Hände (Creating H a n d s ) . Probably the oldest portrait of heroic content, s u c h as Auf dem Felde der Ehre (On the Field ofan artist, a genuine trouvaille, is b y Sascha Guitry: in 1 9 1 9 , just H o n o r , 1 9 1 4 ) or Wie Max das Eiserne Kreuz erwarb ( H o w M a xbefore Auguste Renoir's death, he documented a few moments of Gained the Iron Cross, 1914), acted as boosters of patriotismthe almost paralyzed impressionist painter, representing the first along with some footage of documentary material. In the 2,446known tentative forays of the camera toward the authentic subject. cinemas that existed in 1914 as the only place of diversion, the folks back home were to be told what they owed to the soldiers atPrior to World War \, the German Express Film Company the front. A s A d o l f Hitler later p u t it in his book Mein Kampf \"What the German people owe to the army can be summarized inb e g a n to m a r k e t w a r newsreel material u n d e r the title Der Tag im one word: Everything!\"*\"Film—Erste deutsche tägliche kinmatographische Berichterstattung In Auf dem Felde der Ehre a father disowns his son w h o w a s given a dishonorable discharge as an officer. The son is rehabilitated by(The Day in Film—First Daily German Cinematographic Report­ his touchy father—an arrogant man with the frame of mind of a heel-clicking subordinate—only after he has become a volunteering). In 1913 its reporter shot footage at the front line in the Balkan and conquered a flag from the enemy. At the beginning of the war, Heinrich Mann called this species the \"master race of subjects.\"War when, \"in a hail of bullets,\" he succeeded in filming \"an entire O n 2 4 July 1 9 1 4 , Eiko-Woche, Messter's strongest competitor,campaign including its culmination point as a real battle.\" Fried- advertised its pictures of the Sarajevo murders under the heading of \"sensational program\": \"Archduke Francis Ferdinand's Lastrich v o n Zglinicki reported in his book Der Weg des Films that the Reception in Sarajevo as well as the Funeral Arrangements from Sarajevo to the Family Mausoleum.\" Harbingers of World War I;\"Kaiser was given a private screening of \"original footage of murder as a marketing device. Language dropped to the level of propaganda. In his conversations with refugees. Brecht remindedinfantry bayonet attacks, cavalry patrols, firing guns, and Red us that in the German language wars merely \"break out\" like a pest. \"This,\" he a d d e d , \"is because no one has started those w a r s ,Cross activities.\"^^ and no one has been able to prevent them.\" Similarly the Eiko-Woche of 1 9 1 3 , w h i c h s t a r t e d e v e n before The newsreels of Messter-Woche then created the \"DocumentsMesster's venture, demonstrated with its first film what kind of on the War\" which from 1 October 1914 until the end of the warelements a five-hundred-foot newsreel had to contain to be a pop­ put on the screens back home \"extracts\" of heroic events from allular success: \"Balloon Rally; Accident Due to Gale-Force Winds; parts of the front. At this point at the latest, the boundariesJog in the Grunewald; the Brunswick Palace; The Empress Travels between documentaries and newsreels began to disappear.to Berlin; Homage Visit of an Air Squadron; The Romanian CrownPrince and Crown Princess in Berlin; The Modern Rotation Press Censorship certificate No. 36,732 of 3 October 1914 provides aat the Scherl Publishing House; Visit of the Württembergian Royal good impression of the propagandistic force contained in the veryCouple; The German Crown Prince with Prince Carol of Roma­ first Messter-Woche. Its bullying w o r d s are given here in full innia.\" Half of the topics were concerned with royalty. order to document the mind-set of heroic German chauvinism long before Hitler. Before Messter once again employed his cameramen for docu­mentaries and, in 1914, as war correspondents, he fully devotedhimself to making feature films, discovering in the process manylater \"stars\" such as H e n n y Porten (Das LiehesglUck einer Blinden[The Love of a Blind Woman, 1910]), Lil Dagover, Adele Sandrock,a n d Emil Jannings (Vendetta, 1 9 1 6 ) . A s M e s s t e r explains in hisbook Mein Weg mit dem Film, his excursion into feature films h a dvery pragmatic reasons: the expensive newsreels had to befinanced from the profits made with features—^with the creation of

i138 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 139 Subheadings: did not provide a good view. It was even more difficult to film l.The City of Domnau (East Prussia), a Document of Rus­ actual combat scenes since the cameraman naturally is not given sian Destructive Rage. any information about a planned attack.\" 2. Market-Place in Domnau: Mayor May, W h o Has Escaped from a Russian Camp, Heads the Procession of Returnees. Although the drama is often missing. World War I comes across 3. The Grave of Sgt. Abelt in Domnau. Abelt Was the Last in the newsreel on the whole as something horrific; however, it Heroically to Defend the Town and Died for the Honor of does not appear as the catastrophe that it was. To be sure, the the Fatherland. soothing books by Werner Beumelburg (Ypres) and Paul Ettighofer 4. A Church Destroyed by the Russians in Allenburg (East (Verdun) w e r e even less capable or willing to capture this aspect. Prussia). On the contrary, they glorified the war as a cleansing storm of 5. The Town of Darkehmen (East Prussia) as Ravaged by steel. A s Friedell put it: \"The imagination of the most sober and the Russians. block-headed viewer is still a hundred times more gripping and 6. Looking after the Wounded under the Protectorate of mysterious than all the printed books in the world.\"*^ Princess August Wilhelm. The Princess Attends a Film Showing for Invalids at the Palace Theater near Berlin's In his memorandum on film as a means of political propa­ Zoological Gardens. ganda, written prior to the war, Messter drew attention to foreign 7. The Berlin Choir League Organizes a Patriotic Concert at competitors to induce the Imperial authorities to take counter- Berlin's Königsplatz. measures. As he wrote, the program of the French companies 8. \"A Call Roars by Like a Thunder Clap.\" Pathe-Journal, Gaumont actualite, a n d Eclair revue contained \"much 9. The Brave Crew of the German \"U 9\" Submarine That that was beautiful and grandiose. But all of this had happened in Sank Three British Battle Cruisers in the Morning of 22 France and England and not at all in Germany. They are showing September 1914 Is Being Decorated with the Iron Cross. exhibitions, parades, athletic contests, christenings of ships, maneuvers, fashion shows, etc., as well as beautiful landscapes; 10. Captain Lieutenant Otto Weddingen, the Commander of but all of them lie beyond the Rhine River. And if these good films the Submarine. contain something about Germany at all, it is bound to be some­ thing degrading. There is a system in all this. And these French 11. \"Dear Fatherland, You May Rest Assured.\" newsreels are being supported by foreign governments.\" Length: 500 feet. Messter-Woche c o n t i n u e d to exist u n d e r its old n a m e after The newsreels of the militarist Messter were nothing more than World War I until 1922, even after Messter's production companypropaganda that took its cue from Prussianism. Thanks to his con­ had been taken over by Ufa. Only thereafter was it renamed asnections with the Imperial Court, the Supreme Army Command Deulig-Woche. The first sound-film newsreel w a s issued b y Ufa onfinally commissioned Messter to censor all pictures from the front. 10 September 1 9 3 0 as Ufa-Tonwoche No. 1. No less a person thanApart from his own productions, these were primarily the films of Emil Jannings was the speaker. The first American sound-filmfour other companies and their eight cameramen who had per­ newsreel, called Movietone News, d a t e d back to 2 5 April 1928.mission to make films at the front, among them Carl Froehlich oflater fame.*^ Messter's c a m e r a m e n were also used by the General How effectively the documentary can subtly manipulateStaff in aerial reconnaissance to provide target photos. It was images of reality that are photographically authentic is demon­much more difficult to provide such photos from the trenches strated by the intensive use of this genre in Nazi propaganda.either because the equipment was too heavy or because soldiers There is no better example to show how the dialectic use ofand cameramen had to guard against being spotted by the enemy. authentic material during the editing process can deprive indi­Thus, cameraman Martin Kopp complained in the Berlin journal vidual elements of reality of their \"veracity\" and turn themDer Kinematograph of 12 M a y 1 9 1 5 h o w difficult it w a s \"to film upside-down, when subjected to an ideological superstructure.scenes from the trenches because the construction of the trenches As we know from the early 1920s montage experiments by Pudovkin and Kuleshov, the authenticity of individual elements of reality can be voided by this technique, i.e., by means of simple

140 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 141cuts. The Nazis later perfected this basic pattern of manipulative and newsreels were charged with preparing Nazi ideology astricks: they falsified facts by shifting the context in a speculative clearly as possible, which meant to say that it had to be compre­direction, by twisting causal connections through a change of hensible e v e n to the m o s t obtuse a m o n g the Volksgenossen. It w a schronology, by bending the visual truth with the help of correc­ not Hitler's aim to convince the minority of intellectuals, who intions in the text, and used (heroicizing) music to add \"what the fact were to be neglected. His primary target were the broadimages were lacking in power\" (Goebbels). masses; he wanted to conquer the soul of the ordinary people. This is w h y all propaganda \"had to be popular and its intellectual Nazi propaganda was generally not at all interested in objective level had to be geared to the receptivity of the most limited mindsarguments. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular among those w h o m it is designed to address.... The more it exclu­Enlightenment and Propaganda, wanted to see production only of sively takes into account the feelings of the masses, the more pen­such documents that exclusively portrayed those aspects of reality etrating will be its success.... The art of propaganda lies preciselythat harmonized with Nazi ideas and goals. As Goebbels said in the fact that, in having the proper appreciation of the emotionalbefore the Reich Culture Chamber in 1933, only \"what serves world of the masses, it attracts the attention of these masses in aNational Socialism is good and must be supported.\"''-' In his view, psychologically appropriate form and then finds its way into theirpropaganda was the \"most honest proclamation of the best truth.\" hearts.\" A s far as the documentary is concerned, it is therefore no longer the artist who leaves his imprint on the epoch, but the This view of truth reflects Darwin's basic premise pushed to its politicians—and in wartime, the military.logical conclusion, i.e., that the evolution of life runs purposefullytowards a better state of affairs. Since this evolution is based on Hitler concluded from this that \"all effective propaganda mustwhat Darwin called \"natural selection\"—and this is nothing else be confined to a very few points to be turned into slogans until eventhan the competition of the animal races among each other—the the slowest person perceives the slogan as something desirable.\"\"better\" is equivalent to the \"stronger\" that has survived in thecompetitive struggle. Darwin did, in fact, develop the vision that What then were those \"very few points\" of Nazi ideology toat some future date \"the civilized races of humanity\" would which all other items in the party program were to be subordi­e v e r y w h e r e replace the m o r e \"primitive\" ones.'** nate? Andreas Hillgruber has identified a striving for world dom­ ination and a racist doctrine as the core of this ideology.*^ All other It would be wrong to assume that those parts of humanity who elements of Nazism have a merely functional value. Their primaryconsider themselves \"civilized\" will soon have exterminated those role is to realize the two main objectives. A third core componentparts they regard as \"wild;\" a t the s a m e time, w e are not too far is the Führer principle that overarches the two key objectives. Itfrom the destruction of the cultures of the so-called Third World. includes a notion of how the state functions in all its branches,And yet this development does not confirm Darwin's ideas; rather institutions, and laws.it highlights the perversity of equating quality with power. Eberhard Jäckel assesses the specific elements of Nazi ideologyThe Influence of Open Propaganda in a similar way: \"The state and all its aspects including the Party and its program are only means to an end: an end, however—and But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success this is absolutely crucial—^which is very clearly defined, namely unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and the realization of the twin goals of territorial policy and anti-Senü- with unflagging attention. It must conflne itself to a few points and tism.... Germany had to conquer new living space in the East, and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence it had to remove the Jews—and all the other aspects of public life is the flrst and most important requirement for success. h a d to serve as m e a n s to those t w o ends.\"'*'' Adolf Hitler« The ideological hopes and expectations of the German people that were to be generated through indoctrination formed the psy­The Nazi Party determined what was to be of interest to the German chic foundation that Hitler urgently required to implement his twopeople. Being its most powerful political weapons, documentaries main objectives. H e needed it, firstly, in order to conduct his w a r s of conquest o v e r a longer timespan without inducing paralysis in

142 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 143the wake of a rising defeatism among the population. Secondly, we know about audiences, the filmed world will be received as anthere was the \"Jewish Question\" to be resolved by means of the authentic document. Nazi propaganda knew how to exploit for itsso-called \"Final Solution.\" It w a s not the Leitartikel—a series in purposes this widespread illusion concerning the facticity of whatGoebbels's weekly Das Reich—that Hitler r e g a r d e d as the p r i m a r y was being presented as documents. The contemporary viewer andinstrument of indoctrination. In his view, the audiovisual media Volksgenosse took at face value w h a t in fact w a s merely presentedwere a more powerful means to gain popular support for his aims. as an extract of reality. The dramaturgy of lies to be found in theAccordingly, he used the full weight of the Propaganda Ministry Nazi newsreel is based on this insight. As Kracauer explains:above all for the production of newsreels and documentaries, withGoebbels personally setting the ideological parameters. At a time The effectiveness of Nazi propaganda results from the viewer'swhen the population still regularly went to the movies to find delusion that the evidence presented is genuine: everyone isdiversion, the newsreel and the short documentary, prominently inclined to believe that pictures taken on location are incapable ofplaced in every showing, became the Party's most reliable telling a lie. But of course they can. Let us assume that a docu­mouthpiece and its most important and punctually delivered mentary that has been billed as nonpartisan does not contain anymeans of mass communication. purposefully staged scenes [and] simply confines itself, as it should, to reproducing reality ... and yet it may highlight certain Nazi newsreels and documentaries exclude two areas as a mat­ aspects of a given situation at the expense of others and thus iriflu-ter of principle. To begin with, there is the private sphere: no ence attitudes toward that situation. The shots that are being shownextolling of an idyllic family life here; nor are deprivations treated. are bound to be a selection from a range of pictures.*'Instead of showing people in their daily lives or after work, Nazipropaganda shows the private existence of men and women only Never having seen the unedited truth and hence not missing itwhen they are cheering. However, the reverse side of this coin either, the moviegoer may accept the pictures as perfectly truthfuldoes not appear on the screen either. Anti-Jewish pogroms, book even though they have been put into the wrong context or areburnings, deportations, forced labor, and concentration camps are based on material that has been tampered with; the manipulationnot shown. Nor do sterilization and euthanasia come up as of reality is perceived by the viewer as being authenticated by thethemes. Atrocities and deadly facts are quietly passed over. documents. The truthfulness of the documents may show a bias only if the c o m m e n t a r y is tendentious because the full truth in The early documentaries of Soviet propaganda show the hero those pictures could either damage the reputation of the Party orof labor in his individual existence and portray him as the repre­ undermine Hitler's image.sentative of a system that will bring happiness. The Nazi film, bycontrast, reduces the individual to the status of a purely numeri­ However, Nazi propaganda pursued as its main objective thecal element within the larger Volksgemeinschaft. suppression of all negative images and indoctrinated the masses with optimistic pictures that were presented as \"genuine.\" It also It is therefore logical that documentaries and newsreels repre­ aimed to impress Nazi ideology upon the people by this mostsent all persons in uniform as embodiments of Nazism. It is part of powerful means, until everyone had become convinced that he orthe dramaturgy of Nazi propaganda, which is presented with an she was the proud witness to a globally historic moment. This waseffective understanding of psychology, that even Hitler, in his the mandate of documentaries and newsreels. What they offeredapparent omnipresence, is not portrayed as an individual with his in the way of information was determined exclusively by theirown development, but—as Kracauer put it—only \"as the embod­ propagandistic value. The appeal to have faith in the Führer andiment of enormous impersonal powers—or to be more precise, as confidence in his ideas and ideals was to be served up until thistheir focal point. Many respectful closeups [of Hitler] notwith­ propaganda had been totally internalized. A s Hitler put it: \"Thestanding, these films that are supposed to glorify him cannot German people must be educated to accept one absolute, stub-a d a p t his p h y s i o g n o m y to actual h u m a n life.\"*^ b o m , self-evident, and firm belief [that] in the end we shall all achieve what is necessary. But this can only succeed if w e con­ In contradistinction to the feature film with its actors conjuring stantly appeal to the power of the nation, if w e extol the positiveup a fictive world, the newsreel camera captures real people livingwithin a real world and depicts them as real phenomena. From all

144 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 145values of a people and ignore as far as possible the so-called neg­ the dialectical language of film. Only an intellectual cinema of aative sides.\"^° This is w h y it w a s especially necessary that pub­ kind that has never before existed and whose social function islished opinion \"subscribes totally, blindly to the principle: the open; a cinema of highest intellectuality and extreme sensuousnessleadership is acting correctly.\" that seizes hold of the entire arsenal of optical, acoustic, and bio- motoric stimuli in order to influence the viewer.^^ As early as 1933, Hans Traub, an interpreter of Nazi propa­ganda films, had defined \"active propaganda as the conscious The Russian Montage as a Technical Modelapplication of tendentious means for political purposes,\" as the\"implementation [Zielwerdung] of a mind-set.\" H e then e n u m e r ­ The montage is just as essential an element of film as all others. After theated the main characteristics of \"exemplary propaganda\": \"(1) The campaign for the montage and the storm against it the time has come topossible subjective appeal to the 'world of emotions'; (2) the approach the problems of montage de n o v o and without prejudice.restriction of content; (3) confrontationism [Kampfansage] from thestart; (4) repetition in 'permanent and regular uniformity' (Adolf S. M. EisensteinHi tier). \"^^ A s to the fields in w h i c h the educational film could actin an \"enlightening and propagandistic way,\" Traub recom­ Goebbels r e g a r d e d Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925)m e n d e d portraying \"life in the c a m p s of the Labor Front, v i e w s of as the prototype of a powerful propaganda film and wished toReichswehr maneuvers and exercises, pictures from the daily rou­ p r o d u c e a N a z i film that w o u l d h a v e a similar impact. H e w a stine and Sundays in the navy, work in individual occupations, a convinced that \"if s o m e theater here in Berlin w o u l d screen a filmd a y in the life of the Reich Chancellor.... We [also] need educa­ that would genuinely reflect this age and be a real National Social­tional films about World W a r [I] batties....\" ist 'Battleship,' it w o u l d be sold out for a long time.\"^^ Addressing Goebbels as \"Herr Doktor,\" Eisenstein replied in the Soviet jour­ In order to popularize the Führer principle as something nat­ nal Literaturnaya gazeta of 22 M a r c h 1934 that truth a n d N a z i s mural, it w a s deemed necessary for the individual to be submerged were incompatible: \"Whoever stands for truth will find himself onin the nation—with the N a z i film providing the early e x a m p l e . a different path from that of National Socialism. Whoever is forOnce a sufficient number of people had seen and internalized truth, will be against you!\"^* A n d under the heading \"Noexplicit p r o p a g a n d a movies, the Volksgenosse w a s to b e c o m e de Thoughts Wasted for W h a t Is Inexorable,\" Brecht wrote about Bat­facto a p a r t of the w h o l e nation also—a small ( a n o n y m o u s ) c o g in tleship Potemkin: \"I have seen h o w even the exploiters next to m eHitler's movement. The vulgarity of the national whole is were seized by emotions of approval when they viewed thedepicted with gusto, and not merely in Riefenstahl's films, as a actions of the revolutionary sailors. In this way, even the scumquantitative ornament through marching columns or through participated in the irresistible seductiveness of the possible andp a c k e d blocks of h u m a n s {Menschenquader) w h o listen to the the powerful joys of logic.\"^^Party's rhetoric. On the occasion that an individual is shown, it isin the shape of a \"worker intimately boimd to a machine\" or of \"a However, Goebbels also took something usable from the mon­soldier wedded to his arms,\" as Ulrich Kurowski wrote. Gustave tage theories of the Russians and drew opposite conclusions fromLe Bon added: \"The moment they become part of a mass, the uned­ their insights. A c c o r d i n g to Lenin, film is the m o s t important of allucated and the scholars are equally incapable of being observers.\" the art forms; in Stalin's view it was therefore supposed to play anThere were to be no differences between a member of the Acad­ important role in the cultural revolution not only \"as a means ofemy and a water carrier. comprehensive educational work and Communist propaganda,\" but also as \"a means of educating the masses in the arts, [and] of When asked which art genre was up to the challenges of this offering them purposeful relaxation and diversion.\"^^epoch, Eisenstein replied: A s M a y a k o v s k i succinctiy defined the function of Soviet film in The medium of cinematography alone! An intellectual cinematog­ 1922: \"The cinema serves the proliferation of ideas.\" After 1933, raphy alone. A synthesis of emotional, documentary, and absolute this was also the maxim that Goebbels tried to realize. In the film. Only the intellectual cinema will be capable of putting a stop to the \"disuniting of language\"—^more particularly on the basis of

146 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 147 meantime, he had changed his mind with regard to boring as yet been said about the use of formal means and possibilities \"Socialist Realism\" and hoped to popularize his Nazi ideas with that are inherent in film. After all, Vertov does not assert that the the help of an aesthetic that Riefenstahl was in the process of \"camera eye\" represents the truth; he only speaks about the camera developing. In both systems the camera is sent out on patrol to truth. However, unlike \"genuine\" truth, the latter is absolute. size up the existing order. Maxim Gorki, it is true, had first coined Whereas in reality things and events may be viewed from differ­ the term \"Socialist Realism\" in 1921 and charged it with the task of ent angles, film consists merely of the multitude of its pictures. \"consolidating for the present what has been achieved by the And these have been taken by the camera and carmot be perceived October Revolution and of illuminating accordingly the aims of from any other perspective. the socialist future.\" However, it w a s only at the 1934 Moscow Writers' Congress that the term was turned into binding doctrine Although his formalism was often extreme and included exper­ by Andrei Zhdanov who simultaneously condemned the aesthet­ imental visualization, Vertov pursued the aim of making political ics of formalism. According to Vsevolod Pudovkin, formalism ideas transparent from their substance. For him, this also com­ was \"a comprehensive term that includes everything that distracts prised the notion that the viewer must join in reflecting about the the artist from the actual life of the people a n d its needs. \"^'' conditions under which political events are perceived. This is what he called the perception conditions of film. Eisenstein called The patriotic Ukrainian filmmaker Alexander Dovshenko, these experiments \"formal antics\" and \"senseless vagabondingw h o s e film Earth c a m e out in 1 9 3 0 , m a d e the shift t o w a r d parti­ with the camera.\" Even where Vertov aimed to win over illiteratesanship in good time without sacrificing the lyric base and pow­ viewers—the land laborer from Azerbeidjan, or the shepherd boyerful sensuality of his films to Socialist Realism. His 1935 movie from the steppes—for socialist reforms, critics like Victor ShklovkijAerograd, h e reveled, w a s b o r n e b y the idea \"that life is beautiful, reproached him that the facticity of individual scenes had disap­that this part of our country is beautiful, and that foreign flags peared due to the predominance of scenes that were invented orwill never fly over here.\"^* staged. Thus, even the succinct metaphor which had gained Vertov and his audacious montages so much admiration has remained However, the documentaries and newsreels that had so controversial: the young pioneers who hoist the red flag in a villagei m p r e s s e d Goebbels, like Vertov's The Camera Eye or The Man with camp are not thought to represent what Vertov calls \"sponta­the Camera, w e r e p r o d u c t s of the 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 2 9 period a n d thus origi­ neously\" filmed life. Rather, such scenes are said to exhaust them­n a t e d in the period prior to a d o g m a t i z e d Socialist Realism. D u r ­ selves in providing a calculated, purely aesthetic composition thating his tour of Europe in 1931, Vertov had shown these films to aims at achieving a visual effect. As a result, the authenticity of thelarge audiences. At the same time, he revealed his insights into the moment that he had had in mind is robbed of its impact. In anconstruction of film like a homo faber: \"I create t h o u s a n d s of people objective sense, this scene is nonetheless politically true in that itaccording to different schemes and plans. I a m the camera eye. It certainly happened in a very similar manner. Joris Ivens is simi­is from one person that I take his hands—the strongest and most larly known for setting up scenes in his documentaries, as long asagile; I take the legs from another one—the prettiest and most he thought it served the document. Accused of formalism, Vertovwell-proportioned. From a third person I take the head—the most hardly received any commissions back home during the Stalin era,beautiful and impressive.\" The same manifesto by Vertov also while his ideas remained virulent in Western Europe.contains the quintessential contradictio to his m o n t a g e of \"super­man\": \"The camera eye represents camera truth\"—a statement A m o n g the Germans, it was above all Walter Ruttmann whothat did no more than to articulate a fundamental truth about the was inspired by Vertov's syntax, according to which the film­nature of film. After all, the camera eye is the camera, and nothing maker was urged to think in visual rather than literary or verbalelse can be shown in film other than what the camera \"sees.\" That categories. However, Ruttmann used montage techniques tothe moviegoers take what is put before them as reality to a greater develop formal progressions rather than ones concerned with con­degree than in other media stems from the fact that they are forced tent. The wealth of forms he deployed culminated in a brilliantto adopt the camera's view as the only one from which the world fireworks whose dynamics, produced as they were through mon­that is being depicted can be seen. However, with this, nothing has tage, drove the various parts and cadences into a chain reaction. It 1

148 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 149w a s this that g a v e Berlin—Symphonie einer Großstadt its artistic and its aestheticism and in combining both in a perfect symbiosis.quality and turned it into a sensation. There is a parallel piece of Indeed, without the help of a theoretical program and completely1 9 3 0 , entitled Apropos de Nice, w h i c h Jean Vigo m o n t a g e d w i t h intuitively, she founded the fascist film aesthetic in her firstVertov's brother Boris (Kaufmann) and which ignored all sense of m o v i e , about the 1 9 3 3 N a z i P a r t y rally, entitled Sieg des Glaubensreality by relying on a self-propelling movement that is developed (Victory of Faith). She then so perfected it in her Triumph des Wil­in masterly fashion. And yet the two films do not merely represent lens (Triumph of the Will) a year later that she set with this filman explosive I'art pour I'art. By combining concrete images, they binding standards that remained unsurpassed up to the end ofsucceed in distilling and thus making transparent the phenome­ the Third Reich.non of the city as a space in which humans live closely and pre­cariously together. Alberto Calvacanti's Rien que les hemes (1926), Paul Rötha observed for the documentary in general what thewhich traces the course of a day in Paris in kaleidoscopic fashion, N a z i film later p u r s u e d to excess: it h a d , he said, a l w a y s been onealso falls into the series of city portraits cast in a poetic and reflec­ of the grave weaknesses of the documentary that it excluded thetive mood. Regarding much of this as artificial, Rene Clair called individual.^ Eisenstein also knew from experience that \"the massthese films \"visual exercises.\" acts mechanically; it amounts to no more than a numerical factor\" Henceforth, the community of faith, the mass became degraded to R u t t m a n n , w h o s e w o r k with Riefenstahl on Triumph des Willens the position of a movable cadre pure and simple, that, as it movesended prematurely, did offer the Third Reich his cooperation, but along, is guided and directed artistically by Riefenstahl in accor­not his talent. His p r o p a g a n d a films Metall des Himmels (Metal of dance with the creative criteria that she has developed. With thethe Sky, 1 9 3 4 ) , Altgermanische Bauernkultur (Ancient G e r m a n i c help of tableaux vivants that h a v e been pressed into firm blocks ofP e a s a n t Culture, 1939) or Deutsche Panzer ( G e r m a n Panzers, 1 9 4 1 ) humans and banner-carrying colunms and which she utilizes aes­represented a tame, technically perfect afterglow of his earlier thetically as geometric patterns, she creates emotional spaces thatwork; he escaped into formalism without even attempting to include the viewer in the cinema. For a director who is obsessedreach a critical level. Nor, in his very last wartime booster, did he with rhythm, the formalized masses that have been molded intosucceed in cutting the \"Gordian knot\" that Ernst Jünger had tied compact units of movement are supposed to symbolize the phys­in his 1 9 2 5 b o o k Feuer und Blut (Fire a n d Blood): \"... w e m u s t iological marching in step that evolves, aesthetically transfigured,transmit what is within us to machines; this requires distance and into the harmony between Führer and people. Riefenstahl's accel­an ice-cold brain that transforms the convulsive flashes of the erated dynamic rhythm, which drives the images forward, doesblood into rational and logical energies ...\" Finally, Ruttmann was not give the viewers any caesuras that allow them to grasp newnot killed at the Eastern front in 1941 while shooting his film Sieg d e v e l o p m e n t s a n d situations; does not give t h e m time for cogita­im Osten (Victory in the East); he died in a Berlin hospital in 1 9 4 2 . tion or room for catching their breath; in short, does not leave them any \"half seconds\" as formulated by cognitive psychology.Enter Leni Riefenstahl Moviegoers are to be overwhelmed by the breathtaking events that Nazism generates around them; they are to be captured by its Aestheticism that politicizes itself will always he radical, precisely fast tempo. because of bellezza. It is quite common to confuse radicalism with depth. Nothing is more incorrect. Radicalism is beautiful shallow­ It m a y sound paradoxical, but in the rapture of geometry Riefen­ ness—a liberal cult of gestures that leads directly into choreography ... stahl celebrates the contrast with abstract art. Thus, as Walter Ben­ jamin h a d predicted, the aestheticism of politics triumphs in Sieg Thomas Mann^^ des Glaubens ( 1 9 3 3 ) and Triumph des Willens (1934): aesthetics becomes a manual of downfall, becomes the imminent unleashingLeni Riefenstahl was of a different caliber. By systematically of a global conflagration. Riefenstahl always rejected the reproachexcluding rational elements in the films she made for the Third that she had allowed herself to be abused as the handmaiden ofReich, she succeeded in finding the balance between propaganda ideology. She is right. After all, she was the standard-bearer of the

Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 151150 The Triumph of Propaganda not utilized aesthetically in order to pretend what it was. After all, Riefenstahl w a s herself piously fixated on this actually existingFührer in fascist fikn that, according to Susan Sontag \"glorified sub­ National Socialist reality.ordination, celebrated blind obedience, a n d heroicized death. \"^^ Excursus: Reich Party Rallies and Their Transfiguration In Riefenstahl Hitler had found a congenial choreographer ofhis \"Movement.\" Just like herself, he, too, was the \"director who In the actual act of deception, among all the preparations, the horroraesthetically directed the masses as in a choir.\" Within the Gesamt­ in the voice, expression, gestures, amid the striking scenery, the beliefkunstwerk, w i t h i n this \"most g r a n d i o s e W a g n e r i a n o p e r a of all in themselves overcomes them. It is this that speaks so miraculouslytimes,\" the G e r m a n Volksgenossen represented the \"actors a n d the and convincingly to the onlookers.extras\" at the s a m e time.^^ Friedrich Nietzsche*^ However, her films are not intended to celebrate themselves inthe inimitable aesthetic structure. They d o not represent I'art pour W h y did Hitler attach so m u c h i m p o r t a n c e to the films about theI'art, b u t h a v e been turned into functional carriers of p r o p a g a n d a . Nuremberg Party rallies? What did these rallies mean for the NaziThey want to exert emotional influence and, with their visual and movement? They served a dual purpose: to maintain inner partyverbal messages, have taken sides in a great cause. Siegfried Kra­ discipline and to portray the movement to the outside world. Thecauer is mistaken in this respect if he insists that such \"patterns\" decisions of the leadership that were ratified by acclamation atrepresented nothing that was precise and hence reinforced \"the these rallies were to be transmitted to the smallest local organiza­impression of a v a c u u m . \" E v e n if it is true that the images are tions b y h u n d r e d s of thousands w h o h a d been there. The fightingsupposed to confuse the viewer \"in order to subject him more eas­ spirit was to be charged up with ideological power and gain aily to certain suggestions,\" we must nonetheless contradict Kra­ fresh moral impetus—until the next mass rally came along.cauer's conclusion that \"many images are in effect nothing but anempty break between two propagandistic insinuations.\"*^ Kra­ Pierre Bourdieu has hinted that under Nazism such forces werec a u e r ' s absolutist notion of reality assesses film exclusively from at work even in the body language and the expressions of thethis one-sided perspective that denies the aesthetic variety of film masses that did not merely serve the movement: \"All social ordersand accepts only what \"gives the impression of reality which systematically exploit the fact that the human body and languageleads the viewer to believe to see events that happened in real life can serve as storehouses for ready-made ideas.\"*'and that were photographed on location.\"^ This, he added, may be instrumentalized, explaining the care Martin Loiperdinger has examined what he called Kracauer's with which mass festivities are prepared and why the attempt is\"emphatic notion of reality\" and demonstrated that the latter \"val­ made to put order into ideas and to suggest emotions, such asidates it only for democratic realities.\"*^ Loiperdinger rightly sur­ laughter and sadness, through the regular patterns of human bod­mises that Kracauer's theorems—starting with his assumption ies. Varying an observation by Proust, he concluded that \"armsthat fascist propaganda lacks an \"informative character\" to the and bodies are full of hidden imperatives.\"''\" Pudovkin w a s one ofidea of a \"metamorphosis of reality\"—are rooted in his desire to the first to define film as one of the m e a n s of making an i m p a c tdeny German fascism any political legitimacy by \"declaring it a u p o n \"body a n d soul.\" H e called film the best teacher, \"because its'pseudo-reality' and as such obsolete.\"** lessons do not merely appeal to the mind, but to the entire body\"—or to be more precise: the propaganda movie is the best Hitler's Party rallies were not \"pseudo-realities,\" but experi­ instructor in this sense.ences of a bitter reality. They were not a \"travesty.\" The legend thatKracauer has spread that Riefenstahl organized the 1934 Nurem­ T h e first P a r t y D a y took place in 1 9 2 0 , at that point still orga­berg rally only to serve \"as the backdrop for a film\" that was then nized by the precursor of the Brown Shirts, the National Socialistto assume \"the character of an authentic document,\"*'' is a fatuity German Workers' Association. Subsequent rallies were held dur­that m a n y historians of film h a v e perpetuated. W h a t Riefenstahl's ing the Kampfzeit years at M u n i c h in 1923, at Weimar in 1926, a n dart did was to encapsulate an extra-aesthetic reality with aestheticmeans in such a w a y that the people who lived in this reality rec­ognized themselves in it—as parts of a crowd. Reality was thus

152 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 153at Nuremberg in 1929. In 1926 Hitler was able to have both the these old-fashioned traditions for its all too obvious purposes andgeneral parade as well as the consecration of the flags in Weimar, u p d a t e d t h e m for ideological use. T h u s , the Niederländischea city full of symbols where the National Assembly had met in the Dankgebet (Netherlandian Thanksgiving Prayer) w a s secularizedNational Theater in 1919. As Albrecht Tyrell put it, \"the theater with the aim of emotionalizing Hitler's Party Days. Even liturgicalwas dominated by the Party flag.\" With some three hundred of elements of Christianity were recast into Nazi symbols. Similarly,these flags on the stage behind him. Hitler repeatedly spoke of the wilted charm of the \"blue flower\" of Romanticism reappearedtheir symbolism, but in subtle nuances: \"Red—the symbol of a in a new guise at Hitler's campfires.social attitude; white—our nationalism of action, not of emptyphrases; black—the spirit of labor, that will always remain The public impact of Hitler's collective, immense spectaclesopposed to the Jews and protective of the [German] race.\" The was relatively small prior to the Nazi takeover. Even documen­1930 rally was canceled, and after the seizure of power all of them taries on the subject did not strike much of a chord. To begin withwere held in Nuremberg, the last one in 1938. and owing to a lack of funds, they were technically imperfect and fell short on aesthetics. Until 1930, sound was missing. Cinemas In the Party's historiography, the chronology of the Party Days were not interested, since the public refused to see party-politicaltends to start with the \"great [1923] rally of infinite power and films as an aesthetic experience. Nor were there reputable direc­confidence\" (Hitler) in Munich. This is when the basic pattern tors who would have been prepared or able to give a movie aboutbecame established. Thus, the ritual of flag consecration, which a mass rally a specific aesthetic flavor or dramatic structure. Aswas designed to mobilize members' emotions for a variety of mes­ Benjamin had argued, fascist propaganda was less about thesages, was inaugurated in 1923, though later modified. All mem­ politicization of art than about the aestheticization of politics. Thisbers were supposed to give life and limb for the swastika flag arid is w h y it w a s left to Riefenstahl's genius to do the impossible andfor all that it had come to symbolize. A s the v o w went: \"I swear to to popularize the negative aesthetic of the state by means of a pos­you, our Führer Adolf Hitler, to stay with m y flag until the last itive film aesthetic. As a result of her suggestive aestheticism ofdrop of blood.\" fascism, she supported the \"rape of the masses,\" whom fascism \"forces to the ground in its Führer cult.\" Riefenstahl thus did vio­ The rallies did not represent a decision-making body for pro­ lence to her filmic \"equipment\" which she p u t in the service ofgrammatic concerns. From the start Hitler had prevented their cult values.''^ She succeeded in transforming the rituals of the rally\"parliamentarization.\" After all, his speeches were not be put in with its boring speeches and uniform parades into a hedonisticdoubt by ballots, however farcical they would have been. The task feast, into an easily sellable art product. Hitler found throughwas to instill the Hitler myth deeply into the hearts of the faithful. Riefenstahl true aesthetic energy, and she was firmly resolved toIt was more important to organize a festive, indeed a sacral, realize, at the height of Hitler's own ambitions, her goal of consti­atmosphere than to have discussions. As rituals that had been tuting a fascist aesthetic. There was no room here for societal sub­interspersed in the rally, the fireworks and the invocations sur­ limations and social improvisation.rounding the flag had a self-fulfilling magic and served as diver­sions. \"Two lines of tradition from the font of nineteenth-century In her Memoirs, she—in a w a y that is v e r y revealing of her iden­national festivities and the end of the Wilhelmine Empire came tity—used \"My\" when talking to Hitler about the production oftogether\" at Hitler's Party Days.''' They included the popular tra­ Triumph des Willens that he h a d been pushing for: \"My Führer,\"ditions of public festivals, as they were held by bourgeois associ­ she reports to h a v e said, \"I fear I cannot m a k e this film.... Theations, singing clubs, rifle associations, athletic organizations, the whole subject matter is strange to me; I cannot even keep the SAYouth Movement, and working-class organizations. and the SS apart.\"^^ H o w could the \"subject matter\" be strange to her after she h a d p r o d u c e d Sieg des Glaubens, the one-hour m o v i e Consecrations of the flag, memorial services, nighttime torch­ about the 1933 Party rally a year earlier? She must have known thelight processions, delegates of the military, militias, standard- \"subject matter\" extremely well, as all the laudatory reviews in thebearing march-pasts, as well as military music and songs from the press confirmed. In this first film she h a d also p r o v e n quite c a p a ­Youth Movement were common elements of such events and ble of sorting out those nine thousand standard-bearers from thewere part of a festive ritual. The Nazi Party salvaged many of

154 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 155SA and SS. After all, she celebrated Röhm's SA and Himmler's SS F a n c k (Josef Thorak, 1 9 4 3 ; Atlantikwall, 1 9 4 4 ) ; Wolf H a r t (Rüs­in separate sequences. And with the help of a number of extrava­ tungsarbeiter—Armaments Workers, 1943); Carl Junghans (Jugendgant cuts, she highlighted the role of Hitler's bodyguard unit der We/f—Youth of the World, 1936; Jahre der Entscheidung—Years(Leibstandarte) w h i c h goose-stepped past the Führer w i t h steel hel­ of Decision, 1939); Svend N o l d a n (Deutsche Arbeitsstätten—Ger­mets and in black uniforms. It was precisely through the geomet­ m a n Workplaces, 1940; Sieg im Westen—Victory in the West, 1941);ric shape of the marching columns and the blocks of flag-bearers C u r t Oertel (Die steinernen Wunder von Naumburg—The N a u m ­that Riefenstahl was able to capture with breathtaking images the b u r g W o n d e r s in Stone, 1933; Grabmal des unbekannten Soldaten—principle by which the obedience that was reflected in the goose- Tomb of the U n k n o w n Soldier, 1935); H a n s Steinhoff (Gestern undstepping columns became integrated into the larger whole. As heute—Yesterday and Today, 1938); Karl Ritter (Im Kampf gegen denWalter H a g e m a n n put it: \"The goose-step proved to be one of the We/t/efnd—Fighting the World Enemy, 1939); Walter Ruttmannmost effective tools of mass suggestion; it forced thousands into (Altgermanische Bauernkultur—Ancient G e r m a n Peasant Culture,following the same movements and rhythms.\"^* With her two 1 9 3 9 ; Deutsche Panzer—German P a n z e r s , 1 9 4 1 ) ; Alfred W e i d e -Party rally films, Riefenstahl reinvented the \"Nuremberg funnel,\" m a r m (Soldaten von morgen—Soldiers of Tomorrow, 1941; Händefirst developed in the seventeenth century, with which even the hoch—Hands U p , 1942); E u g e n York (Danzig, 1939). Gustav Ucickydumbest were instilled with Hitler's ideas. h a d to give his n a m e to Wort und Tat (Word and Deed, 1 9 3 8 ) with­ out having been involved in the making of this film. Riefenstahl's third major movie was to augment Hitler's pres­tige in the outside world, and the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin Piel Jutzi threw overboard the humanist aesthetic of the prole­provided a welcome opportunity. A year after the Nuremberg tarian movie to act as cameraman in Jürgen von Alten's tired mil­racial laws had been promulgated, the task was to improve itary film Gewehr über (Shoulder A r m s , 1939). G. W. Pabst returnedHitler's battered image. The film, Olympia, w h i c h w a s c o m p l e t e d from his American exile to produce without pressure tendentioustwo years after the Games, consists of two parts, \"Fest der Völker\" N a z i stuff like Paracelsus (1943). Karl Ritter, w h o h a d p r o d u c e d(\"Festival of Ü\e Nations\") a n d \"Fest der Schönheit\" (\"Festival of Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Q u e x ) in 1 9 3 3 , gained the r e p u t a ­Beauty\"). A s in the t w o Party rally movies, Riefenstahl's theoretical tion of being the most consistent among the compliant protago­notion of beauty remains undefined in this 225-minute work. nists of the sophisticated documentary. Among his productions w e r e such infamous a n d inflammatory m o v i e s as Verräter (Traitor, The Third Reich produced innumerable documentaries that 1 9 3 6 ) and GPU (on Stalin's secret police, 1942), as well as heroiccinemas were obliged to show in conjunction with the main fea­ pieces extolling w a r like Unternehmen Michael (Operation Michael,ture film. They can be roughly classified as attempts to promote 1937); Stukas (Dive B o m b e r s , 1941), and Besatzung Dora (The D o r athe following themes: the Führer myth; Germandom; custom; Force, 1943).blood and soil; Thanksgiving; the German forest; national health;sports; art, culture, and \"Strength Through Joy\" (the Labor Front's In his feature film Kampfgeschwader Lützow (The L ü t z o w Fight­recreational movement); Reich Party Days; successes of the Party; ing Squadron, 1941), Hans Bertram continues from his 1940 doc­the various Nazi organizations; Hitler Youth; the Nazi Girls' u m e n t a r y Feuertaufe ( B a p t i s m of Fire) a n d t h u s w i t h his loftyMovement; premilitary training; rearmament; the German soldier cockpit heroes, one of whom succeeds in salvaging a preciousin peace, maneuver, and war; a nation without space; world ene­ bomber on the runway before—his face marked by death—hemies; enemies of the people; anti-Semitism; hereditary diseases; gives up his immortal soul. After all, \"even a dying man demon­euthanasia; belated victories over the Versailles system; Hitler's strates w h a t spirit is alive and well in the Air Force.\" During thecampaigns; cult of the Nazi dead. w a r the fascist film instrumentalized death. W h e n B e r t r a m p r o ­ d u c e d his Kampfgeschwader Lützow in 1 9 4 1 , Reich Film Director As eager stooges of Nazism, next to Riefenstahl the following Hippler held up the heroic deaths to be seen in German film asdirectors lent their corruptible talents to the production of docu­ something to be inutated. He referred to Lessing's dictum thatmentaries: H a n s B e r t r a m (Feuertaufe—Fire Baptism, 1940); E d u a r d death expressed the \"condition of calm and insensibility,\" in otherv o n B o r s o d y (Früh übt sich—Early Start, 1 9 3 6 ) ; H a n s C ü r l i s words, a condition that was more comforting than particularly(Arbeitsdienst—Labor Service, 1 9 3 3 ; Arno Breker, 1 9 4 4 ) ; A r n o l d

156 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 157disturbing. Hippler then defined death in his own words as a No less important for any verdict on the Nazi regime are also,state of weightlessness, if there really w a s a sense to it: of course, all films that were refused production permission, even though the above-named directors would no doubt have made Poetry and visual arts that can only depict the process of dying them in masterly fashion. However, just as there were no secession rather than the condition of death will put it into a larger philo­ movements in Nazi art, it was equally impossible to produce sophical context that will elevate it from the senseless and depress­ movies against the regime. As Eisenstein put it in 1934 in his open ing sphere of nature into the world of values and ideals; this means letter to Goebbels, \"this required courage and bravery.\" He con­ that the process of dying itself becomes irrelevant at this point (that tinued: \"The honey-sweet phrases in your speeches notwith­ is merely a matter of medical record). What alone is essential is that standing, you have put your arts and culture into the same iron it is embedded in the larger picture that precedes or follows it, from chains in which you also hold the remaining thousands of incar­ which it becomes necessary or in reference to which it bears fruit.''' cerated people in your hundreds of concentration camps.\"''^ The constant presence of death is also reflected in relentless Leni Riefenstahl's Film Olympiafade-ins of sacred elements like church bells, war memorials, pic­tures of martyrs, and specific Nazi symbols like photos of the Politically, I did not know what was important. I only asked where theFührer. They represent the ubiquitous icons just as swastika flags best material could befound, where intensifications might be possible.become the visual incense. The background music of spheric har­ I concentrated on blending images and movements.monies or pseudo-religious choral songs provide for suitable ele­vation. Carrying Hölderlin in his backpack, the poet pays homage Leni Riefenstahlto the death-defying soldier, offering romantic verses during anunromantic time. Leni Riefenstahl's theoretical notion of beauty remained diffuse, whereas the ideal of beauty that she shows in her pictures can be The poet transforms the genuine fear of death into something deduced quite easily from her movies. However, we must differ­ metaphysical. What Hitler needed for his German freedom strug­ entiate between the median of what came to be portrayed as the gle w e r e filnis that e d u c a t e d people for w a r (Kriegserziehungsfilme). ideal of the new man and man as the sum total of an idea that They are designed to explain war as a means of developing the Riefenstahl set up in formations of columns and their preferably highest manly virtues; for \"war is the father of all things,\" as geometric movements. Riefenstahl's standards for her stagings of Nicholas K a u f m a n n , Ufa's Kulturfilm e x p e r t p u t it in his article o n the beautiful and sublime take classicism as their original model, \"Ufa's Cultural Film Production.\"''* H e added: \"Kriegserziehungs- w h e n symmetry, natural proportions, and harmony still consti­film a n d Kulturfilm exist under the totality claim of the G e r m a n tuted the canons of beauty. And what she selects from these mod­ freedom struggle ... These films are faced with great tasks as we els is then dressed up with elements of power and dynamic try to explain, in simple words, the many measures that have been excitement to give the appearance of beauty. Her repertoire is the taken for the protection of our national life and, above all, for the beauty of the masses, and these masses are not static but set in exemplary and circumspect care of our armed forces. It is pre­ motion in ornamental fashion. Insofar as they wear brown shirts cisely themes of a state-political or party-political character that and carry swastika flags, she divests them of whatever may look have seized hold of the cultural film during recent years.\"^ It is threatening about them. She has even sensually captured the not just spectacles like Feuertaufe or Sieg im Westen that offer typi­ geometry of the anonymous marching columns and blocks of men cal e x a m p l e s of this kind of movie; there are also shorts like Unter and has rendered viewing them into an aesthetic experience. der Kriegsflagge ( U n d e r the W a r Flag, 1934), Unsere Infantrie ( O u r Infantry, 1 9 4 0 ) , Balkanfeldzug (Balkan C a m p a i g n , 1941), Die Funker A s far as the beauty of nature is concerned, Riefenstahl takes her mit dem Edelweiss (The Wireless O p e r a t o r s w i t h the E d e l w e i s s prejudgments from the platonic notion which postulated that the Flower, 1 9 4 2 ) , Junker der Waffen-SS (The L o r d s of the A r m e d SS, ideally beautiful be imderstood as the primordial image of every­ 1 9 4 3 ) , Front am Himmel (Front Line in the Skies, 1944), Endkampf thing that w a s beautiful in this world. If beauty was conceived by um Berlin (Final Battle for Berlin, 1945).

158 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 159the Greeks as a complex being, as incarnation of the mythologi- Führer—a true masterpiece of misrepresentation. This, after all,cally divine, Riefenstahl's camera forged from it her selection cri­ w a s the time of the N u r e m b e r g racial laws; the first concentrationteria for a kind of beauty that could be harmonized with the ideals camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen had brutalized opponents ofof the Nazi movement. the regime since 1933; the preparation for war was started on the days after the opening of the Olympic Games in Berlin when The ancient Greek ideal of beauty, as reflected in the Venus de Hitier decreed the dispatch of the Condor Legion to Spain to sup­Milo or the Discus-Thrower of Myron, had been the foundation of port Franco in his revolt against the Republic. In a secret memo­the idealistic aesthetic since the Renaissance. Kant's definition of randum, composed during the Games, Hitier ordered that for thewhat was beautiful in the arts had had profound repercussions for next four years German industry was to be geared toward warGerman cultural consciousness. The beautiful was seen as the sen­ and the armed forces to be prepared for an offensive in the East.sual manifestation of an idea. By capturing the peaceful competition among the participant n a t i o n s , Riefenstahl's Olympia m o v i e thus stages a g r a n d i o s e Riefenstahl, with a sure instinct for what is effective in the arts, fraud: Der Stürmer, Streicher's anti-Semitic r a g , h a d been takenadded a sizable dose of sympathy with nature in order to guarantee off the newspaper stands during the Games and all signs demand­the emotionalization of the viewer. This viewer was thus to find it ing \"Jews out\" had been removed.easier to identify with those ideas as they transported exemplarsof beautiful, i.e., racially pure, men from the screen to the audi­ There remained one difficulty in which Riefenstahl had to out­ence. In her m o v i e Olympia Riefenstahl lets the c a m e r a revel in wit her opponent Goebbels. This was the delicate task of produc­beauty. The lens is virtually glued to the beauty of athletic torsos ing a rough approximation between the official ideal of beauty inand limbs with their muscle formations. She favors sequences that Nazi art and her own optical products that frequently ran countershow an aesthetically beautiful movement, be it in long-jump, to the proclaimed Nordic image when she filmed athletes at thesprint, or discus-throwing. Even as it was tripping and falling finishing line o r o n the winners' platform. A t these points duringover, the body was to display its beauty. To the natural elegance of the \"Fest der Völker,\" as the first p a r t of her m o v i e w a s called, ita dart-like dive from the diving board her fanatical quest for was difficult to uphold Nazi racist views. Riefenstahl could notbeauty would add a subtle photographic point. The actual physi­ and did not want to omit the obvious fact that the nations ofcal strain is suppressed when she shoots those sharply contoured Africa, Asia, and other \"non-Aryan\" parts of the world had sentportraits of extreme concentration in the starting hole, during tar­ men and women to the Games who were, by the standards of clas­get practice, or shot-putting and smoothes over the tense body sical antiquity, in an e x e m p l a r y sense beautiful people. She there­lines. Indeed, many a champion on the field or the track becomes fore simply incorporated into her film whatever was usable ina plagiarism of nature, a simple copy of life before a camera that is terms of her physical ideal. As far as propaganda was concerned,concerned only with capturing radical beauty. By turning beauty Olympia plainly w a s to be a \"hymn to the p o w e r a n d beauty ofinto something absolute, she aestheticizes processes and thus robs man, a making visible of the healthy mind in a healthy body, illus­them of their reality. The gospel of beauty that Riefenstahl reels off trated b y exquisite [!] y o u t h s from all over the world.\"''^optically c a n a w a r d first prize to the perfectly shaped, steely b o d yof the young man because the less attractive, old, and frail person Master Works by Outsiders to the Nazi Film Industryis not permitted to compete in the stadium nor in the movie. Willy Zielke, the c a m e r a m a n w h o shot the prologue to Olympia, By excluding all phenomena that in her subjective perspective remained an outsider as a director. Apart from the short filmappear as ugly, and by thus also excluding the large majority of all Arbeitslos ( U n e m p l o y e d , 1932) dealing with the fate of the jobless,men, she perpetrates a fraud on the image of reality. The lie is he produced one other film that made him known only after thetaken out of the set. The u n w e l c o m e reality remains extra muros; war. Fascinated by the machine, Zielke transformed his script for athe green oval of the stadium is reserved for youth. Beauty exclu­ commissioned exultation of the Reich railroad into a fortuitoussive. Those many millions outside Germany who saw this exaltedpicture with its optimistic emotions were treated to an idealized,sympathetic, and peaceful Germany with a relaxed and smiling

160 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 161synthesis of documentary and feature film whose segments are (Fists a r o u n d the Flag Pole, 1935), Wir tragen die Fahne gen Südenamalgamated by experimental transitions. The 45-minute movie (We Are Carrying the Flag Southward, 1939).appeared in 1 9 3 5 under the title Das Stahltier (The Beast of Steel). Itstheme is provided by an idealistic engineer who tells his colleagues The Compilation Filmduring their coffee breaks amusing or dramatic episodes from thehistory of the railroads during the past one hundred years. Zielke The microcosm of the montage had to appear as a unified picture thattranslated these episodes into formally brilliant images, some of falls apart under the inner pressure of its contradiction so as to recon­which remind the viewer of famous inventors, like James Watt, stitute itself at a new level into a new unit that was qualitativelyFrancis Cugnot, or Stevenson. The film represents a dynamically more advanced.edited celebration of the machine, which is used as a metaphor forthe idea of progress and a glorification of technology. And yet the Sergei Eisenstein^\"attempt to make its usefulness for the development of mankindvisible remains underexposed, despite some partly expressionist The compilation film, with its artificial structure and its violationsfireworks. The dominance of formalistic elements was probably also of aesthetic rules, ignores traditional genre boundaries. The dra­one of the reasons why the movie was banned in the Third Reich. maturgy of this parasitic genre combines materials that have already been used in other movies that are then put into a the­ Curt Oertel is the name of the other highly gifted outsider of the matic and stylistic context different from the original one. The dis­documentary who was not prepared to pander to Nazi aesthetics parate parts and heterogenous ingredients are removed from theirfor the sake of achieving early fame. In 1932 his camera work had original aesthetic context and reality to achieve a specific didactich e l p e d to m a k e Die steinernen Wunder von Naumburg a success. purpose; they may even appear as diametrically opposed to theirThis came after Oertel had given his visual talents as ingenious original context due to a montage that changes their entire orien­lighting director to Pabst for the latter's 1 9 2 5 m o v i e Die freudlose tation. They represent particles in a reconstructed film reality thatGasse (The Joyless Street) a n d to Geheimnis der Seele (Secret of the appear to be realistic; they develop their impact only in their com­Soul) a year later. Oertel quickly gained an international reputa­ plementary role or in a correspondingly aesthetic combination.tion. In 1940 Tobis and the Swiss Pandora launched a monumen­tal c o p r o d u c t i o n u n d e r the title Michelangelo. In it, O e r t e l The reality content of these films was changed simply by elimi­ingeniously united the life and work of the \"Titan\" (1475-1564) in nating the original context. The old \"truths\" percolated through thea historical portrait, using the latter's sculptures (tombs of the sieve of the new ideology. The blending of many rudimentary real­Medici) and buildings (St. Peter's in Rome) as well as his paint­ ities produced a new, quite different filnüc reality, and, as far as theings and drawings. Through a dramaturgy of light and shadows Nazis were concerned, this new reality was geared, above all, to itsthat gave life to figures, objects, and landscapes, he created a mas­ ideological impact. The eclectic layout of the compilation movie isterpiece that was received with reserve in the Third Reich because not only structured by its thematic presuppositions, but in particu­of its eccentric formal qualities. Accordingly, the press was lar also by the genres that have been chosen. As Svend Noldan'sdirected to play this movie down. It was only in 1950 that the film two-part Der Weltkrieg (The World War, 1 9 2 7 / 2 8 ) and the anony­achieved international acclaim u n d e r the title The Titan: The Story mously p r o d u c e d Deutschland—mein Deutschland ( G e r m a n y — M yof Michelangelo, w h e n H o l l y w o o d a w a r d e d it a n Oscar. Germany, 1932/33) demonstrate, these may consist of combina­ tions of silent feature films, silent newsreels (taken from the Reich Zielke's and Oertel's movies were diametrically opposed to the Military Archives and to some extent also from Hugo vonpropaganda-soaked documentaries that were elevated to Nazi art Kaweczynski), animated film elements, as well as sequences,not only with the help of Hitler's swastika flags, but also because reflecting the appropriate contemporary climate, that were espe­t h e y h a p p i l y s p o r t e d the flag in their titles, s u c h as Unter der cially shot for the occasion. Compilation films are strung togetherschwarzen Sturmfahne ( U n d e r the Black S t o r m Flag, 1935), Unsere S3moptically, but rarely with the aim of staking out an aestheticFahne ist die Treue (Loyalty Is O u r Flag, 1935), Unter der Fahne derJugend ( U n d e r the Flag of Youth, 1935), Fäuste an dem Fahnenschaft

162 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 163 claim or of creating a tangibly modified new form. In his retrospec­ and presents images that have been torn from their original con­ tive on World W a r I, N o l d a n invented the general staff m a p , w h i c h text, removes from this material all that does not serve the one and was enhanced by technical tricks, and used it to provide moving only truth. Its fake authenticity, generated from genuine materials, visual images of the war's logistics. His new techniques made it for example, from enemy newsreels, rests on the fact that it has possible for four years of war to become visually more graspable. been usurped by an ideology that is not concerned about truth. Changes in chronology and details that are either reported or Such arch-reactionary compilation films as Johannes Häußler's omitted, and hence augment or reduce weight and meaning, also Der eiserne Hindenburg in Krieg und Frieden (The Iron H i n d e n b u r g stem from this dubious approach. in W a r and Peace, 1929) and Blutendes Deutschland (Bleeding Ger­ many, 1933) provide examples of how unable the directors were to Of course, the strictly ideological use of preexisting material master the wealth of material (by mostly unknown cameramen), that was typical of fascist compilation films does not apply to the not to mention their inability to put some structure into them. genre more generally. Nevertheless, it is striking how rarely direc­ Without the critical historical eye, a chain of visual events turned tors have succeeded in making such films aesthetically satisfying. into a purely material conglomerate. Made from an inflexible, A s Ulrich Kurowski put it, this is because \"the film material cannot right-wing, patriotic perspective, these films p a y sentimental trib­ be completely refashioned.\"^^ Thus, it m a y be possible only in ute to the relics of the past. The emperor's long beard, so to speak, exceptional circumstances to compile a movie about Nazism thatprotrudes from everywhere. The iconographic past assumed an is critical and analytical and relies primarily on Nazi material withalmost liturgical role. its o w n peculiar aesthetic. Michail R o m m ' s Daily Fascism (1965) m a y be such an exception. It is barely feasible to counter the H ä u ß l e r ' s Blutendes Deutschland w a s the m o s t frequently power of the pictures with the acoustics of the corrunentary. His­screened film of its d a y in this genre. Historic truth is blatantly fal­ tory—seemingly supported by the visual documents—remainssified so as to enable the Nazis to see themselves as the sole heirs overwhelming. As a rule, the word tended to overlay the picturesof Prussia's heroic virtues. History has become a semantic space; in Nazi compilation movies and thus to dominate the overallthe Nazis appear as alert jugglers with words and pictures under thrust. Vague commentaries are employed to spread historicalwhose fingers history is given a new shape at the cutting table. In falsehoods in a quite literal sense. The conglomerate that consiststhree parts, Häußler's cheap product conjures up what he calls of heterogenous memory fragments, contradictory visual mater­Germany's national uprising: (1) \"Aus grosser Zeit\" (Of Great ial, and anachronistic chronologies is held together by a unifyingTimes), which runs from the birth of the German Empire, starting idea or ideology, by the brackets of the director's dramaturgy, andat Versailles in 1871, up to the \"Storms of Steel of the World War\"; by a text that insinuates symbiosis. This hodge-podge that aims to(2) \"Der Verrat an Deutschland\" (The Betrayal of Germany), pre­ reconquer the past may be made up of silent film and sound film,senting the November Revolution, the Spartacist Uprising, the of 3 5 m m , 16 m m and super-8 film, of 16 and 2 4 pictures per sec­Versailles \"Treaty of Shame,\" and the execution of Albert Leo ond, photos, facsimiles, newspaper cuttings and posters, black-Schlageter (\"with original photos\") by the French during the Ruhr and-white as well as color film, animation and moving maps,Occupation in 1923; (3) \"Deutschland erwacht\" (Germany Awak­ aggregate data, interviews, and newly shot sequences. All theseens), starting the \"fateful turn\" of 30 January 1933 when Hitier elements and, as Alexander Kluge called them, \"self-containedwas appointed Reich Chancellor. grarrunalogues,\" that at best represent miniatures borrowed from divergent styles and currents, are strung together to be handled as These three headings constitute the technical pattern and the gratuitous pictorial proofs. It is only in the rarest of cases that theybasic bias of the propagandistic compilation film during the years form a m o s a i c that is also superior from a film-aesthetical point ofto come. The montage script and its technical realization at the view and has a synergetic impact.cutting table put together various visual set-scenes, facts, half-truths, lies, false ascriptions, false or exaggerated emphases; in While making his film Strike in 1924, Eisenstein w a s one of theother words they do everything that Eisenstein defined as the first to articulate how important the context is into which individualmodel case of a \"montage of attractions.\" An insidious compila­ shots and whole sequences are being put: \"The essence of a filmtion film of this type, w h i c h constructs a n actually desired reality

164 • The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 165must not be sought in individual sequences, but in their interactions In 1923 L e w Kuleshov, w h o s a w film as a synesthetic art, h a d... the expressive impact of a film is the result of combinations.\"^^ made an experiment to demonstrate the manipulative power of the montage. With the help of a simple cut, he confronts the stoicFrom Esther Shub to Jean-Luc Godard face of the actor Ivan Moshuchin alternately with the picture of a soup bowl, a corpse, and a nude beauty. The viewer believes that Production advances all the time with fresh confidence and in the he sees in the actor's face consecutively the expression of hunger, clear consciousness that the traditional Ufa standards have to be, and fear, a n d lust.*^ will be, upheld and that, with an unquestioned sense of duty, cultural films will come out of the Babelsberg studios in sufficient numbers Similarly to Kuleshov, Vsevolod Ilaryonovich Pudovkin, in the and established quality: scientific films and technical ones, entertain­ early 1920s, gave impressive proof to how easily the reality of a ing and historically important ones, political as well as unpolitical particular angle can be changed when juxtaposed with others. He movies, films in black-and-white and in color. They are all designed to chose three angles, with t w o showing the s a m e w o m a n , first smil­ discover life in its manifold variations, to discover nature and its mys­ ing and then in shock. The third picture is a closeup of an unse­ terious laws that never cease to stimulate man to investigate them cured revolver. By choosing the sequence, woman in shock— anew and further; they are also designed to entertain and elate people revolver—smiling woman, he gives the impression of a coura­ and to expand their knowledge for the benefit of the German people geous w o m a n who is in control of the situation. Meanwhile, the and the world. reverse sequence would have suggested panic.*^ Nicholas Kaufmann^^ Pudovkin wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to reverse meaning by changing the content sequence. Both experimentsThe model of the aesthetically structured compilation film was typify the simple means by which the public can be duped andcreated between 1925 and 1928 by the Russian director Esther demonstrate how effortlessly the manipulators can instrumental-Ilyinichna Shub with her trilogy The Pall of the Romanov Dynasty, ize the montage for demagogic purposes.The Great Road, a n d The Russia of Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy. In threeyears of work, Shub, who was Eisenstein's montage assistant for Dziga Vertov had designed the basic dialectical pattern of thishis Strike, p u t together a filmic triptych from old newsreels dating genre s o m e six years prior to Esther Shub. U n d e r the title Historyback as far as 1896 and from the private collections of the Tsarist of the Civil War ( 1 9 2 1 / 2 2 ) , he m a d e a film that w a s less c o n c e r n e dfamily. Meandering through its chronology and adhering strictly with presenting an objectivized array of facts than with usingto a partisan point of view, she traces the development of Russia these facts for agitation. Probably without knowing it, Vertov tookfrom the Tsarist period down to the tenth anniversary of the Bol­ Nietzsche's dictum literally, according to which there are no factsshevik revolution. The approach is decidedly selective and gener­ but only interpretations of them. It was a famous formula thatalizes partial aspects and small points of information. Thus, Shub John Grierson later e x p a n d e d in his Creative Interpretation of Facts.contrasts sequences about impoverished peasants with images of Vertov in his History interpreted the Bolshevik p a r t y line by refer­wealthy people who are (apparently) amused by the former's mis­ ence to selected and one-sidedly presented sequences in whichery. At this point, she does not come through exactly as an advo­ the official party doctrine was nostalgically laid out in no less thancate of truth. She uses the \"Kuleshov Effect\" as a stylistic means. thirteen acts.She described her work on this project in these words: \"Whendoing the montage, I tried to avoid classifying the material With this movie Vertov anticipated the program of the lateraccording to its inner value; rather I evaluated it with its docu­ Kinoki w h o p r o p o s e d to compile their w o r k s \"from facts.\" T h e ymentary importance in nünd. All details had to be subordinated to used intermediate texts to avoid giving the impression that theythis principle.\"** w e r e not m e a n t to agitate, with the counterrevolution, of course, as their target. The i n t r o d u c t o r y sentence of the Kinoki manifesto may serve as an example of the thrust of their work: \"The power of the workers and peasants had to conduct a long, drawn-out struggle against their class enemies within the country after they

166 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 167 had freed the nation, which was bleeding to death, from the Greatest Story. All these movies satisfied the respective \"syndrome clutches of the imperialist war.\" of expectations.\" Given that the compilation of the selected parts into a merely chronological or formal sequence without any Vertov experimented constructively with a formula that Soviet dialectical tension amounts to pure tinsel, the monosyllabism movies later deployed very methodically, i.e., that putting two that is generated becomes the sister of boredom and fails to images next to each other generates the suggestion in the mind induce reflection. and consciousness of the viewer that there exists a connection between them. Once the viewer becomes conscious of this con­ Jay Leyda has reported that Joris Ivens and his friends fre­ nection, \"construction sets in and its laws begin to have their quently borrowed copies of newsreels from cinemas. They then effect,\" to quote Victor Shklovsky. edited them \"during the night in order to highlight their class character and to screen them before a working-class public.\" At How clearly Communist functionaries had recognized very the end of the weekend, the copies were then revamped into their early that they could use for propaganda purposes historical original state before they were sent back \"with a few friendly material that reproduced facts that had been declared to be such, words on Monday.\" It was due to this influence that Henri Storck is confirmed by a reference in the first German compilation film, was able to conceive the idea for his first short compilation film, which had been commissioned by the KPD. Under the title Histoire du Soldat Inconnu (History of the U n k n o w n Soldier), m a d e Weltwende (The Beginning of a N e w World), Carl J u n g h a n s c o m ­ in 1932, with a 1959 sovmd version. piled a one-hour movie from newsreel material for the benefit of the Communist Party in 1918. This movie copied the principles of The growing signs of preparations for war in 1932 are taken by the Russian model, though without coming anywhere close to Storck, Belgium's pacifist pioneer of the documentary, as an occa­Vertov's advisory that the camera must register \"the world more sion to write a satire about the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Signed byvariedly from the most divergent angles and more perfectly than more than 120 countries, this agreement aimed to outlaw wars ofthe human eye.\" Instead of enlightening the viewer about Marx­ aggression. Storck drew his material for this satire from the 1928ism, Junghans rather turned it into a puzzle. newsreels that celebrated the Pact. He believed these films to be suitable to serve the unreconstructed militaristic attitudes and the To this day, we do not have any generally accepted syntactic rearmament fever that was spreading throughout Europe in therules for the compilation film. Its authenticity is created less by the early 1930s.persons and historical events it portrays than by the context intowhich the film puts its extracts, making them truthful by means of One of the smaller and macabre episodes contained in thisa lie (sie wahr lügt). It w a s not only the N a z i s (though they a b o v e movie is the exhuming of an \"unknown soldier\" whose skull hadall) but other countries as well that put the compilation film into clearly been pierced by a bullet. This is followed toward the endthe service of political agitation. They, too, turned the cutting table by a pompous ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier ininto an experimental ground for (subjective) history. Thus, we front of the \" F l a m e of M e m o r y \" flanked b y t w o lions in stonewere rarely given a true picture of reality during World War I, seemingly ready to pounce. The film concludes with shots of Brus-which Paul Virilio called the \"first mediatized war.\" W h a t w e sel's \"Männeken Pis,\" which do not seem out of place in this con­mostly received instead was an image that propaganda said was text. It is meant as a metaphor for what a soldier's life has really\"truthful.\" In other words, films were made that \"confused the been worth to governments. The contexts into which Storck putslast with the first\" (F. Nietzsche). After all, pictures and texts do representatives of the bourgeoisie, the churches, the army, capital­not make an aesthetic parallelogram; nor do form and content ism, as well as \"the silent majority\" hint at his latent Marxist sym­lead to a symbiosis. pathies; but French critics later accused him more of anarchist and surrealist proclivities.^'' Toward the end of World War I, the Americans spread world­wide their propaganda versions of the war's origins and conse­ Temporal distance from events portrayed by the materialquences in films like G e o r g e Crul's America's Answer to the Hun makes it easier to manipulate them. This is because the material(1917). During the s a m e year, the Allied p o w e r s p r o d u c e d Under can no longer be scrutinized by the accurate memory of the view­Four Flags, a n d in 1 9 1 9 the British followed suit with The World's ers. At any rate, at the moment of projection onto the screen, it is

168 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 169 difficult to assess the truth content of the image of history offered from similar situations, being no more than an onlooker reinforces in a documentary. \"the viewer in his belief that paradise begins beyond the barriers. The viewer does not see through the macabre irony of this para­ A typical example might be the American compilation film sitic flashlight business, i.e., that those on display have themselvesthat F r a n k C a p r a m a d e in 1 9 4 3 , entitled Why We Fight. The first been cheated, that the celebrity is his own extra, and that thetwo-thirds of this movie deal exclusively with the period prior to empress is her own model. It never occurs to him to doubt thethe outbreak of World War II to justify its title. The sequence digruty of the empress who poses before the camera, and so it is heshowing infantry supposedly parading at the 1937 Nuremberg w h o is putting clothes on the model that doubles for her.\"^' InParty rally is based on archival material that must date from the Paris 1900 people of different class b a c k g r o u n d s act like divergentbeginning of the war two years later, since the soldiers wear war factors within a societal parallelogram of forces.decorations like the \"Iron Cross, Second Class.\" However, thisfraudulent detail that is basically insignificant should not lead us Major directors of the nouvelle vague, such as Frederic Rossifto conclude that the entire film is designed to deceive. And yet, {Mourir ä Madrid, 1 9 6 2 ) a n d J e a n - L u c G o d a r d (Les Carabiniers,the knowing viewer is left with serious doubts as to the credibil­ 1963), are similarly not interested in the great men of the age butity of the whole enterprise. in the consequences they left behind. Both of them have m a d e montage into the montage movie; both invoke what Habermas With Luis Buftuel as the d o m i n a n t influence, Madrid '36, an would later call the \"subversive power of reflection.\" Moreover,anh-fascist movie, was compiled that same year from newsreel both of them use the same material with the aid of which theymaterial and photos from the Republican side in the Spanish Civil hoped to gain access to the Spanish Civil War from the perspectiveWar. With Beethoven's symphonies as its music, it certainly suc­ of the victims. Such films indirectly contradict the view that theceeded in making an emotional impact. eye is the ultimate authority. Rather, it is the viewers' intellect. G o d a r d believes that the corpse that is shown in his Les Carabiniers Nicole Vedres's Paris 1900, m a d e in 1 9 4 7 / 4 8 with Alain Resnais triggers a sense of unease, whereas the same dead personas her assistant, must be considered one of the most influential enthused the viewers of Mourir ä Madrid. W h a t causes the uneasemovies since the genre developed in the direction of a more ana­ is that the corpse \"remains what it is: insignificant, i.e., it gains nolytical structure. She does not simply pile the available pictures on i m p o r t a n c e , w h e r e a s it is given an i m p o r t a n c e in Mourir ä Madridtop of each other. Instead, and in her own words, she \"wants to that probably did correspond to its life....\"'° Godard rightly callspenetrate the cover of the pictures that have been selected and to this a fraud, \"even if it has been perpetrated with clean hands.\"capture, without particular emphasis, that special expression that And, so we are tempted to add, perpetrated with emotional poweris always hidden under the surface of the images. [Thus] this and visual beauty.bearded gentleman, a politician, struts about with a smile and anair of joie de vivre, a n d yet w e sense his m e n d a c i o u s malice. H e Bashing the United States and the Soviet Uniondoes not show it; his photo does.\"*^ This is the sophisticated con­text of self-revelation in which Nicole Vedres presents, without ...for contrary to earlier times, in this war we Germans have learned oneany commentary, contemporaries like Monet, Renoir, Bernhardt, virtue that will make us invincible: the confidence in our own powerCarpentier, and many others. The pointed music by Guy Bern­hardt makes anything else superfluous. Joseph Goebbels'^ Often the privileged persons that are portrayed are used to So far we have surveyed the genesis of the compilation movie onleave the viewer with the bitter feeling of exclusion from their the basis of a n u m b e r of typical examples from the history of filmw o r l d . This is true n o t only of Paris 1900 (though it is particularly in order to demonstrate that this extremely ambivalent genre wasmarked here), but also of many other movies that were cobbled not an invention made in Dr. Goebbels's diabolical laboratory,together from newsreel material. The film then compensates for even if the Nazis appear to have invented it. W h a t must bethis \"loss\" by giving viewers the impression that, as spectators,they have become witnesses to moments of historic encounters, atleast after the event. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger concluded

170 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 171 stressed, however, is that the cinematographic falsifiers of history \"Roosevelt, the warmonger, has developed an appetite for [gob­ and the atrocity propagandists of the Hitler regime studied the rel­ bling up] the whole world.\" Again, and without indicating the evant techniques of manipulation and mechanisms of popular source, the film included a scene from John Ford's The Grapes of seduction in detail. They appropriated whatever was useful for Wrath ( 1 9 4 0 ) , w h i c h effectively r a n g true b e c a u s e the drastically their negative designs and perfected it psychologically. shown capitalist methods of exploiting the farming population appear, in the deceptive context of newsreel material, as a reliable The compilation films that were produced against Hitler's report of facts. \"world enemies\" after the begirming of the war provide especially telling examples of the kind of demagogic deception that the Pro­ Together with the Jews, Bolshevism had been declared \"world paganda Ministry engaged in with its uninhibited use of the \"art\" enemy No. 1.\" Hence, during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Hitler alone of montage. These films were shown not just in the Reich, but also was in a position to declare a thaw that lasted from the fall of 1939 in the occupied territories. They were designed to justify why to June 1 9 4 1 . The SS-journal Das schwarze Korps (The Black C o r p s ) Hitler was allegedly forced to wage a holy war against the explained the renewed reversal in 1941 to its readers as follows: \"beasts,\" plutocrats, and Jews that were represented. \"C)nly Adolf Hitler was able to lead the German people to this change of fronts, and it was only upon the German people that the Thus, the 1942 movie Amerika sieht sich selbst ( A m e r i c a Looks at Führer could impose at that moment the expectation of an uncon­Itself) lays out a depressing picture of the country with unrefer­ ditional willingness to follow him. Even if there w a s never a ques­enced excerpts from American feature films of the late 1930s and tion of an ideological reconciliation or even rapprochementearly 1940s. Juvenile crime is rampant and indirectly contrasted between National Socialism and Bolshevism, superficial observerswith visually tangible Nazi ideology under which young German could nonetheless easily gain this impression.\"'^ Not surprisingly,criminals do not have a chance. The revamping of evidence relat­ anti-Soviet propaganda pieces had long been lying in Goebbels'sing to the physiognomy of American society culled from American drawer, to be taken out punctually when Hitler tore up the Nazi-thrillers to provide material for Goebbels's propaganda, blended Soviet Pact. Subsequently, the Russians are portrayed as a devilishwith original German commentaries, provide the elements that a n d inferior race in films that are even m o r e perfidious than thehave been craftily constructed from a dramaturgical point of view. ones against \"plutocrats\" a n d Wall Street. Movies like Das Sowjet-It is this texture that m a d e this film so effective w h e n it c a m e out Paradies (The Soviet Paradise, 1942) or Im Wald von Katyn (In K a t y nin 1942. Slum scenes, evidently portraying New York's East Side, Forest, 1943) not only excoriate the Communist system, but thehave been taken out of their original context in the gangster movie nations of the Soviet Union as a whole.Dead End ( 1 9 3 7 ) a n d c o m p i l e d as authentic d o c u m e n t s to fakeAmerican reality. These and other fictional images of the United The former film begins with an aggressive commentary thatStates achieved a higher degree of reality than the best German sets the tone for the rest of the movie: \"Where once stood pros­propaganda material could ever have copied, since director pering villages, the gray misery of the collective farm predomi­William Wyler had originally presented this milieu with artistic nates today. This is where the Soviet peasant lives as a slave.\"license in a way that was aesthetically convincing. Consequentiy, A n d : \"Some eighty people m u s t vegetate in fifteen rooms.\" Thethe German compilation, its formal brilliance notwithstanding, editors evidently had fun composing a potpourri of misery fromturned into a casuistic example and a propagandistic fraud. The the sinister documentary material. The horror images certainlyscenes from the A m e r i c a n feature film that the G e r m a n m a k e r s demonstrated what the commentary had promised, i.e., \"the dis­had interconnected displayed a marked tendency to turn the func­ astrous results of twenty years of a bloody regime run by a Jewish-tion of self-criticism in Dead End into its opposite. Bolshevik terror clique.\" The misery was coded with the help of a t t r i b u t e s like \"caked in filth\" {\"dreckstarrend\"), \"unkempt,\" In 1943, then, when Goebbels proclaimed \"total war,\" the cari­ \"enslaved,\" \"liquidated,\" etc. In conjunction with the film Sovietcature of Roosevelt which is cobbled together from the President's Paradise, Goebbels organized an exhibition with the s a m e titie indifferent public a p p e a r a n c e s for the m o v i e Herr Roosevelt plaudert which a monster that was made up of Jews and Bolsheviks was(Mr. Roosevelt Chats) is used at the same time to personify the declared \"world enemy No. 1\" and then sent aroxmd the Reich.Jewish \"world enemy\" w h o m it is necessary to extinguish; for

172 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 173 H e l m u t Krausnick has d o c u m e n t e d in his book Hitlers Einsatz­ culture of Europe and the world.\" The Soviets are not simplygruppen the catastrophic consequences that the equating of J e w s portrayed as enemies, but as a bestial brood. This film with its hor­ and Bolsheviks had, especially for the former. It appeared in the rifying photos was supposed to act as a diversion from the moun­ literature and film published by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry tains of corpses in Hitler's concentration camps. In the debate that and Alfred Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Terri­ the Berlin historian Ernst Nolte unleashed in the 1980s concerning tories in aggressive slogans such as \"Jewish-Bolshevik terror the origins of the \"Final Solution of the Jewish Question,\" we haveclique.\"'^ Anti-Jewish pogroms began immediately after the inva­ been hearing vmacceptable arguments that challenge the unique­sion of the Soviet Union, following on the heels of the racist liqui­ ness of the Holocaust when by quantifying Hitler's and Stalin'sdation programs that the Nazis had initiated in Poland in 1939. victims for \"objective historical writing,\" the deaths of sixteen orJews were murdered in the thousands in bright daylight and more million Ukrainians and kulaks who perished are alleged tobefore everyone's eyes. This refutes the contention that it w a s only weigh, statistically speaking, more heavily than the six millionthe dreaded \"Gestapo on wheels\" who were responsible for the Jews who died in Nazi gas chambers.mass murders of Jews. Rather, it w a s Wehrmacht generals w h oeither covered or even ordered the deadly excesses against Jewish The Eternal Jew (1940)civilians, since \"a crusade had to be conducted against Bolshevismand hence also against the Jews who were more or less equated He calls death more sweetly.with Bolshevism.\"'* The actions of Gauleiter Erich Koch alone, in Death is master in Germany.his role as Reich Commissar for the occupied Ukraine, reached the He shouts that we should play our violins more darkly.proportions of genocide when he ordered hundreds of thousands Then you will ascend into the air as smoke.of Jews from Bialystok and the Ukraine to be liquidated by bestial Then you will have a grave in the clouds.means while implementing his \"Germanization\" policy in his Where it is not cramped.realm. According to Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, thevanquished loses his quality as a human being in the eyes of the Paul Celan»«victor. He may be persecuted without inhibition after everythingthat is evil and dangerous has been projected onto him: \"The SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. F r a n z Hippler w a s the m o s t eager a n ddefeated becomes the prey of boundless bloodthirstiness.\"'^ imscrupulous among Goebbels's film experts who knew how to arrange the most disparate clips and most antagonistic arguments T h e t w o - p a r t m o v i e Im Wald von Katyn, w h i c h is subtitled into a triumph of dialectical destructiveness. It was he who put\"documentary film,\" turns us into witnesses of superficially together the morally most perfidious, intellectually most under­buried history. It exhumes in a very literal w a y the crimes of Katyn handed, and ideologically most perverse mishmash that has everForest where in April 1943 German soldiers came across the mass been p r o d u c e d . This w a s Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), m a d e ingraves of 4,143 Polish officers. They had been murdered there in 1940. Only human scum could bring out such a diabolical work.1939 during the occupation by the Red Army which had marched Together with }ud Süß (1940) a n d Die Rothschilds (1940), as well asinto the eastern half of Poland as part of the deal with Hitler under the book b y H a n s Dieboro with the same title. Der ewige Jude raisedthe Nazi-Soviet Pact. The litany of pictures of corpses, exhumed the pogrom mood against the Jews to boiling point. These filmsby Polish prisoners, is accompanied by interviews with Poles w h o and a number of other books were calculated to justify in advance\"stand shattered in front of the blood of their former comrades.\" the mass murder of the European Jews.'^ The film was prenüeredThese kinds of testimonies are designed to \"objectivize\" the hate- in Berlin on 28 November 1940. Deportations to the camps in thefilled German commentary. The second part shows mass graves of East followed without delay. When the film was first shown in theUkrainians as \"witnesses to Soviet bloodthirstiness.\" A Greek- \"Casino Cinema\" in Lodz at the beginning of January 1941, someOrthodox bishop sprinkles holy water across the sea of corpses. In two hundred thousand Jews who had been crammed into the localthe words of the commentator, Bolshevism appears here as \"a Jew­ ghetto were liquidated shortly thereafter. Under the impression ofish organization for the extermination of the intelligentsia and the

174! The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 175the Polish premiere, the Berlin journal Film-Kurier w r o t e of L o d z t h a t Julius S t r e i c h e r h a d s p r e a d in his anti-Semitic r a g Deras \"a place which, so to speak, symbolizes this film; for it w a s here Stürmer. T h e dilapidated a n d filthy milieu for w h i c h the Nazis,that a large part of this movie was made.\"'^ having crammed twelve people into one room, were themselves exclusively responsible is presented in \"genuine\" pictures as an There then followed this aggressive text: \"The camera wandered \"Augean stable\" that was typical of the Jewish \"race\" and that the [through this ghetto] before the ordering hand of the German Jews had merely brought upon themselves. Among this \"evi­administration intervened to clean out this Augean stable in order d e n c e \" w e r e also e x c e r p t s from Joseph Green's The Purim Playerto obtain a true, undiluted picture of this cesspit from which world (1937) a n d Yidl Mit Fidl (]ew with a Fiddle, 1936). In a perfect fade-Jewry was steadily supplied.\" This is where the camera discovered over, several Jews \"metamorphose\" from men in orthodox dressthose \"types of Jewry\" and those \"depraved faces\" that are shown to people in West European tailor-made suits without beards andin the film. Once \"they moved as peddlers and parasites through sideburns. This is supposed to demonstrate the Jewish art of per­this city.\" A n d finally: \"The movie left a very strong impression.\" fect deception. In order, nevertheless, to be able to identify the Jew, h e h a d to w e a r as the m a r k of Cain the Star of David, first Succinctly a n d approvingly, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of 2 9 introduced in Poland on 23 November 1939 and in the Reich on 19November 1940 gave a description of the emotional streams of September 1941.hatred that the film unleashed: \"The viewer breathes a sigh ofrelief when the film reaches its end. He returns to light from the All these scenes of denial a r e escalated in this film into a guidedarkest swamps.\"'' for action by a commentary whose cynicism can hardly be sur­ passed. The result was many spontaneous outrages against Jews, T h e Illustrierte Film-Kurier, a n o t h e r s y n c h r o n i z e d j o u r n a l , not to mention all the ones that had been officially organized.played the same propaganda tune: \"In shining contrast [to the Through insertions, various partial truths are further truncated\"rats\"] the film, following these terrible scenes, ends with pictures and lies are refashioned into truths. In short, as Theodor Adornoof G e r m a n people a n d G e r m a n orderliness. They fill the v i e w e r put it, \"everything that isn't, is nonetheless promised by the factwith deepest gratitude that he belongs to this nation whose Führer that it appears.\" The theme of extermination is buttressed byis in the process of developing a fundamental solution to the Jew­ \"arguments\" that look convincing in their primitivism. For exam­ish problem. \"^°° In J a n u a r y 1 9 4 2 the L o d z C a s i n o C i n e m a s h o w e d ple, an analogy is made between a bunch of disgusting rats andG u s t a v Ucicky's hate-filled concoction Heimkehr ( H o m e c o m i n g , Jews massively swamping the civilized world and in turn conjur­1941). In it, the return of the Germans from Volhynia is said to be ing up dangers of pest epidemics and festering sores. Just as in theindebted to a dive bomber attack: \"Against the background of a case of other contrapuntal montages, the indoctrinating commen­world-historical decision, the fate of the ethnic-German men and tary is important here: \"Where rats appear, they spread diseasew o m e n from the late summer of 1939 who are depicted in this and carry destruction into the land. They are wily, cowardly, andgreat a n d m o v i n g film leads to the c a u s e of the fateful struggle cruel and appear mostly in large numbers—^just like the Jewsthat has been imposed on us.\" These were the words of the among the humans.\"Völkischer Beobachter on 2 4 October 1 9 4 1 . Meanwhile, the d e m a ­gogic texts in the Polish language were to have a psychologically The scenes of ritual slaughter of sheep and other artimals in thishumiliating effect. film m a y look cruel to Christian souls, e v e n if the c o m m e n t a r y is disregarded. But the impact is worsened in its polemical anti- The tremendous impact of both these films is due to several Semitic effect because faces of Jewish butchers who go after theirfactors that provide an apparent authenticity, systematically con­ profession with apparent voluptuousness have been faded in. Norc o c t e d in the laboratory of destruction. Der ewige Jude combines d o e s the film's m o n t a g e technique shrink from defanung famousindividual parts of the argument in a demagogic commentary and Jewish artists. Thus, scenes from F e d o r Ozep's Der Mörder Dimitria montage that is artfully welded together by synthetic forces; it Karamasoff and Fritz Lang's M (both m a d e in 1931) are b r o u g h t indoes so in such a fashion that the individual segments mutually to personally identify Fritz Kortner and Peter Lorre with the psy­magnify their pitilessness. The shots taken for Hippler's work in chopathic roles they played in these movies as seducer and asthe ghetto \"at the source of all evil\" exclusively show faces thatwere designed to confirm the prejudices about the \"subhumans\"

176 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 177murderer. Within this hate-filled context, emotions are farmed by newsreel in order to produce a friend-foe dialectic. This is donean irrational chauvinism in order to turn the Jews into scapegoats with perfidious perfection in Sieg im Westen by omitting the con­on patriotic grounds as well. In these ways the producers tried to text in which the latter originated. In this way and for the purposejustify what Foucault has called the \"stigmatization of the victims of proving the point, \"foreign matter\" from the opposing side isand the demonstration of the punishing authority.\"'\"' incorporated into the narrative. Nazi racism, as depicted in film, reached its terrifying climax in German War Film Compilations, 1939-1945Der ervige Jude. It is n o coincidence that the m a c h i n e r y of genocidewas set in motion at the same time that this \"documentary\" justi­ From the long-term perspective, war propaganda that exclusivelyfication of mass murder was released. The power of the words serves truth is the best. Joseph Goebbels'\"^and the wizardry of the pictures provided the ammunition for alarge-caliber anti-Semitic weapon. As Albert M e m m i put it, In a strict sense, every single newsreel represents a compilation\"Racism is no doubt one of the cogs in this diabolical engine.\"'\"^ film. H o w e v e r , the photo material is m o r e h o m o g e n e o u s than inHe continued: \"Man is the only being that systematically despises, other montages insofar as all of them are permeated by the samehumiliates, and exterminates members of its own species physi­ heroic spirit and are wedded to the same cause, i.e., to win victorycally and existentially for the purpose of self-justification. In large for Hitler. These films exude an enthusiastic mood that ispart this occurs through language, and this linguistic aspect of e n h a n c e d by m a r c h i n g songs. To this extent, all of these films withracism is certainly not just perverse. Man is endowed with lan­ their adoration of the Führer belong to the same category ofguage, i.e., he draws, communicates, stresses, and erases his expe­ equally crude propaganda pieces. Paul Virilio's assessment ofriences in images and words.\" Feuertaufe in the a r m e d forces journal Signal applies praeter propter also to the other w a r films: \"[These are] pictures without inunedi- In Memmi's view, racism at the level of symbols is a continuous ate dramatic tension whose judicious editing, which combineslaboratory in which the destruction of the victims is being pre­ events occurring more or less far apart, and whose conmientarypared. Films like Der ewige Jude w e r e s u p p o s e d to justify at a s y m ­ are designed to expose the viewer to the vibrating rhythm of thebolic level Hitier's racist fanaticism worldwide. Cinematographic grand historical event.\"'\"^instruments that worked so insidiously and manipulated the con­sciousness of the masses as effectively as possible secured a con­ T h e s a m e e n d s as in Feldzug in Polen also justified the m e a n s ofsenting silence on a massive scale. Racist anti-Semitism may arise Feuertaufe, according to the subtitle of H a n s Bertram's \"film aboutthrough \"the generalized and absolutized valuation of actual or the deployment of the German air force in Poland.\" BertramActive differences to the advantage of the accuser and the detri­ released his documentary a few months after Hippler's movie.ment of the victim with which privileges or aggressions are to be Bertram was severely wounded on location and lost one eye.justified.\"'°''In this anti-Semitic world. Hitler was the \"cement\" of Above all, like most other cameramen attached to the air force, hehis Nazi movement. b e c a m e intoxicated with flying. These m e n w e r e trained to wield both the camera and the machine gun and were able to switch Fritz Hippler's Feldzug in Polen (The Polish C a m p a i g n , 1940), positions if required. As Major Carl Cranz, the c o m m a n d e r of theH a n s B e r t r a m ' s Feuertaufe ( B a p t i s m of Fire, 1 9 4 0 ) , a n d Sieg im first Air Force Propaganda Company reported, thanks to thisWesten (Victory in the West, 1 9 4 1 ) b y S v e n d N o l d a n a n d Fritz training \"our war reporters are full-fledged soldiers.\"'* This com­Brunei pursued identical objectives. What differentiates them from pany had gained its first relevant experiences only a few monthsmost other compilation films that have been mentioned here is earlier during maneuvers in West Prussia and Pomerania andthat all events take place on the \"field of h o n o r \" This means that during the occupation of Sudetenland. Perhaps without realizingthey rely almost exclusively on German war newsreel material, it, these m e n implemented in the baptism of fire high above thewhich in turn was made up of many individual contributions froma variety of cameramen. The thinking and feeling of these menwere pervaded as strongly by the spirit of Nazism as their films.Their authenticity is reinforced by the attempt to use captured

178 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 179Vistula and Warthe rivers the idea of the \"armed camera-eye/' of the impact of air warfare will also recognize the extent of thealbeit in a totally different way from what Vertov had envisioned. guilt that Britain has to shoulder.\"\"\" Virilio no longer saw the war of the twentieth century as a war Wilhelm Stoeppler's lines, composed in 1939, are recited:of weapons, but as a war of perception. In his view, battles areonly secondarily decided on the battlefields; the actual conflict We flew to the Vistula and Warthe rivers.takes place as a map maneuver in the command centers. The effec­ We flew toward Polish landtiveness of such scenarios is dependent on the exact location of the We hit the enemy army hardenemy positions—it is a perception that determines victory and With lightnings and bombs and fire!defeat, life and death. Göring's boastful delusions of revenge are supposed to provide And indeed, combinations of guns and cameras, e.g., cameras the crowning conunentary for the movie: \"The promises the Ger­mounted on top of machine guns, were quite widespread in World m a n Air Force has made in Poland will be fulfilled in Britain andWar II. Whoever operated the gun would automatically also trig­ France.... We shall prove to Mr. Chamberlain that islands noger the camera. As Virilio wrote, \"For the soldier the function of longer exist. The hearts of all airmen beat faster when they arethe eye merges with that of the weapon.\"^\"^ H e added that w a r has cleared for take-off: We are flying against Engelland.\" A n d withshown to the camera-artist that \"military technology in action [is] relentless optimism, the bomber pilots sing themselves into thethe-highest privilege of art.\" Soon the air war appeared to many apotheosis at the end of the film, in Stoeppler's words and withairmen as the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery had music by Norbert Schnitze:described it in his Flight to Arras—as n o m o r e than \"an experi­ment in a laboratory.\"^\"^ Saint-Exupery, w h o had tried to elevate We confront the British lionthe machine as a symbol of the spirit, failed to return from a sortie for the last decisive attack.in July 1944. The poetry-writing hero thus ennobled his work We sit in judgment. A global empire is breaking up.through his death. That was our proudest day! Bertram presents his report on the eighteen-day blitzkrieg Cortu-ade! Comrade! The girls will have to wait.against a Polish army that was greatly inferior and totally unpre­ C o m r a d e ! C o m r a d e ! The order has c o m e through. We're off!pared primarily from a bird's eye perspective and elevated also in Comrade! Comrade! You know the password:ideological terms. The sequences in the film's preamble identify Close up to the enemy! Close up to the enemy!Britain as the main warmonger that instigated the Poles to unleash B o m b s for Engellandlpogroms against ethnic Germans: \"The West European plutoc­ Do you hear the engines sing: close up to the enemy!racy—Free Masons and Jews—^have sworn an oath of truce to com­ Does it resound in your ears: close up to the enemy!bat National Socialism.\"^'\" The film then provides the response: Bombs! Bombs! B o m b s d r o p p e d on Engellandl\"Like a sword in the sky, our air force is ready for take-off.\" Sitting in front of the screen, the spectators are sucked into the We also know Hitler's reply: \"From now on we shall retaliate fighting and the assurance that the enemy's potential has beenbomb for bomb.\" The inferno had thus been prepared. Göring's destroyed; they are included as a sympathizing mass that, throughtwo air fleets systematically destroyed Polish airports, railroad its sons, brothers, and fathers, has been made part of the victory.tracks, roads, ports, military installations, and towns, allegedly The stirring marching band music similarly swept people away\"in order to prevent the concentration, supply, and retreat of the and absorbed them emotionally. Many joined in the singing of theenemy.\" As the speed of bombers increased, not only the aerial \"Bombs for Engelland\" song or at least quietly h u n u n e d it. Thisviews changed all the time, but also the angle at which films were powerful emotional push toward victory and this popularityshot. As a result, the walls of ruins assume the ghostly shape of among the masses were aspects of propaganda that became deci­isometric projections. When the film presents the horrifying pic­ sive in Nazi filmmaking.tures of devastated Polish cities as a pleasurable panorama, thecommentary adds sneeringly that whoever \"sees the true measure I

180 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 181 Jerzy Bossak and Vaclav Kazmierczak have included in their of \"Greater German Radio\" contributed to this illusion of authen­1961 m o n t a g e , titled September 1939, the whining engines of dive ticity. Using c o n t e m p o r a r y show-biz darlings, the Wunschkonzert isb o m b e r s from Feuertaufe. They h a v e also used the choir's happily broadcast as if the movie were \"by chance\" witness to this Sundaysung lines: \"For w e are flying against Polenland ... with lightnings afternoon ritual of the nation. It was a ritual that was to keep sol­and bombs and fire\"—^which h a d been prognostically changed to diers as well as the \"home front\" in good spirits, with the help of\"against Engelland\" only t o w a r d the end of the movie. The t w o light music and obligatory morale boosters like the operetta starPolish filmmakers then replay the cutting voice of the originalcommentator who orders death and destruction for Poland. As Marika Rock a n d the schmaltz baritone Wilhelm Strienz.Bossak explained: \"This passage enables us to say a great dealabout the spirit of fascism.\"'\" From the limited material that was This movie certainly is an example of the attempt to blend theavailable to them, he and Kazmierczak compiled a 60-minute ret­ simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, as well as play and reality,rospective that offered more a passionate historicization than a front and home front into an optical unit by deploying bits ofsober argument about the Polish campaign. Consequently, they newsreel as alternating visual stimuli. Thanks to the blurringhave used prewar newsreels and Göring's glorifying air force effect of a heavy dose of sentimentality, the viewer generally didmovies rather inorganically. W h a t they have produced is a not notice how the nonidentical had been made totally identical.mechanical sequencing whose anti-fascist message is carried alone Adorno has called this realism resulting from a loss of reality.by the commentary, without reaching a new qualitative level. As Attendance figures prove how much films were loved at this timethe two directors added: \"The editing makes it impossible for us to that were categorized as \"popular\" and \"valuable\" from a \"state-feel and think with them. If a particular scene is unusually d r a w n political\" and \"artistic\" point of view: up to the end of the warout, this is not in order to produce tension and cogitation, but only Wunschkonzert h a d been seen b y 2 6 . 5 million people.because the montage in question just happened to be that long.\"This approach is responsible for the film's inorganic structure that By relying upon recognition effect, the stereotypical final cere­leaves the viewer no room to make associations. mony of the request program provided a nullion-fold opportu­ nity to identify emotionally with the sentiment that the popular E d u a r d v o n Borsody's Wunschkonzert (Request Concert, 1 9 4 0 ) showmaster Heinz Gödecke had prepared:was the first German feature film to fade in original documentaryclips as part of the action. These authentic sequences from Riefen­ The Wehrmacht request concert is now coming to an end.stahl's Olympia as well as w a r newsreels h a v e been so perfectly The home front stretches out to the front its hand.blended with the main narrative that the fictive persons become The front stretches out its hands to the home front.credible. There is, for example, the Olympic Stadium in Berlin W e say: G o o d night, auf Wiederhören,where Inge (Use Werner) and the dapper lieutenant Herbert Koch Until we return next time—(Carl Raddatz) discover their love. \"Germany is coming,\" Inge The Fatherland says auf Wiedersehenlsays enthusiastically as the German Olympic team, dressed inwhite, turns into the homestretch. The editing suggests that the Allied War Film Compilations, 1940-1945Führer is watching the same scene as Inge and Herbert. Just as theOlympic bell is faded over, pictures of the Olympic fire lead into \ We live in an obsessed world ...It would not come as a surprise tothe film's second part. We find ourselves in the war which ends \anyone if the madness would some day suddenly turn into a rage intowith another symbol-laden technique: a fade-out with swastika which this poor European humanity would lapse, stunned andflags in cumulo that promise victory. insane; while the engines are still purring and the flags rustling, the spirit has disappeared. In the second part, Herbert, the air force officer who has mean­ Johan Huizinga\"^while received the Spanish Cross and now acts against the back­drop of original w a r newsreel, looks as if he has just returned from Michail Romm's impressive symbiosis of aesthetic quality anda sortie in the heated air battle with the enemy. The request program enlightenment in the sixteen sections of his Obyknovennij fasizm

182 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 183(Daily Fascism, 1965) has been unsurpassed in its impact to this mechanisnis of Nazi ideology through picture and commentary, inday. Indeed, it signifies a crossroads on the well-trodden path of which he combines \"the language of the angry journalist with thecompilations about fascism. R o m m is himself convinced that his pungency of the satirist, the stylistic sensitivity of the artist withwork is a criticism of movies about fascism in which the bitter the wisdom of the humanist.\"\"^reality of Nazism has been transformed into an artistic reality,since the critical perspective became imprisoned by stereotypical R o m m chose a method that is both intellectual and emotive toimages and powerful concepts. At the same time his film is a \"cri­ investigate the truth about the Hitler period and to make it acces­tique of movies about many other historical themes.\" He adds: sible: \"If we all cooperate to describe the historical events not just superficially and with didactic corrunentaries, but try to stop and We have movies about the \"Great Patriotic War,\" the history of the think when dealing with every individual phenomenon, we shall Revolution, about a variety of countries.... They are all the same. I sooner or later come close to the truth.\"\"* However, this goal can am convinced that as a consequence of the principles that underlie be achieved only if the limits of the genre are broadened beyond them they are all profoimdly untrue. And none of them is a success the confines of the massive material that is available. In 1965 with the viewers. They are successful only with those who com­ R o m a n K a r m e n t u r n e d the Soviet m o v i e Velikaya Ochesvenaya missioned them. Thus, the latter will already be happy if all has Voina (The Great Patriotic W a r ) into precisely such a m a m m o t h been enumerated and reported. Meanwhile, the viewer is terribly enterprise that he, as the organizer of the whole compilation, evi­ bored: \"Everything is included and nothing else!\" ... We watched dently lost his thread. This film about a period of great tragedy for one documentarist movie about fascism, the war, and the Soviet the Soviet people strings together all sorts of episodes to produce Union after the other; we then switched off the sound, and our an arbitrary conglomerate of impressions that are all similar. This attention was drawn to the unintelligent and imiform language of is achieved with the help of Nazi newsreels and Soviet documen­ the pictures. It was not the primitiveness of the montage; [on the taries that Karmen himself was involved in. Thus, he was the cam­ contrary,] this was all neatly and expertly done; it was the unedu­ e r a m a n for Leonid Varlamov a n d Dya Kopalin's Victory Against the cated language of art [that struck us]. It was no longer what is German Armies before Moscow ( 1 9 4 2 ) a n d d u r i n g the s a m e y e a r called \"colds cuts\" over here....\"^ directed, with Yefin Uchitel, the d o c u m e n t a r y about The Struggle for Leningrad. This latter film w a s shown u n d e r the title Moscow Romm does not simply show images of atrocities taken from Strikes Back in the United States a n d w a s a w a r d e d an Oscar in 1942German and Soviet newsreels in order to emotionalize the audi­ for best documentary. Still, in Karmen's case and even with a filmence through shock treatment. The original material from those that runs for 130 minutes, it should have been possible to avoidNazi films is not suited for his ambitious enterprise to develop a contrived transitions and repetitions in such large numbers, iftypology of a terror regime. In Romm's view, those films are in only he had developed a professional pictorial grammar.any case \"incredibly monotonous.... Among six million feet offilm we did not see a single picture of ordinary man.\"\"* And yet it Karmen was always directly on the front line, facing the enemy.is this ordinary man, the follower, on w h o m his interest is focused. H e reached Berlin with the first Soviets tanks. Thus, he used scenes from his The Struggle for Leningrad (1942) a n d Stalingrad W h y did this man join in and why did he remain an obedient (1943) both for his Great Patriotic War a n d for Sud Naradov (Judg­link in the chain of the mass movement to the bitter end? All mate­ ment of the Nations, 1947), a movie about the Nuremberg Trials ofrial R o m m draws upon is designed to unmask the propaganda the major war criminals. And \"jointly with the judges and themethods, including the aesthetic transformation of ideological Allied nations we documentarists rendered the verdict: death bycontent into a motivating force, which the Nazis marshaled in hanging.\"\"^ However, it is only after Stalin's death that Karmenorder to use the German people for their sinister purposes. R o m m also explicitly takes the view that \"barbaric fascism\" rather thanis not interested in the tabulation of history. He wants to grasp the the G e r m a n s w a s the e n e m y of the Soviet Union. In his Great Patri­socio-typical moment behind the pictures, to get hold of the phe­ otic War Stalin h a d already been dethroned.nomenon of fascism in its totality. He hopes to make visible themotives of blind obedience. This is why he tears the veil from the Ten days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 Decem­artificial aura surrounding the adventurer Hitler. He uncovers the ber 1941, Roosevelt issued a Presidential Letter on 18 December in

184 The Triumph of Propaganda Nonfictional Genres of Nazi Film Propaganda 185which he appointed a \"Coordinator for Government Film,\" but people win wars.\" The 1944 installment, \"The Battle forthough without executive powers. This is the background to an China,\" was removed from circulation because relations betweeninitiative by the U.S. War Department authorizing Col. Frank the Communists and Chiang Kai-shek were precarious. \"The Bat­Capra to begin a propaganda film offensive. The idea was to tle of Russia\" was withdrawn during the McCarthy years of anti-counter the weapons produced in Dr. Goebbels's cinematographic Communist hysteria in the United States.munitions factories. A film series seemed most suitable, not onlyto justify the United States's entry into the war, but also to depict A m o n g the seven Why We Fight movies, Anatole Litvak's \"Warit \"as the inevitable reaction to serious crimes.\" Under the title Comes to America\" (1945) is probably the most impressive.Why We Fight, a seven-part series w a s to be m a d e that w o u l d be Although opinion polls with \"common people,\" official state­based on firsthand evidence and factual accounts because they, ments, and historical facts are neatly interpreted in conjunctionabove all, were deemed to have persuasive p o w e r . I n the first with newsreel materials and dialogues, the constant fade-ins ofinstance, this implied reliance on newsreels from around the interviewees and the statistical evaluation of their answers byworld. Capra's films were shown to GIs before they were sent to Gallup do become somewhat unnerving. By including newsreelsEurope, but also in cinemas back in the United States and the a n d even clips from Triumph des Willens, Litvak succeeds in p o r ­British Commonwealth. Churchill personally introduced the Com­ traying a cross section of contemporary American history. Thesemonwealth version. The movies were designed to give a conclu­ images are confronted with Hitler's wars of conquest and Japan'ssive answer to the question of \"Why we fight\" by contrasting, in a raid on Pearl Harbor, resulting in the American declaration of war.psychologically adept manner, the \"Free World\" with the \"Slave Sentimental texts about the American countryside in deep peaceWorld\" of the Axis Powers. The seven installments of, on average, a n d its lyrical transfiguration take the G e r m a n Kulturfilm as theirsixty minutes were to safeguard not only chronology and system­ model. But then the trivial tone is replaced by warlike language:atic interpretation, but also continued popularity. \"We shall fight to the last man.\" The movie also contains interest­ ing sequences about fascist movements outside Hitler's sphere of The series broadly followed Roosevelt's somewhat vague influence, among them Nazi rallies and large numbers of swastikaproclamation in his State of the Union Address of January 1942. In flags in New York's Madison Square Garden. No doubt theit, the President identified as central points of the w a r a n d raison answers to the overriding question of \"Why we fight\" have beend'etre of the A m e r i c a n entry: \"the A m e r i c a n w a y of life,\" a n d , sec­ carefully documented here; and yet it is not a \"dramatic, excitingondly, the \"character of the enemy—^his ideology, his motives, his ... and extremely convincing film,\" just a very patriotic one. Amethods.\" Furthermore, he mentioned the United Nations and statement by George C. Marshall, as chairman of the Joint Chiefstheir Allied armed forces and the need to secure, from \"the pro­ of Staff, concludes the movie: \"Victory of the democracies can onlyduction front\" supplies for the ultimate victory. Finally, there were be c o m p l e t e with the utter defeat of the w a r machines of G e r m a n ythe responsibilities of the civilian services at the home front and and Japan.\" The film then shows the Stars and Stripes with a fade-\"our troops, our Allies and sympathizers.\"\"' over of American children who, with hand on heart, sing the national anthem. \"Prelude to War,\" which appeared in 1942 as the first title in theWhy We Fight series, c o v e r s the y e a r s of Hitler's rise u p to 1938. In \"Prelude to War,\" the first p a r t of the series, children in NaziThe next part, \"The Nazi Strike,\" reports with biting irony the Germany, Italy, and Japan are shown from the opposite angle—Wehrmacht's march into Austria and Czechoslovakia as well as how they are put under the state's tutelage at an early age. Therethe invasion of Poland. \"Divide and Conquer\" (1943) documents is a German blackboard with the words in Gothic script: \"We areHitler's war in Western Europe. The evacuation of the British living for Hitler, and we'll also joyfully die for him. With theExpeditionary Force from Dunkirk after the fall of France in June Führer unto death, for he is our God.\" A Japanese cemetery is1940 and the air raids on London and Coventry are at the center of headlined: \"To die for the Emperor means eternal life.\" However,\"The Battle of Britain\" (1943). \"The Battle of Russia\" (1944) shows Americans also do not shrink from a willingness to face death:the Soviets as brothers in arms and spreads sympathy for the suf­ \"Give me Liberty or give me Death.\" Through judicious editing,fering population under the motto: \"Generals may win battles. Frank Capra put together a dynanuc propaganda film for which