Mimicry and Mirror Reflexes: Geographies of Nazi Cinema

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Mimicry and Mirror Reflexes: Geographies of Nazi Cinema

Johannes von Moltke

Introduction: The Migrating Mountain Film

At least since Siegfried Kracauer’s verdict that Arnold Fanck’s Stürme über dem

Montblanc (1930) anticipated “the ultimate fusion of the mountain cult and the

Hitler cult,” the relatively short-‐lived cycle of mountain films has been considered a

quintessentially German obsession.1 Indelibly linked to the names of Arnold Fanck,

Luis Trenker, and Leni Riefenstahl, these are films we remember for their natural

landscapes, their cloud imagery, their heroic feats of athleticism and daring, their

inconsequential plots; and although they date back to the Weimar Republic, thanks

to Kracauer, we remember the mountain films also for their association with Nazi

values, such as the cult of leadership personified in the chiseled physiognomy of

Luis Trenker, the celebration of myth and tradition, and the valorization of Heimat.

But it is perhaps worth recalling that the mountain film’s leading trio also traveled

widely – from the early years of the Nazi regime, when Trenker took to the streets

and skyscrapers of New York for Der verlorene Sohn (1934) and then to the

American Southwest for Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (1936 – a western), through Leni

Riefenstahl’s ill-‐fated attempt to market Olympia with what she wrongly expected to

be a star turn in the United States in 1938.

Arnold Fanck, meanwhile, traveled East to make Die Tochter des Samurai /

New Earth in 1936. This film opens with the kind of nature photography audience

would have come to expect from earlier films such as Der heilige Berg or from Der

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verlorene Sohn: waves lapping at rock formations in the ocean, mountains rising

majestically, clouds billowing. But here, Mount Fuji has replaced the Alps, and the

ocean is the setting not for Leni Riefenstahl’s version of Ausdruckstanz but for the

arrival of a modern ocean liner carrying the aptly named German journalist Gerda

Storm and a different prodigal son: Yamato Teruo, the hero of the film, who is

returning from a six-‐year sojourn in the West. As the two converse on deck, the

camera captures Teruo between two flags [slide], thereby heavy-‐handedly

foreshadowing the central conundrum of the plot: the hero’s conflicted position

between West and East, Fremde and Heimat, or – in the film’s love triangle –

between Gerda and the utterly traditional Mitsuko (Hara Setsuko in her first

starring role).

The film will work through this conflict in ways both predictable and rather

striking: on the one hand, it simply replays Tonio Feuersinger’s passing infatuation

with America and an American woman in Der verlorene Sohn – where the encounter

with the more modern, Western “other” serves only as a reminder of the values of

home, tradition, and family.2 On the other hand, the fascination with the West leaves

its traces. In Trenker’s film, this was the visual fascination of New York – its sheer

attractiveness as spectacle, which the rather simplistic back-‐to-‐the-‐Heimat narrative

tries to contain but cannot shed. In Fanck’s film, the negotiation is both mundane (as

in the strategic praise of German technology and ideology) and rather more

complex, as Teruo literally brings the West into the framework of the East. The

dichotomies remain in place, to be sure – modern, Westernized architecture, dress,

and music are ultimately just so many temptations to be overcome by the return to

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tradition. And yet, the distinctions blur: as we follow Teruo up the mountain in his

(literally) climactic effort to pull back his Japanese fiancée from the brink of suicide,

Richard Angst’s cinematography yields images [slide] that are virtually

indistinguishable from his work for Fanck back home in the Alps. This visual

equivocation is doubled by an ideological one: New Earth, the title for the Japanese

version of the film, deliberately echoes the German ideologeme of Volk ohne Raum,

famously narrativized by Hans Grimm in the eponymous novel, and translated in the

final images of Fanck’s Japanese film into images of the young family cultivating

“new earth” in Manchuria [clip].

Though Fanck’s film is relatively unique as a full-‐fledged (if also ill-‐fated)

coproduction between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it opens up the question of

Nazi cinema’s boundaries. We have long learned to think about how the film culture

of the Third Reich spilled over the temporal boundaries of 1933 and 1945 – whether

by predating the Machtergreifung, as Kracauer would have it, or, as any number of

commentators since Susan Sontag have noted, by inflecting (infecting) our image

culture in photo-‐essays on African tribes, on the History Channel, in Inglourious

Basterds or Der Untergang. But we have been somewhat less adept at considering

the spatial reach of cinema during the Nazi era. This is what I propose to do today by

considering some aspects that come into view if we map the geographies of Nazi

cinema beyond the confines of the German nation.

What I wish to suggest, then, is quite simply this: Nazi cinema was always

something more than national. Although we have generally come to think of film in

the Third Reich as the most “national” of cinemas (after all, it was rapidly

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centralized, “Aryanized,” censored, and nationalized after 1933), it extended beyond

Ufa or the films that passed the German censors and appeared on screens inside the

varying borders of the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. The films, policies,

texts, and practices that constitute “Nazi Cinema” evolved, rather, in a far-‐flung

network that we can – and should – variously think of as national, international,

colonial, imperial, and transnational.

Given some intrinsic limitations on individual (as opposed to collaborative)

research in this topic, given the preliminary state of my own research on those

aspects that I’ve begun undertaking on my own, and given time constraints, I will

limit myself to three snapshots and a concluding proposal for remapping Nazi

cinema in this sense. The first snapshot reframes the latter as Fascist cinema; the

second brings into view issues of democracy and totalitarianism by adopting a

trans-‐Atlantic lens; and the third focuses on theorizing the projection of national

difference in Nazi cinema as examples of what Siegfried Kracauer calls “retrographic

self-‐revelation.” We might think of these as three different geographies of Nazi

cinema: an axis geography, a trans-‐Atlantic geography, and the imaginary geography

of Nazi propaganda. Throughout, I treat cinema both as set of material and

industrial practices including production, distribution and exhibition; and as a

textual practice where geography, space, and nation become a matter of

representation and ideology.

1. Axis Geographies: Fascist Cinemas?

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Comparative work by historians has begun to map the relations between various

types of European and other fascisms, noting especially the importance of culture as

the realm in which to study relations between different fascist systems. As George

Mosse, one of the foremost cultural historians of the period, put it, “if… fascism saw

itself as a cultural movement, any comparative study must be based upon an

analysis of cultural similarities and differences.”3 Focusing on the cinema, doubtless

a central medium for the elaboration of fascist culture, such an analysis might begin

with some deceptively simple questions: what happens to our notion of Nazi cinema

if we reframe it as fascist cinema? How did Nazi cinema function in the Tokyo-‐

Berlin-‐Rome “axis”? How did films and film aesthetics travel along that axis, let

alone in the imperial geography spawned by this alliance?4 Did the prospects of

conquering foreign markets inflect the subject matter, style, or production of

particular films?

To pursue such questions involves two different, but interrelated, lines of

inquiry – one industrial/institutional, the other textual/aesthetic. Thus, we might

consider, first, the kinds of personal and institutional exchanges that cumulated in

Die Tochter des Samurai, as well as the distribution and reception of the finished

film. Two slightly different versions opened to highly publicized and politicized gala

premieres first in Tokyo (where members of the Imperial Family were present), and

later in Berlin with prominent Nazi politicians and a Japanese delegation. Though it

met with its share of criticism from Japanese reviewers, Die Tocher des Samurai did

well at the box office and was discussed positively in Germany in accordance with

the directives issued by Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry.5 As Janine Hansen

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points out, many German commentators remarked on the “skillful way in which The

Daughter of the Samurai sealed the axis between the two countries.”6 If it remains

the only prominent example of a German-‐Japanese co-‐production, film relations

between the two axis countries nonetheless went well beyond this single event –

dating back to the producer Kawakita Nagamasa’s early experiences in Germany

during the 1920s, which subsequently led to regular visits to Nazi Germany; to

arrangements for the export of German features and especially the coveted

Kulturfilme (to be emulated by a slew of bunka eiga in Japan). Although plans for a

joint German-‐Japanese production company never materialized, other forms of

reciprocity included the adoption in Japan of some aspects of the

Reichslichtspielgesetz in 1939, and collaboration on at least one further project – the

military training film Nippons wilde Adler (1942).7 Turning to the European vector

of the axis, meanwhile, we could trace similar forms of collaboration between Italy,

Spain, and Germany – especially in the late 1930s, when “the cinema became a

primary site of cross-‐cultural collaborations,” as Ruth Ben-‐Ghiat points out in her

work on Fascist Modernities.8

To reframe Nazi cinema as fascist cinema also requires us – secondly – to

revisit the question of a “fascist aesthetics,” or what Markus Nornes has described as

fascist style.9 Famously developed by Susan Sontag with reference to Riefenstahl’s

films and photographs, the notion of a “fascist aesthetic” undoubtedly falls short of

describing the bulk of Nazi cinema, which was in many respects unspectacular,

generic, even pedestrian. And yet, Sontag’s term (including its resonance with

Benjamin’s understanding of fascist aestheticization, and with Kracauer’s analysis of

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the “mass ornament”) retains its considerable analytical purchase if we use it to

think across cinematic borders, and to consider the ways in which aesthetic

developments in one of the axis countries may be inflected by similar or

complementary manifestations in another. This would certainly involve tracking

Riefenstahl’s brand of “fascinating fascism” in works such as Gallone’s 1937 Scipione

Africanus [slide] or in the “monumental style” of Japanese films, or in the staging of

the ecstatic body in Japanese military training films as much as in Olympia [slide].10

As Alan Tansman’s work on the aesthetics of Fascism in Japan has shown, Sontag’s

summation of this brand of fascist aesthetics as one that “glorifies surrender, exalts

mindlessness [and] glamorizes death”11 travels well across these films.12 Besides

questions concerning the depiction of leadership, the glorification of death, the

function of spectacle, and the implicit discourse on sexuality already analyzed by

Sontag, the reconsideration of fascist aesthetics across axis cinemas would include –

among others – questions about: the depiction of gender and the body, including the

different family romances of fascist cinemas;13 the uses of myth and history;14 the

place of modernity;15 the role of genre;16 tropes of racial purity and mixing; the role

of entertainment; the aesthetics of documentary, the Kulturfilm and the newsreel;

and the depiction of war, the home front, colonialism, and empire.17

II. Trans-‐Atlantic Geographies: Dictatorship and Democracy

While the various treaties among the axis powers provided a political infrastructure

for the circulation of films, crews, and aesthetics between Japan, Italy and Germany,

as well as allied and annexed territories from Spain to the Philippines (according to

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a 1941 report, the Nazis alone planned to open over 1,000 new theaters in the

occupied territories)18, there is no reason to limit the political geography of Nazi

cinema to the Third Reich and its Allies. The lively, if generally troubled, relations

between Berlin and Hollywood offer a case in point, which has recently come into

the spotlight thanks to two new books on the subject. This is not the place for a

detailed engagement with the arguments of Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration and

Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, other than to suggest that the combined

evidence of these two studies makes a strong case for thinking of Nazi cinema as

extending into the very fabric of the American movie industry. As both Urwand and

Doherty show, the Nazis had a (heavy) hand in censoring American films, not only

for German exhibition but for world-‐wide release.19 The give-‐and-‐take between

Hollywood and Germany extends, as well, into trade, distribution, and exhibition

practices. While we have a fairly good overview of Hollywood’s presence in

Germany during the 1930s, thanks to Markus Spieker’s Hollywood unterm

Hakenkreuz, comparatively little is known about how Nazi cinema circulated in

countries such as the United States.20 The current assumption is that, whereas

German cinema enjoyed enormous popularity with American audiences and critics

until 1933, 21 there was a precipitous drop after Hitler’s Machtergreifung, when

“American moviegoers fled German cinema as if propelled out the doors by Nazi

stinkbombs.”22 [slide]

But more research is clearly needed here. What are we to make, for instance,

of the permanent presence of an UFA distribution arm in New York from 1924

through 1941? Or of the showing, as late as May 1941, of the German propaganda

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film Victory in the West in an upper East Side theater, picket lines

notwithstanding?23 How did Germany’s stated desire to find and expand

distribution in the United States and other countries (in 1940, films were being

prepared in no fewer than 16 languages!) inflect the subject matter and even the

style of Nazi cinema?24 As one of the few, brief overviews American-‐German film

exchange during the 1930s notes, we are “short of data on [the] fascinating subject”

of German film exhibition; moreover, it seems safe to assume that the information

we do have centers on New York and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles – two major

cities that, while significant for the entertainment industry, can hardly be

considered representative for the breadth of distribution politics, let alone reception

patterns.25

In order to fill this gap, we have recently initiated a research study on the

topic at the University of Michigan. In the context of a larger project that is gathering

information about the history of film exhibition in Detroit,26 we are tracking the

offerings of the “Little Cinema,” in particular, which catered to the large ethnic

German population of the city. Compiling listings and reviews from English-‐ and

German-‐language newspapers from the 1930s and 40s, we aim to reconstruct the

programming and runs of German films during these years. This will provide us

with data from a mid-‐western metropolis that we can then compare with the more

readily available information about major urban centers on the East and West coast,

as well as with import records and relevant material from the German trade press.

[slides]

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This research is driven by an empirical impulse to obtain and map as much

information about Detroit as possible; but the stakes are of a broader historical,

political, and theoretical nature that comes into view if we turn, again, to questions

of film form and aesthetics. Undoubtedly, cinema was as central to Nazi Germany as

it was to the United States during the 1930s and 40s, which we now consider the

“golden age” of Hollywood. One need not share Kracauer’s reflectionist assumptions

about the ways in which films mirror the psychological predispositions of a nation

to agree that the medium of film was closely bound up with notions of national (self-‐

)representation, whether under conditions of dictatorship, as in Germany, or of

democracy, as in the United States. In fact, cinema was a site for negotiating

precisely those conditions on both sides of the Atlantic – and here we encounter

some remarkable equivocations and reversals that are of central concern to the

transnational investigation I am proposing. For the pre-‐Cold-‐War division of the

world into Axis and Allies hardly mapped onto a division among antiliberal and

liberal spheres; rather, those spheres intersected and cross-‐contaminated each

other – a process we can observe with particular clarity at the movies. From this

perspective, depression era and wartime Hollywood on the one hand and Nazi

cinema on the other generate curiously inverted mirror images of one another – not

simply in the sense that they extol the virtues of democracy and totalitarianism,

respectively, but in the deeper sense that they betray quite precisely the fears of

contamination by the other.27

Take, for example, the question of democratically legitimated versus

totalitarian leadership. While at first blush, the camps are neatly divided between a

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Capra-‐esque defense of democracy in the US and fascist cinema’s commitment to the

Führerprinzip, prominent films blur the picture. As early as 1933, we find MGM

releasing Gabriel Over the White House, a political fantasy bankrolled by William

Randolph Hearst, in which the fictional US president Jud Hammond is visited by the

archangel Gabriel after a car accident. He emerges transformed from the hands-‐off

party loyalist he had been at his inauguration. Instead, Hammond is now an

interventionist – or should we say decisionist – leader, who rules by emergency

decree and martial law. In the film’s iconic scene, in which he suspends congress, he

manages rhetorically to package his dictatorship as democracy [clip].

Ben Urwand, the most recent commentator on this film, has taken the near

simultaneous release of Gabriel with Hitler’s ascent to power as an occasion for

comparing the president’s fictional speech with the Führer’s call on the Reichstag to

pass the Enabling Act in March of 1933. Suggestive though this montage may be, it is

historically and theoretically as misleading as Urwand’s claim that Gabriel over the

White House was simply a fascist film. Not only did Gabriel tap into a long-‐standing

American fascination with Mussolini rather than with Hitler;28 Urwand also

disregards the generic markers through which Gabriel marks the miraculous

transformation of the president by divine intervention as a form of political satire.

Benjamin Alpers offers a more circumspectly historicized reading of Gabriel over the

White House, noting that it premiered at the end, rather than the beginning, of

America’s “romance” of dictatorship during the Great Depression; that the film

understands the dictator “in terms of his personality and power, not some

supervening ideology;” and that the representation of dictatorship in the film does

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not engage in explicitly antidemocratic rhetoric (choosing instead to portray

dictatorship and democracy as compatible with one another). This is a far cry from

claiming, as Urwand does, that Gabriel Over the White House was the first in a long

line of fascist films from Hollywood. Even if the Nazis themselves valued the film, it

is wrong to call this “the first major fascist motion picture” that “served as

propaganda for the new Nazi regime.”29

Indeed, illiberal notions of leadership “infect” Hollywood cinema during the

1930s and 1940s, just as Nazi cinema repeatedly finds itself forced to confront the

allure of democratic legitimacy as a threat to the consolidation of totalitarian

leadership in ways to be shown below. In this sense, reading films such as Gabriel

over the White House transnationally is not about equating fascism with democracy,

detecting “pacts” and “collaboration” where looser forms of exchange, interaction,

and cross-‐contamination obtain; it is, rather, about listening for the voices of the

other that echo through productions on both sides of the ostensible divide between

liberal and illiberal polities.

It should be obvious that this is a matter not only of unpacking the place of

political speechifying in films about the presidency, but also of tracing the

construction of leadership through various other visual and stylistic registers of

filmic signification. Although I do not have time to go into this here, let me offer a

glimpse of what this might mean by suggesting comparing the apotheosis of the

leader figure at the end of a Nazi film such as Der große König (1936) with the way

in which John Ford famously concludes Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) [parallel clips].

Both films mobilize the stern gaze of the paternal leader figure throughout the

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narrative, but isolate it at the end – as a superimposition in Harlan’s film, and as

monument in Ford’s. The “strange ideological balancing act” of Lincoln, famously

analyzed by the editors of Cahiers du cinema,30 resonates with the aesthetics of Der

große König: just as his “insistent stare” indexes what the Cahiers describe as

“Lincoln’s castrating figure” – a figure of violence and power in excess of the

democratic project that the film ostensibly espouses,31 so does the disembodied

gaze of Otto Gebühr infect the Nazi film with an excessive dimension – not to

mention the way in which the king’s fatigued retreat to the cathedral after the

victory on the battle field and in lieu of the public celebrations anticipates “Lincoln’s

rather weary solemnity” at the end of Ford’s film.32 Though the Cahiers point to

Ford’s professed interest in Weimar expressionism to interpret the quasi-‐vampiric

disappearance of Lincoln from the film at the end, one can’t help but see the more

proximate echo of Harlan’s mise-‐en-‐scène of mythic leadership. Conversely, the

Cahiers’ reading of that ending evokes Fredericus when they describe Lincoln’s

“monstrous character,” which leaves the film as “an intolerable figure.”33

III. Imperial Geographies: National Projection in Nazi Propaganda

“Was als Fremdes abstößt, ist nur allzu vertraut”

Adorno/Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung

How, then, to interpret such parallels and echoes if we are not to reduce them, as

Urwand does, to flat-‐out reversals, whereby Hollywood films become fascist under

the aegis of an all-‐out pact with Hitler? Urwand’s one-‐dimensional model of

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influence implicitly assumes the work of propaganda as Hitler himself envisioned it

in Mein Kampf, a text that Urwand intriguingly reads for its contribution to a theory

of film as a propaganda medium. What Urwand fails to show, however, is the

monomaniacal character of that theory – its insistence that propaganda continually

repeat its message, no matter its truth content, without ever making any

concessions to an opposing viewpoint.34 Whatever its merits as a general theory of

political propaganda, such a view is ill-‐suited to understanding the complex

negotiations that characterize feature films, even if they are explicitly intended as

propaganda.

Working through such issues at the time – first in French, and then in

American exile –, Siegfried Kracauer offered the far more reflexive notion of

propagandistic “mirror reflexes.” In the manner reminiscent of the fleeing robber

who yells “stop thief” to divert attention from himself, Kracauer suggests,

propaganda projects its own transgressions onto others, in order then to legitimate

the assault: “one does not explain the truth but rather inverts it completely by

accusing the enemy of precisely those deeds and machinations that one is pursuing

oneself.”35 What such propaganda ultimately produces, according to Kracauer, are

“retrographic self-‐revelations” (Selbstenthüllungen in Spiegelschrift) – dizzying

rhetorical contortions that have the power to affect the very “psycho-‐physical

structure” of the subject.36

This strikes me as an extremely useful perspective to adopt if we return,

finally, to the imagined geographies of Nazi cinema in an effort to understand the

negotiation of national difference on the level of aesthetic representation. Here, the

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very notion of a national “other” becomes permeable in the sense imagined by

Kracauer: it is constituted as a projection, an inverse mirror image of the self.

Whether we think of the Puerto Ricans of La Habanera (1937), the Poles in

Heimkehr (1941), or the English who wage war on the Boers in Ohm Krüger (1941) –

we can discern a distinct pattern of using the national other to project traits that the

self considers loathsome and pursues with heightened aggression against the other.

Thus, the authoritarian Don Pedro may exert a temporary, fatal attraction on Zarah

Leander’s Astrée in Sierck’s film; but the latter introduces the Nordic scientist as a

foil to critique Pedro’s tight-‐fisted, anti-‐American regime. The Caribbean island thus

figures as both the racialized, tropical other, to be colonized, civilized, and

democratized by the Western scientists – and as the projection of the isolated,

authoritarian state that is Germany in 1937. Ohm Krüger similarly deploys the

British Empire in a double role as both oppressor to the Boer minority in South

Africa and the mirror image to the German State of 1941. The legitimation of war

against England in this film proceeds precisely by projecting onto the British the

aggressor’s decision to lead a total war. Two years after the invasion of Poland, a

year after marching into Paris, a few months after unleashing the Battle of Britain,

and on the eve of the assault on the Soviet Union, the 1941 film depicts the British as

the aggressor: halfway through, a British admiral outlines the need to put an end to

sentimental talk of humanity (Humanitätsduselei) by burning farms, separating

families and forming concentration camps, making no distinction between military

and civilians. Heimkehr, finally, has the Poles burn German books, deny Germans the

right to congregate or listen to the radio, round up Germans on netted flatbed

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trucks, and incarcerate them in cellars with slits through which they are about to

machine-‐gun the lot when German tanks arrive in the nick of time to liberate their

compatriots. What these films share, in other words, is an imaginary geography

constructed around German victimization in order to legitimate an imperial agenda.

Need it be said that the inversions analyzed here share the logic of anti-‐

Semitism? There is perhaps no clearer articulation of this link than in one of

Goebbels’s most perfidious diatribes, a 1941 article published in Das Reich. Under

the title “Mimicry,” he develops an invective against the Jewish ability to adapt, a

trope familiar from canonical anti-‐Semitic literature and films such as Der ewige

Jude or Jud Süß. But before long, the text begins unraveling: when Goebbels claims

that, according to Jewish chuzpa, “not the murderer is guilty any longer, but the one

who was murdered,” we have arrived at the center of the hall of mirrors: an anti-‐

Semitic text that imputes to the victims of persecution not only guilt, but also the

ideology that underpins the inversion of guilt and innocence, aggression and

victimization. Indeed, as if both aware of and oblivious to his own twisted logic,

Goebbels goes on to note the inevitable undoing of this ideology at the hands of the

ideologue. Thus, when he claims that the Jews, as manipulators of meanings and

appearances, “begin to stumble” [sich verhaspeln] and “suddenly betray themselves”

at the height of their rage, he might as well be describing the raging logic of his own

text. Fittingly, this logorrhea culminates in the doubled exclamation that “it’s the

Jews’ fault,” thus enacting the gesture of blaming the victims, which he had initially

laid at the feet of the Jews.

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As Adorno and Horkheimer note in “Elements of Anti-‐Semitism,” “there is no

anti-‐Semite who does not feel an instinctive urge to ape what he takes to be

Jewishness.” Goebbels is no exception, developing in “Mimicry” precisely the

ideological operation that Adorno and Horkheimer analyzed as “false projection”

and “mimesis of mimesis” at the limits of enlightenment.37 The geography of fascist

cinema involves false projection in this same sense. “False projection,” Adorno and

Horkheimer write, “makes its surroundings resemble itself. … [It] displaces the

volatile inward into the outer world.” In films like Ohm Krüger or Heimkehr,

impulses which are not acknowledged by the nation and yet have been enacted by it

(such as total war or ethnic persecution), are attributed to the national other: the

country to be, or already, invaded. Nazi propaganda in this sense becomes an echo

chamber in which various national signifiers project and ricochet in profoundly

disorienting fashion. The cinema’s various images of nation amount to a hall of

mirrors that perverts the sense of transnationalism Ofer Ashkenazi could still detect

in Weimar era films: to be sure, Nazi propaganda mobilizes its own version of

transnationalism as “a paradigm for identification,” as Ashkenazi puts it – a

framework that “links the individual with an imagined community that exists

beyond national boundaries.”38 As I have suggested, German viewers are aligned

doubly in these films with the victims and with the aggressors, i.e. with the Boers

and the British, the German minority and the Poles, the Nordic race and the

colonial dictatorship. But where such an expanded sense of national identification

constitutes, in Ashkenazi’s reading of Weimar cinema, an “imagined collective

[that] marginalizes the role of state borders and the alleged distinctive essence of

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the nation,” the Nazi mobilization of national difference reinforces that essence

and redraws those borders around an ever expanding racial Reich. Having expelled

and projected the aggressive traits of the self onto the other in the cinema – and in

accordance with the logic of anti-Semitism – Nazi politics either re-incorporates it

through invasion, or annihilates it.

IV. Mapping Fascist Cinemas: Further Work

In 1994, historians held a conference at Oxford in memory of Tim Mason, the

influential social historian of Nazism. The conference was devoted to “Fascism in

Comparative Perspective,” pairing contributions on Italy and Germany in several

thematically defined panels. But the conference apparently fell short of its title’s

promise, as panelists seemed to argue on parallel, rather than intersecting, tracks.39

The same holds true for studies, where the paradigm of national cinemas continues

determine the way we think of film culture during the 1930s and 40s. One of the

principal reasons for this is linguistic: while there is no shortage of bilingual

scholars, we have difficulty generating the multi-‐lingual investigations that would

allow for a truly transnational mapping of cinema’s geographies during this

period.40

There is no easy fix for this, but it appears obvious that the standard models

for research in the humanities are ill-‐suited for making much headway, since they

would require individuals to learn multiple languages in order to undertake

research in multiple national archives and acquaint themselves with the cultural

and film historical background necessary for a sort of global fascist area studies, in

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which then to undertake transnational investigations. Instead, what we need are

collaborative models, that involve renewed efforts at subtitling and exchange to

broaden the material basis for investigations beyond national boundaries; sharing

of expertise in screenings and workshops; and new databases (“big data?”) that

allow historians and film scholars to ask questions that cut across various national

practices of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. The challenge would

be to overcome the limitations of a strictly comparative approach, which Eve

Rosenhaft identified at the Oxford conference mentioned above. I have concrete

ideas for how to foster the kind of integration that I’m happy to share, but would be

eager to hear your thoughts as well on how we might advance the agenda of

studying Nazi cinema – and other national cinemas of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s – in a

transnational frame.

1 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947), 258. 2 Note, however, that in New Earth the trip to the West, and to modernity, precedes the plot; where Trenker charts a tripartite story of home – away – return, Fanck chronicles only the third leg of this journey, and the lengthy process of adaptation that it involves. 3 George Mosse, “Toward a General Theory of Fascism,” in Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives, ed. Constantin Iordachi (London/New York: Routledge, 2009), 70. 4 In the following, I draw repeatedly on ongoing conversations with my colleagues Markus Nornes and Giorgio Bertellini, as well as with Michael Raine. In particular, I have benefited from Markus Nornes’s thoughts in an unpublished paper entitled “On the Question of Fascist Film Culture.”

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5 Janine Hansen, “The New Earth: A German/Japanese Mesalliance in Film” in In Praise of Film Studies, ed. Aaron Gerow & Abé Mark Nornes (Ann Arbor: Kinema, 2001), 184-‐98. 6 Hansen, “New Earth”, 195 7 Hansen, “Celluloid Competition: German-‐Japanese Film Relations, 1933-‐45” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel & David Welch (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 187-‐97. 8 Ben-‐Ghiat, Fascist Modernities 141; cf. also Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico Roma-‐Berlino. 9 See Markus Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 10 “Monumental style is a cultural sacrament offered to the Japanese people. A sacrament is the enacting of a covenant, or spiritual contract, that sets out the responsibilities of people toward their God. The sacrament also promises salvation in exchange for the faithful devotion of the believer. Salvation, in the monumental style, does not mean everlasting life or individual happiness but rather a sense of belonging to a living entity much larger than the lone, often alienated, self. It promises above all a new way of seeing the world and one’s place in it. It penetrates the clutter of ordinary perception to visualize the traces of antiquity and nobility in the slightest movement, in the humblest object.” Darrell Davis, Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); I owe this reference to Markus Nornes (see above). 11 Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 91. 12 Although the use of the term fascism is in dispute among scholars, Tansman persuasively takes his cue from historical actors and scholars in Japan who “have been far more at ease with the term [fascism] than those outside Japan.” As he puts it, “despite arguments to the contrary, describing Japan as culturally fascist catches more of the 1930s in its net than it misses.” Stressing the shared antiliberal and anticonservative tendencies of fascism in Japan and elsewhere, Tansman concurs with Mosse in assigning central importance to the sphere of culture. In The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, he traces some of the very themes that have been central to our understanding of Nazi Cinema, thereby allowing us to recast them as aspects of a transnational, fascist culture. Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 4 & 8. 13 Nornes points out the overvaluation of the mother-‐son dyad in Japanese film, at the expense of the fathers, who “are generally dispensed with through narrative trickery.” 14 One might compare, e.g. the prevalence of the 18th century and of Prussia in Nazi Cinema, analyzed at length by Schulte-‐Sasse, with historical productions such as

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Blasetti’s 1860, or with the Romanità of Gallone’s Scipione – and juxtapose these, in turn, with the turn to sylvan myth in a film like Ewiger Wald. 15 See Ben-‐Ghiat, Fascist Modernities; the complex relation of modernity and tradition in reactionary modernism plays out in very different ways in Japan, Italy, and Germany – New Earth provides an excellent example for the fact that, as Tansman points out, “if fascism in Japan was, as in Europe, a reactionary response to modernity, it differed from European fascisms in that it grew out of an attempt to articulate a vision of a modernity that was born in the West yet was resistant to Westernization.” Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, 13/14 16 Melodrama, in particular, seems ripe for a transnational analysis that would likely reveal shared ideological investments and political affects alongside similar but different assumptions about gender, motherhood, and sacrifice. One obvious example would involve tracing the charged representations of national / colonial othering in melodramatic films as seemingly distinct as Dawn of Freedom and La Habanera. See Laura Heins, Nazi Film Melodrama: A New Perspective on Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2013). The urban comedies of Camerini (Il Signor Max; Daró un milione), or even the comparison of comedic personae of Heinz Rühmann and de Sica, or the relation of the Strapaese and the Heimat aesthetics/discourses in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and 40s. 17 On colonial films and the myth of the Italian Impero, see Peter Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, and Ben-‐Ghiat, “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema: Kif tebbi, The Conquest of Libya, and the Assault on the Nomadic,” in Postcolonial Cinemas: History, Aesthetics, Epistemes, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp.20-‐31. 18 “Nazi Plans” in Sight and Sound 10.38 (1941), 30. 19 One might spin out their argument to suggest that the production of anti-‐Nazi films after Confessions of a Nazi Spy (and after the subsequent cessation of trade relations between the two film industries) amounts to Nazi Cinema’s dialectical counterpart; indeed, much the same can be said for the larger rubric of “exile cinema” that intersects, of course, with the anti-‐Nazi cycle. In 1996, Jan-‐Christopher Horak asked provocatively, whether it is “possible to integrate German exile film into a larger history of German cinema or any other national cinema.” In the transnational perspective I am advocating here, the answer would have to be an unequivocal “yes” – it is not just possible to integrate these cinematographies, but conceptually productive as well. Jan-‐Christopher Horak, “German Exile Cinema, 1933-‐1950” in Film History, 8 (1996), 374. 20 Chapter in Vande Winkel & Welch; chapter in Drewniak; chapter in Doherty. 21 Doherty notes that prior to 1933, as many as half of all film imports to the US were German, distributed to around 200 cinemas specializing in “German tongue talkers” (Hitler and Hollywood, 177); as late as 1932, two German productions – Der

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Raub der Mona Lisa and Mädchen in Uniform – had made the New York Times top ten list, according to Spieker, Hollywood unterm Hakenkreuz, 179. 22 Doherty, 177. His source is a report in Variety – and the argument rests almost entirely on research in contemporary trade papers. Import/Export records, meanwhile do show a substantial number of films arriving at US shores 23 The film had an international career that would be worth retracing in its own right – screening in countries as far-‐flung as Iran, Syria, Chile, and Japan – where it was interpreted as part of Hitler’s campaign to convince the Nipponese that the Germans are invinvible, that Japan must throw in her lot unreservedly with the Nazis.” See Henry Wolfe, “Tokyo, Capital of Shadows: A First-‐hand Survey of the Fanatic, Gloomy Japanese” in New York Times, Oct. 26, 1941, SM6 24 “Bei den Exportfilmen wird es nötig sein – den amerikanischen Prinzipien entsprechend – der Mentalität der Massen des Auslandes hinsichtlich der Stoffe und der Stars Zugeständnisse zu machen.” “Attachés für den Film?” in Film-‐Kurier, 3 Sep 1936, cited in Spieker, Hollywood unterm Hakenkreuz, 185. On Nazi Plans for other film exports as late as 1941, see “Nazi Plans,” in Sight and Sound 10.38 (1941), p. 30-‐32. 25 David Culbert, “German Films in America, 1933-‐45: Public Diplomacy and an Uncoordinated Information Campaign” in Vande Winkel & Welch, 316, n. 24. 26 This project was initiated by Phillip Hallman, with assistance from Ben Strassfeld. 27 Kracauer diagnosed the lingering effects of this fear in the postwar era in a searching essay on “Hollywood’s Terror Films” 28 See Benjamin Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy 1920s – 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); as well as John Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 29 Urwand, The Collaboration, 107 & 112. Urwand quotes a reviewer for the Nazi journal Der Angriff, who sees the film as “proof that the National Socialist principle had penetrated the thoughts and feelings of the citizens of all modern nations” (108); while this is highly relevant to understanding the film in a transnational framework, as I suggest above, this is different from following the arguments of a Nazi “critic” to locate the film historically and politically, as Urwand does. 30 Editors of Cahiers du cinema, “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln” in Screen 13 (Autumn 1972), 42. 31 Editors, “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln,” 24 32 Editors, “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln,” 37.

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33 Editors, “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln,” 39, emphasis in the original. The parallels extend to the use of the soundtrack “Battle Hymn of the Republic” / “Schwarzer Adler.” 34 “Sowie durch die eigene Propaganda erst einmal nur der Schimmer eines Rechtes auch auf der anderen Seite zugegeben wird, ist der Grund zum Zweifel an dem eigenen Rechte schon gelegt. Die Masse ist nicht in der Lage, nun zu unterscheiden, wo das fremde Unrecht endet und das eigene beginnt.” Mein Kampf, 201. 35 “Man legt die Wahrnehit nicht aus, verdreht sie vielmehr dadurch total, das man den Gegner genau der Handlungen udn Machinationen bezichtigt, die auf der eigenen Linie liegen.” Siegfried Kracauer, “Totalitäre Propaganda” in Werke 2.2 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2012), 70. 36 “Selbstenthüllungen in Spiegelschrift,” Kracauer, “Totalitäre Propaganda,” 71. 37 “Hitler can gesticulate like a clown, Mussolini risk false notes like a provincial tenor, Goebbels talk as glibly as the Jewish agent whose murder he is recommending,” Dialectic of Enlightenment, 152. First quote, 154. Drawing on Freudian categories, Adorno and Horkheimer reveal the logic of projection at work in the anti-‐Semitic construction of self and other. Pathic projection, they note, involves the “transference of socially tabooed impulses from the subject to the object;” anti-‐Semitic projection, which takes the Jews as its object, is “false” in the sense that subject and object crowd each other out: “The disorder lies in the subject’s faulty distinction between his own contribution to the projected material and that of others” (154). 38 Ofer Ashkenazi, “The Incredible Transformation of Dr. Bessel: Alternative Memories of the Great War in German War Films of the late 1920s” 39 As Eve Rosenhaft put it in her conference report, “generally, and inspite of the efforts of some of the principal speakers, discussion of the Italian and German cases proceeded independently of one another, with the largish group of floor participants divided among German specialists, Italian specialists, and interested non-‐specialists in roughly equal numbers. In the end, the drawing of conclusions – explicit or implicit – from the comparison between Italian and German fascism presented itself to this observer at least as problematic. The evidence of this conference is that this is because the two national historiographies have proceeded on distinct and largely separate trajectories, in terms of both the objects of study and interpretative techniques.” Eve Rosenhaft, “Fascism in Comparative Perspective: Tim Mason Memorial Conference, St Peter's College, Oxford,” in German History 12.2 (1994): 197-‐202 40 Janine Hansen, to whom we owe the insights on Japanese-‐German film relations during the Third Reich, and who unfortunately appears to have left academia, is one of the rare exceptions.

Documents

Mimicry and Mirror Reflexes: Geographies of Nazi Cinema