Hitler's Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema (Culture and the Moving Image)

Hitler's Heroines Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema

Hitler's Heroines Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema

----

ANTJE ASCHEID

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

\ Philadelphia

Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 2003 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2003 Printed in the United States of America @Thepaperused in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ascheid, Antje, 1964Hitler's heroines: stardom and womanhood in Nazi cinema / Antje Ascheid. p. em. - (Culture and the moving image) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56639-983-1 (cloth: aile paper) - ISBN 1-56639-984-X (pbk. : aile paper) 1. National socialism and motion pictures. 2. Women in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures-Germany-History. 4. SOderbaum, Kristina. 5. Harvey, Lilian, 1907-1968. 6. Leander, Zarah, 1907I. Title. II. Series. PNl995.9.N36 A83 2002 791.43'658---dc21

2002071460

Fur meine Eltern

Gisela und Eberhard Ascheid

Contents

Preface

ix

1

INTRODUCTION

1

NAZI CULTURE? NATIONAL SOCIALISM, STARDOM,

11

AND FEMALE REPRESENTATION

2

KRISTINA SODERBAUM: THE MYTH OF NATURALNESS,

42

SACRIFICE, AND THE "REICH'S WATER CORPSE"

3

LILIAN HARVEY: INTERNATIONAL STARDOM,

98

GERMAN COMEDY, AND THE "DREAM COUPLE"

4

5

DIV A, MOTHER, MARTYR: THE MANY FACES OF ZARAH LEANDER

155

CONCLUSION

213

Notes

221

Bibliography

257

Index

269

vii

Preface

THE IDEAS expressed in this work have been taking shape in one form or another throughout my life. My initial encounter with the films of the Third Reich took place during my childhood as a naive spectator watching television. Musical pictures starring Zarah Leander or Lilian Harvey intermixed with Hollywood's Busby Berkeley films or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. Given the standard German practice of voice dubbing, it was only later that I realized that there was a fundamental difference between the various movie classics I had enjoyed as a child. One group belonged to Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s; the other was part of the dark legacy of Nazi culture. And yet my initial impression that many Nazi films had much in common with Hollywood movies was confirmed when I began to study National Socialist cinema and has been noted by many scholars in the field. What particularly intrigued me about these films were their female figures; their glamour and beauty seemed to contrast starkly with the stereotypical images of wholesome Nazi women I had previously associated with the National Socialist ideal. During my years as a graduate student at New York University, I developed a particular interest in questions of gender, genre, and politics. Moreover, I frequently encountered many of the tensions explored in the book in my studies of American film. Indeed, feminist film criticism has pointed to the difficult negotiations regarding the representation of women in dominant Hollywood cinema, many of which I have subsequently applied to National Socialist productions. In fact, when I turned to the films of the Third Reich, a number of approaches to reading the image of "woman" in popular culture previously adopted in cinema studies promised productive results. In addition, ideas advanced in the field of cultural studies have contributed significantly to my study of stars in Nazi culture. I am therefore indebted to both feminist modes of inquiry and cultural studies models, which have informed this work in fundamental ways.

ix

X

PREFACE

This project initially developed as a dissertation at New York University. Many influences and experiences, obtained through formal education or in private conversations with teachers, friends, and acquaintances, have gone into making sense of some of the issues this book seeks to address. The Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, and the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt am Main have provided significant archival resources without which this book would have been impossible. All still photographs for this volume appear with the permission of the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek. My professors at New York University, in particular my adviser Robert Sklar but also Chris Straayer and Richard Allen, deserve thanks for their support and encouragement. Special thanks go to Eric Rentschler for his expertise and advice as well as his efforts to help me present my work in the field through presentations and publications. In addition, Gerd Gemiinden and Linda Schulte-Sasse have contributed significantly by reading the manuscript, offering suggestions, and pointing me toward additional resources. Two articles containing some of the ideas covered in this book were published earlier. An essay on Lilian Harvey entitled "Nazi Stardom and the 'Modern Girl': The Case of Lilian Harvey" appeared in New German Critique, Spring/Summer 1998. A short version of an early draft of Chapter 4 on Zarah Leander was published as "A Sierckian Double Image: The Narration of Zarah Leander as a National Socialist Star" in Film Criticism, vol. 23, nos. 2-3 (Winter/Spring 1999). Furthermore, my friends and colleagues must be recognized for their enduring assistance and tireless rereading of the manuscript, their confident belief in the project, and their endless efforts in keeping up my spirits, especially Jeff Miller, Christine Haase, Alexandra Keller, Lucia Bozzola, Jan Nathanson, Wendy Rowland, Paula Massood, Roy Grundmann, and Kirsten Thompson. Finally I want to thank my parents, Gisela and Eberhard Ascheid, who welcomed the many family debates regarding Germany's National Socialist history that inspired this study, and without whose intellectual encouragement and financial support neither this book nor my pursuit of an academic career would have been possible.

Hitler's Heroines Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema

Introduction

IN 1938, the Nazi women's journal NS-Frauenwarte published an editorial that severely criticized the representation of women in the popular media at the time (Fig. I.}). Illustrated with a number of images, the two-page spread provided examples of what kind of representations the authors wished to disappear and how they should be replaced. On the left, we find a collage of scantily clad women posing as chorus girls and glamorous dames, heavily made up and coiffed, drinking champagne; on the opposite side, we see young females in sports tricots and peasant costumes, with long blonde braids and no makeup, exercising and dancing folk dances in clearly separated images. In bold letters, readers are told on the first page "You think: Charming and fun? We think: dirty and convulsive!" whereas the second page reads "You think: boring? We think: healthy and beautiful!" The text in the middle reads: Whoever has recently monitored a number of periodicals might have noticed with great surprise certain tendencies that seem Jewish, all too Jewish, to us. What is presented here, in films and in variety shows, as "woman" is precisely that demi-monde-type [Halbweittypl hostile to marriage and family, who is the living embodiment of the sterility that was a marker of the previous epoch of decay. The National Socialist idea is profoundly life affirming. Nothing could be further from us than prudery. Beauty and grace are the natural purpose of woman. The enjoyment of life and the pleasures of the senses are elements of the productive tensions of life. A beautiful girl certainly wasn't made to be a nun, but, and this is the difference between yesterday and today, she also wasn't made to be a coquette. The superficial and frivolous degradation of woman into an object of entertainment, the disgusting adulteration of a healthy, natural sense of the body into undisguised sexual greed, this whole distorted, unhealthy atmosphere exclusively belongs to the chapter of subversive Jewish propaganda! We will have a watchful eye to see that such tendencies do not reemerge under some kind of pretext. A look at what we have recentlyobserved in publications, which are being presented to the German people in the millions, lets us realize unequivocally just how deeply the Jewish pollution has infiltrated this particular area.) 1

2

INTRODUCTION

Figure 1.1. Before and after? This magazine spread contrasts glamorous "Weimar" images still present in Nazi culture with depictions of "natural" femininity that conform to the National Socialist ideal.

In its extraordinary conflation of issues of gender, sexuality, and race, this passage raises a number of tensions, which are the subject of this work. The feature juxtaposes two stereotypes of female representation as antagonistic, while identifying one as essentially anti-"German." The text alludes to various Nazi discourses that permeated the debates surrounding the National Socialist ideal of womanhood and the often discordant representations of women in the popular media of the Nazi state: anti-Semitism, reactionary "feminism," gender essentialism, antireligious tendencies, and a pronatalist discourse. The writer invites the reader to compare two sets of visual images. One, a modernist collage of half-naked beauties, offers images familiar from both German and American film productions; it is intended here to invoke a sense of Weimar and contemporary foreign cultures, suggesting degeneracy in general and women's objectification in particular. The other points to the volkisch imagery of Nazi folklore best illustrated by Leni Riefenstahl's aestheticized renderings of the fascist body.

INTRODUCTION

3

The ideological gap between them is impossible to bridge. Looking at these two pages, it is difficult to favor the one on the right. In fact, the author of the text assumed an imaginary reader who would reject it and needed to readjust her preferences ("You think: boring? We think: healthy and beautiful!"). Along the same lines, the magazine also complained bitterly about the German film industry and its products, arguing that contemporary films did not pay enough attention to idealizing the family and primarily featured childless couples, which once again points to a privileging of desire over reproduction. 2 As many scholars have noted, the representation of women in the Nazi state was in fact fraught with inconsistency and dissonance. Bound up in various cultural continuities, economic dependencies, and ideological frictions, National Socialist culture frequently produced its own contradictions and thus gave voice to the very tensions that underlay the repressive axioms of Nazi ideologues. The discourses that circulated through public figures and popular texts spoke to a multiplicity of female images and desires, which in tum articulate femininity as the object of continuing antagonisms during the period. In imagining German fascism, we are instantly overwhelmed with images. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of National Socialist culture is its positive embrace of modem technology, ranging from the fully developed use of emerging media to the efficient production of means of mass destruction. The orchestration of monumental spectacles and the programmatic use of film images for propaganda-overseen by Joseph Goebbels's newly founded Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda-were integral to National Socialist politics. Political rallies, Siegfried Kracauer observed, were aestheticized into "mass ornaments." Leni Riefenstahl's notorious documentary feature on the 1934 Nuremberg party congress, Triumph of the Will (1935), illustrates impressively how, in the words of Bertolt Brecht, the Nazis presented "political discourse as theater."3 Another contemporary observer, Walter Benjamin, proposed that Nazism attempted to break down the boundaries between aesthetics and real life, and mobilized technologies, such as the mass media, for that purpose. 4 As one would expect, then, film under Nazi rule consisted of more than weekly newsreels and propaganda features. By and large, popular film culture supported a cinema intent on entertaining the public. This does not mean that it escaped the influence of National Socialist ideol-

4

INTRODUCTION

ogy. The war films, or the so-called genius pictures, typically presented story lines that glorified the "masculine" struggle toward victory and encouraged the viewer to identify with the fascist project. This use of the genre was consistent with Nazi ideology, which primarily addressed the German male and was preoccupied with fantasies of masculine strength and heroic death. In National Socialist ideology, women's roles were limited to those of "wife" and "mother." In popular cinema, however, women usually played the central role. Remarkably, Nazi cinema is the cinema of the female star actress. Whereas the "exemplary females" of National Socialist ideology were oppressed in many areas of the National Socialist everyday life, women triumphed on the silver screen. Although the representation of women in National Socialist films functioned within the ideological framework of German fascism, attempting to represent and address only those spectators who were included in their system of "desirable" subjects, it also consistently depicted women as "other."s Fascist texts, such as the one cited earlier, associate femininity, sexuality, and race, directly revealing the difficulties Nazi culture experienced with respect to its female images. The conservative model of the virtuous maiden and self-sacrificing mother that National Socialist demagogues idealized generally failed to attract and titillate contemporary audiences, who preferred the "dangerous" images of Hollywood glamour and cosmopolitan allure. Yet, the social significance of women in diverse cultural contexts has been largely neglected in studies that deal with women in the Nazi state. Historians have tended to reduce women to victims or coconspirators, contrasting "Frau Hitlers" or concentration camp guards with females who were subject to Nazi brutalities ranging from job sanctioning to forced sterilization and genocide. Further, in the past historians have explored "ordinary" women's everyday lives primarily in terms of the Nazis' prescriptive delineations. For reasons connected to dominant ideas of historical relevance, the explicitly political overshadowed the more complicated, politically ambiguous manifestations of conflicting discourses in the realm of popular culture. That said, even female images that dramatically contradicted Nazi models had no tangible subversive effect. On the contrary, they might very well have aided the fascist project by creating the illusion of "false normalcy."6 Stephen Greenblatt has argued that capitalist systems (and Nazi Germany, after all, remained one) often create "regimes in which the drive

INTRODUCTION

5

toward differentiation and the drive toward monological organization operate simultaneously."7 In the same vein, Catherine Gallagher points out that "under certain historical circumstances, the display of ideological contradictions is completely consonant with the maintenance of oppressive social relations."B Following these notions, I will argue that the National Socialist state needed to embrace its ideological "enemy" to accommodate its public's fantasies; that even a system as totalitarian as Hitler-Germany could neither dictate nor contain public discourse in an ideologically stable way. Women figure prominently in this frame. Goebbels and his acolytes allowed for diversity in cultural expression, because audiences persistently continued to express their predilection for residual cultural forms that did not correspond to Nazi doctrine. Rather than conceiving of National Socialist films and its stars as solely "mass culture," women (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, also men) must be seen as a "mass audience" whose consumer preferences shaped the very contradictions we will encounter in this work. That is, I will explore National Socialist film culture as dynamic, as a set of relations that worked in both directions, not simply from the top down. Before Patrice Petro's revisionist feminist history of Weimar culture explored how Weimar cinema addressed female spectators and represented women's concerns, women had been figured chiefly as "modernism's other," reduced to symbols of "mass culture" lacking significance in the cultural production.9 The modernist trope that posited popular media as generating a culture of "feminization" regarded the public sphere that emerged in fascist Germany as popular and populist, as including all of mass culture's negative aspects. With fascist culture thus metaphorized as feminized (through women's identification with mass culture) and masculinized (in terms of its ideological celebration of male supremacy and its fascist modernismlO), the actual position of women in the everyday world seemed a minor element in a larger framework stretching from cultural coercion to physical persecution. To locate women in the everyday, I wish to turn directly toward the relationship between women and popular culture itself, in particular the way in which female stars both represented and addressed women in popular films and the concomitant star discourse. National Socialist culture approached women in two radically separate ways: first, in an ideologically conformist manner along the lines of Kinder, Kiiche, Fiihrer; second, an ideologically'problematic one promoting consumer lifestyles,

6

INTRODUCTION

professional or social advancement, and romantic fulfillment (which is ego-centered rather than community-oriented)-all of which were most prominently articulated through the movies and their female stars. As both Petro and Miriam Hansen have shown, the cinema had much to offer female audiences from its very beginnings. 11 In fact, women's mass consumption of popular culture led cultural critics to the sexist conflation of the two. The modernist binary that frequently identified women with "low" culture consumption and men with "high" modernism ultimately suggests the problematic conceptualization of fascist mass culture as "feminizing."12 The factual basis for this argument, howeverwomen's notable involvement with popular discourses-brings female audiences themselves and their relationship with the popular in National Socialist culture to the foreground. This in tum points toward the significance of female star signs as signposts that informed women's sense of identity as much as they indicated women's fantasies and identificatory desires. In the past, the main focus of feminist film critics investigating Nazi cinema has been on the representation of women through characters in popular films. I have departed from this model of isolated textual analysis and turned toward a contextual investigation of star images circulating in various media environments. This enables me to expand the scope of reading contexts and theoretical approaches and allows for the inclusion of star theory and cultural studies approaches. As mentioned earlier, the typical Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa) hit film belonged to the female star performer, the Nazi film diva.13 And it is through her, through the paradigm of the female film star, that womanhood most clearly articulated itself as one of the central areas of contestation within German fascism. Although Nazi culture synthesized its politicians-in particular its cultic Fuhrer-figure, Adolf Hitler-into its male stars, its only publicly visible female stars (rather than unrealized generic stereotypes) were Ufa film actresses, of whom a significantly high percentage were not even German. Conceptually, Nazism embraced neither the femmes fatales nor the femmes fragiles of the fin-de-siecle, nor did it approve of the "new woman" of modernity. It foregrounded instead the absolute of the "German mother" as well as the image of the deeroticized "female fighter and comrade." Accordingly, National Socialist media sometimes closely approximated its ideal in its representations of women

INTRODUCTION

7

through stars, both in its films and in its manufacture of popular star texts. Yet more often than not Nazi films featured actresses whose star images and screen characters struggled to incorporate National Socialist doctrine. In constrast, they referred back to those discourses operative in international cinema and Weimar traditions. Although all the stars of Nazi culture, as well as their films, reveal some influence of National Socialist ideology, we must question whether their popularity depended on these influences. Not only did different filmmakers and Ufa's media machine approach various female stars in radically different ways, but whatever they did, the figure of woman invariably points to frictions inherent in the problematic position women assumed in relation to fascist patriarchy. In contrast to what the Nazis envisioned, it was impossible to streamline popular culture; instead a strange parallelism permeated the popular, allowing a number of nonsimultaneous discourses to coexist. As other scholars have noted, a closer look at Nazi cinema reveals that cultural production always exists in a certain tension with ideological prescription: even if to a somewhat lesser degree, we find the same multidiscursive tendencies that have been shown to permeate Hollywood productions also in existence here. In place of Goebbels's grandiose fantasy of a fascist Gesamtkunstwerk-conceiving of "Germany" as a total work of art-then, we are once again left with a highly contradictory system that managed to contain its ideological tensions, but not resolve them.14 Rather than explore Nazism's modes of operation and cultural production to account for how it was possible that it came to exist at allin other words, to explain German fascism through cultural analysisI want to explore the instabilities of the culture that developed under National Socialist rule. Although it is useful to examine the uniquely prograMmatic character of the regime's propaganda work, such a focus risks p ::>ducing an overly formulaic analysis that will reproduce identical re~,ults regardless of what cultural phenomenon is under investigation. My analysis of the complexities surrounding womanhood during the period relates the various intersecting discourses that emerge to their diverse, and often discrete, histories. The very push and pull that transpired in National Socialist culture-the constant clash of ideological and cultural subjects-provides a fascinating account of the struggle

8

INTRODUCTION

over systems of meaning in the Third Reich. Thus, I am interested not only in placing the representation of women into the context of Nazism, but also in looking at the cultural descriptions and inscriptions of "woman" that surfaced under National Socialist rule as related to larger cultural contexts in which these images circulated and operated. In other words, one part of my project is to elaborate on the Nazis' technologies of governing, in particular, to borrow Victoria de Grazia's phrase, on how fascism ruled women. The other is to develop the idea that women, and their relations to the social contemporary, represented a highly unstable element in National Socialist culture. By using the figure of the female star to point to a larger historical problematic and to reveal the underlying instability of National Socialism's homogeneous conception of femininity, I can offer a more complex feminist history of women in the Third Reich. Chapter 1 surveys the three most prominent discursive fields that bear on my investigation of female star images in Nazi popular culture: film politics, the woman question, and star discourse. My aim is to use the historical information and theory debates introduced here to conceptualize the production and reception of singular instances of stardom, star signs, and the films. I consider the dominant discourses structuring National Socialist culture, along with the nondominant discourses that circulated at the margins of National Socialist Germany's repressive state apparatus to illustrate the tensions that informed the daily cultural operations functional during Nazi rule. This permits cultural production under National Socialism to be read within its political context but not exclusively through it. Next I focus on three female film stars of the Third Reich-Kristina Soderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander. I chose them for their prominence and popularity as well as for their varying generic characteristics, which reach across the wide spectrum of female images circulated through stars under the National Socialist regime. My analysis juxtaposes and compares their star signs, their roles in popular narratives, and other images of women that were disseminated and propagated during the Nazi era. My approach foregrounds the intersection of various discursive elements-communicated through the different media, such as films, magazines, political writings, and fan publicationsand juxtaposes cinematic, literary, nonliterary, and social texts in synchronic and diachronic social analyses.

INTRODUCTION

9

Chapter 2 centers on Kristina SOderbaum, who is frequently identified as the National Socialist star who most closely approximated the Nazi ideal of womanhood. As the National Socialist era's most homogeneous star persona and the heroine of some of its most notorious propaganda films, Soderbaum's example serves to illustrate an ideological model that was as atypical for Nazi cinema as it was conflicted within itself. My textual analysis of three of SOderbaum's films further shows that despite National Socialist director Veit Harlan's concerted efforts to create a female image consistent with the demands of National Socialist doctrine, the melodramatic elements connected to SOderbaum's persona exceeded their ideological containment and hence simultaneously described a positive ideal and its tragic opposite. Chapter 3 investigates the crossover star Lilian Harvey, whose career in Nazi cinema was preceded by Weimar fame and Hollywood stardom. Harvey's comedies and star image in National Socialist Germany therefore departed significantly from the ideological framework suggested by a star like Soderbaum and, instead, pointed to a number of continuities that were firmly embedded in discourses of international modernity. Harvey's case-in terms of her excessive image as a glamour star as well as her comedic performances in her films-thus indicates the difficulties National Socialist cinema faced in trying to combine the enduring appeal of anachronistic popular models with a National Socialist redescription of femininity. Finally, I turn to Zarah Leander, arguably Nazism's biggest and most complicated star persona, in Chapter 4. Introduced into Nazi culture as an "instant-diva," intended to replace Marlene Dietrich, Leander's star text most clearly exemplifies the multidiscursive and oxymoronic elements contained within the figure of the National Socialist film diva by constituting a star sign that oscillated between notoriety and saintliness. Leander's films perpetually repeated this pleasurable negotiation of antagonistic formulations, thus pointing to modes of audience identification and spectators hip issues-most strikingly articulated through her immense popularity with the postwar gay community-which must be seen as in excess of National Socialist objectives. What modes of address did these female star images rely on? What models of womanhood did they promote? And what changes did they undergo throughout the period? Did these female stars remain popular despite, or because of, the 'multidiscursive elements of their star per-

10

INTRODUCTION

sonae? Or did the Nazis simply follow Hollywood's model, which allowed for the brief representation of social transgression only to harness it through measures of narrative containment? In addressing these questions, I point to various literary traditions, modernity, Weimar and Hollywood culture, and Nazism. Additionally, underlying my account of these stars are issues that point to the more general problems the Nazis encountered vis-a.-vis the limiting role prescriptions their "philosophy" reserved for women. Ultimately, we come to see a Third Reich history of female subjectivity, one that Nazi cinema articulated, just as National Socialist politics sought to eradicate it. The female stars of the Third Reich thus lead us to discover an ideologically troubled regime incapable of overcoming modernity's gender gap.

1

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation

FILM CULTURE AND THE POPULAR IN THE NAZI STATE

The creation of small amusements, the production of daily doses against boredom and melancholy, we do not wish to suppress. One mustn't deal in ideology from dawn to dusk. Joseph Goebbels in his "Kaiserhof" address to the film industry on March 28, 19331

BERTOLT BRECHT described fascist spectacle as a theatrical discourse, a never-ending series of fireworks aimed at dissolving or exchanging the public's critical perception of politics with the irrational sensations of emphatic entertainment. 2 Along the same lines, "fiat arspereat mundus," the slogan Walter Benjamin suggested to coin the fascist motif of aestheticizing political life, of displacing the reality of totalitarian oppression and military aggression into the sublime sphere of artistic expression, is often cited to point to the Nazi state's self-stylizations. 3 Leni Riefenstahl's Hitler-documentary Triumph of the Will (1935) readily comes to mind when one thinks of Nazi film culture today (Fig. 1.1). Similarly, Nazi entertainment practices that went beyond the political rally or the propaganda newsreel, such as the Ufa pictures at the local cinema, are frequently analyzed as a "bread and circus" aesthetics aimed at streamlining and pacifying the populace by means of the mass media, not least by the National Socialist ideologues themselves. The speed with which the Nazis quickly took control of virtually all public and cultural institutions (Gleichschaltung), simultaneously eliminating their political opposition through measures ranging from coercive intimidation to radical persecution, is well documented. Shortly after Hitler's Natianalsazialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; National Socialist German Workers Party) emerged victorious in January 1933, the National Socialist culture machinery sprang into action. On 11

12

CHAPTER

1

Figure 1.1. Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia premiers at a Berlin movie palace.

March 13, 1933, the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium [iir Volksaufklarung und Propaganda)-in short, Promiwas founded under the control of Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels. 4 Two weeks later Goebbels addressed the film community, liberally proclaiming that "art is free and art must remain free," an unconvincing announcement already qualified by Goebbels's earlier definition of what exactly would be considered "art": " ... art is only possible if it is rooted in National Socialist soil. ... We have no intention to tolerate, even in the slightest, that those ideas which will be eradicated in Germany from the roots up [mit Stumpf und Stiell, somehow, disguised or openly, reemerge in film."s By this Goebbels did not rule out supposedly apolitical entertainment, but he followed the maxim that the best propaganda functioned unconsciously, "works invisibly so to speak."6 The years of Nazi rule saw the continuing production of popular Spielfilme (more than 1000 feature films were made between 1933 and

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 13

1945),7 gladly executed by the Ufa studios which, as Anton Kaes points out, had become increasingly proficient in imitating Hollywood's industry of "distraction and diversion" in the early 1930s.8 The conditions of production that informed Ufa's (and other German film companies') activities after the Machtergreifung (the Nazis' seizure of power), however, changed dramatically. No longer were capitalist interests--or even aesthetic concerns-the only measure that determined whether or not a film project was realized; rather, ideological monitoring and censorship influenced the film industry's commercial activities on all levels. Various institutions under Promi' s umbrella controlled the press, theater, radio, art and film.9 "Non-Aryans" could not receive membership in mandatory professional chambers and were thus quickly driven out of their careers. 10 New legislation, such as the Lichtspielgesetz passed in February 1934,11 introduced a system of precensorship that entailed the review of manuscripts and screenplays through a state official (Reichsfilmdramaturg) to "prevent in time that subjects which go against the spirit of the time are dealt with."12 In addition, the so-called Reich's film dramatist also oversaw the actual execution of movie production and was in charge of supervising everything from casting practices to stylistic aesthetics.13 The film press functioned under similar constrictions until, in 1936, Goebbels prohibited "art criticism in its present form" altogether. 14 Film criticism was subsequently renamed "film contemplation" (Filmbetrachtung) and had to closely follow interpretive guidelines previously issued by Promi. 15 Finally even audience behaviors became subject to the Nazis' relentless discipline. In 1941, for instance, a secret report informed Promi that the public increasingly avoided watching the mandatory propaganda newsreels that preceded feature film screenings by coming late or lingering in the theater lobby. Goebbels promptly stepped in to regulate such ideologically unwelcome habits by prohibiting spectators from entering the screening room after the newsreels had started.1 6 Moreover, from 1933 onward Ufa moved progressively toward becoming a state-owned business, a process that was effectively completed in 1942, when Ufa's new state-controlled mother company Ufi finally vertically integrated the entire film industry, incorporating not only production, distribution, and exhibition enterprises but even service industries, such as developing and printing houses.17 This degree of control virtually insured that very few films made under Nazi rule would be heavily censored or banned from release after

14

CHAPTER

1

they had been completed. 18 Goebbels trusted in his ideological state apparatus, to borrow Althusser's phrase, and was confident that what the Nazi state now produced was indeed Nazi culture. But was it? Questions concerning the ideological status of Germany's cultural productions in the Nazi era remained a continual source of political debate both during the Third Reich and afterward. In fact, numerous tensions emerged between Germany's culture industries and its ideological watchdogs, tensions that had less to do with political opposition than with the incongruence between certain National Socialist ideals and the requirements of the National Socialist state's commerce-based economies. In other words, products that were easily popularized and sold more often than not promised the fulfillment of those very ego-driven desires that the Nazis' idealized conception of fascist collectivity sought to counter; aside from the obvious propaganda picture, popular cinema still dealt in a currency of fantasy fulfillment that frequently concentrated on private scenarios of romance and individualized happiness. Other industries likewise addressed consumers' "private" interest in leisure activities, beauty products, and luxury goods. 19 As many contemporary articles and reviews indicate, the frequent inconsistencies that surfaced in Nazi popular culture were in fact identified and criticized in Nazi party publications. 2o A Nazi youth journal, for instance, concluded in 1938: "Except for portions of the newsreels, cinema in a new politicized Germany amounts to an apolitical oasis. A really clever person might claim that even if there are no propaganda films, there still is propaganda tucked away beneath the film's surface details .... [But] the more we go to the movies, the more inescapable is the feeling that the world we see on the screen by and large has nothing to do with the National Socialist world we live in."21 To be sure, Goebbels and his minions at the Ministry of Propaganda intended to infuse every aspect of the cultural public sphere with National Socialist thought and were particularly interested in using the popular appeal of entertainment cinema, the public's Filmsucht (film addiction), for their purposes. Yet whether they actually achieved what they set out to do through Ufa's filmic dream machine or simply claimed unqualified success (turning their strategy of manipulation into the performance of self-deception) is subject to debate. In the postwar accounts of National Socialist film culture, this problem initially articulated itself in a dramatic split between, in Eric Rentschler's

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 15

words, "adversaries and apologists."22 Studies such as Gerd Albrecht's 1969 Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik divided National Socialist films into various categories centered on genre and political content, which were further labeled "propagandistic" and "non-political."23 This organization led him to foreground films with overt propagandistic content in his discussion of film and ideology-largely to the exclusion of the majority of films, classified as "non-political"-a practice which long dominated the study of Nazi pictures. Erwin Leiser's Nazi Cinema also investigated a number of exemplary film texts containing overt propaganda. 24 Hilmar Hoffmann's The Triumph of Propaganda and David Welch's The Third Reich proceeded in a similar manner.25 Consequently, Karsten Witte critically summarized that "for decades, both German and international research concentrated on the exception rather than the rule. Again and again, about a dozen ostensibly propagandistic pictures were singled out and studied, while the rest of the films-sometimes banal material, sometimes genre films of above average quality-were ignored. The epistemological interest was focused on the reading of manifestations of propaganda. Totalizing ideas about system immanence dominated."26 Many scholars of National Socialist entertainment thus looked at National Socialist discourse as a coherent system that managed to produce a unified, homogenous mass culture that maintained and confirmed National Socialist ideology. As Detlef Peukert points out, postwar critics concentrated on reading National Socialist entertainment as a "means of consolidating passive consensus, an affirmation of the newly achieved 'normal status quo.' "27 As a result, many theorists proceeded to look at all of Nazi cinema as somehow aiding fascism, functioning as a kind of cultural indoctrination that was achieved through an allencompassing system of escapism or propaganda. In this view, escapist fantasies containing subtle ideological content-often referred to as "fascist kitsch" -allowed the German public to use the cinema to take breaks that would prevent the overaccumulation of their frustrations, whereas overt propaganda directly participated in the ideological manipulation of the German spectator. 28 Among the apologist and redemptive voices was that of director Arthur Maria Rabenalt, whose 1957 book Film in the Twilight argued for an understanding of "film as exile."29 He suggested that the film community simply tolerated their rulers, biding time in the apolitical atmo-

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sphere of Babelsberg's art world without actively supporting the system. One example in support of this view is the frequently mentioned fact that the new "German Greeting," Heil Hitler, was abhorred on the Ufa lot, as film people still welcomed each other with the traditional Guten Tag. 3D Most postwar fan books, star biographies, and autobiographies also adopt this position. Zarah Leander's It Was So Wonderfull, Kristina SOderbaum's Nothing Remains the Same Forever, and Hans Borgelt's The Sweetest Girl in the World: Lilian Harvey all use anecdotes to suggest their stars' opposition to the Nazi regime and present their heroines as having lived and worked in the virtually isolated world of theatrical glamour. 31 Of course, German fan publications and their nostalgic readers are not motivated by the desire for lucid historical analysis. Rather, they testify to the need to confirm what is a latent knowledge in German collective memory; in other words, they indicate that not everything that is remembered of the twelve years under Nazi rule is remembered as negative: "ordinary" people-that is people who were not specifically targeted by Nazi persecution-lived lives, went on vacations, played sports, fell in love, married, had children, and went to the movies ... it couldn't have been all bad. In the postwar years until the late 1970s two oppositional approaches toward National Socialist film culture divided cultural historians and film critics: 1. One viewpoint suggested that the Nazis were successful in their dissemination of fascist ideology through countless overt or covert propaganda vehicles, and that even seemingly apolitical entertainment was in fact spreading "invisible" ideological content. Goebbels's allowance for a certain cultural illusionism, his "daily doses against boredom and melancholy" aimed at creating the continuing "false" impression of normalcy and continuity, and thus constituted a deliberate strategy that was part of the overall political system. 2. The contrary position spoke to the Nazis' inadvertent admittance that certain areas of cultural production were never entirely cleansed of non-National Socialist influences ("certain tendencies that seem Jewish, all too Jewish, to us") and thus constituted free spaces in which a subdued form of alternative culture could survive in filmic "exile." Evidence for this perception, as mentioned earlier, can indeed be found in the National Socialist press itself.

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Since the 1970s these two dominant, though contrasting, views have been incorporated into a more complicated understanding of the nature of film ideology and its contradictions. In more recent cultural studies approaches to National Socialist films, neither view predominates. Linda Schulte-Sasse argues that Nazi cinema taught its ideological lesson not through "political content but in its generation of a subject effect of wholeness and mastery dependent on 'imaginary' experience."32 Schulte-Sasse's psychoanalytic investigation of National Socialist filmsdrawing on the work of Slavoj Zizek-suggests that the Nazis tapped into the public's collective desires for closure and completion by installing a sense of wholeness as the goal of the fascist fantasy, which was in tum produced through Nazi cinema. To do so, however, films didn't rely on National Socialist messages but instead reverted to artistic ideals of the eighteenth century with "its subject position of wholeness, of fusion with a cohesive social body."33 Schulte-Sasse also points to the possibility of ineffectiveness, of the films' possible failure at being ideologically convincing: If one dispenses with preconceived ideas and looks at these films, one

finds that not only are they riddled with the same ruptures and internal subversions that beleaguer virtually all narrative texts, but that the popular success many enjoyed may be tied precisely to these ruptures, which compromise-if not necessarily contradict-the "Nazi message." The struggle to make the Jew Other ends up making him ambivalent if not appealing; films about genius/leader figures may overshoot their mark, rendering their hero so insufferably perfect as to make his adversary more sympathetic; many films thrive on a melodrama not necessarily accommodated to Nazi totalism, which ... involves an exorcism of the private sphere. 34

Schulte-Sasse is not alone in investigating the obvious discrepancies between doctrinal National Socialist ideology and cultural production. Hans Dieter Schafer argues that the German public sphere displayed signs of a "split consciousness." On the one hand it was marked by the powerful images of Nazi propaganda-triumphal daytime parades and mystical nightly spectacles performed under the omnipresent symbol of the swastika-while on the other hand there were still international magazines at big city newsstands, swing concerts, Hollywood features, Disney cartoons, and Coca Cola. 35 Klaus Kreimeier's institutional history ofUfa similarly emphasizes the complex relations influencing Nazi

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film production. Yet in contrast to the ideological move that SchulteSasse indicates through the invocation of eighteenth-century tropes-a rejection of overindulgence and excess in favor of a premodern ideal of bourgeois/communal morality-Kreimeier's account leads us to consider a move in the opposite direction. Like Schafer, he describes a cultural environment that departed from National Socialist ideology through its privileged relationship with modem consumerism: "Advertisements addressed to the' common man' -for the family home and an automobile of one's own, for the radio and the photo-camera, for modem kitchen appliances, 'chic' clothing and 'worldly' cosmeticsmoved objects, which had previously only been connoted with lifestyles seen in society pictures, within close reach."36 The very promise of the society feature, however, of the elegant dress and of the cosmopolitan refreshment ensured by a popular American soft drink, was to rise to a lifestyle of luxury and consumption previously reserved for the upper classes. KdF (Strength through Joy) cruises and affordable fashions, organized leisure time activities and subsidized theater visits-all imbricated with the signifiers and connotations of privilege-thus functioned as the inconsistent counterpoint to an ideology that denounced luxurious indulgence as decadent degeneracy, while simultaneously benefiting from the perceived upward "democratization" of social inequalities. Nazi films, likewise, displayed an array of features that were difficult, if not impossible, to contain within party parameters in the strictest sense. Consequently, Kreimeier contends that it is one of the legends of film history that the National Socialists succeeded in infecting all genres of cinematography, each film, each material and every ever-so-far removed subject with insinuations from their ideological poison lab. Even if the minister's desires and the ambitions of his helpers aimed in this direction, frequently the material that was to be politically shaped ... slipped through the apparatus in spite of its multiform control instruments .... The very nature of the filmic with its incalculable, will-o'-the-wisp qualities and its affinity with micrological structures finally refused the "macro technique" of Goebbels' control machineryF

Hence we encounter in Nazi culture a technique of doubling. There was National Socialist ideology which, according to Georg Lukacs, was in itself constructed as "an eclectic synthesis of all reactionary tend en-

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 19

cies" (racism, nationalism, communitarian populism, antimodern tendencies) already in circulation in German discourse. 38 That is to say, the Nazi "philosophy" propagated a mix of "residual ideologies,"39 as Adorno put it, compiled into an overall Ersatz-ideology posing as a totalizing exegetic model, a quasi-religion. 40 Meanwhile, popular culture presented a similar mish-mash of influences on the level of entertainment patterns and everyday cultural practices, but in its manifestations not only drew on synthesizing "reactionary" tendencies, but mobilized other popular cultural trends and traditions as well. This allowed Germans, suggests Peukert, to lead a "double life" that carefully separated the ideological imperatives that dominated the organization of work and political life in the Nazi state from a routine of leisure time activities that embraced a certain degree of cultural diverSity.41 Although the Nazis attempted to disguise these frictions to appear as a totalizing whole, the dominant reality was one of fragmentation, both ideologically and culturally. The Nazis' ideological efforts to "cleanse" the public arena of the "foreign" or the "degenerate" through their revisionist rhetoric only thinly masked the multidiscursive and often contradictory continuities that flowed into the popular. KdF cruises, which perpetuated mass tourism, were justified as giving hardworking people a deserved break and thus furthering the volkisch health; attractive ladylike attire (as opposed to dressing in the National Socialist friendly "wholesome" manner, which emphasized "peasant" or "sporty" styles) was excused as a woman's duty toward her husband whose desire would in turn lead to a growing German family (and nation); movie stardom was rearticulated as ideological labor, and so on.42 The inconsistency of National Socialist rhetoric further revealed itself through its malleability vis-a.-vis the changing demands of current political and economic situations, which were expressed in the frequent modification of previously propagated doctrines. This understanding of Nazi film culture as including a variety of discursive fields and leaving many contradictory loose ends untied 43 leads us to ask why such a wide array of cultural means had to be mobilized, why National Socialist rhetoric alone did not suffice. Put differently, Schulte-Sasse's concept of multidiscursivity as instrumental to National Socialist film texts or Kreimeier's insistence on ideological slippage prompts us to investigate more closely how much of the culture the

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Nazis enlisted to ensure public popularity, or at least contentment, genuinely belonged to Nazi discourse. In fact, it makes us wonder if any "germane" Nazi culture existed at all. On the other hand, it also doesn't make sense to distinguish numerous cultural elements as somehow separate from the ideological sphere of fascism, "in" it but not "of" it, so to speak. Critics such as Eric Rentschler caution that the purpose behind a cultural analysis of National Socialist entertainment should be driven by wanting to understand the ideological mechanics of the Third Reich and not to rescue Nazi art. To address these concerns, Karsten Witte emphasizes political contexts, shifting away from attempts at aesthetic formalism (i.e., the question: what is a fascist film?) to turn to a historicized notion of National Socialist film culture.44 Along the same lines, Rentschler acknowledges the systemic environment that enabled cultural production as vital, but not singularly determinative, for its historical assessment. I regard Rentschler's argument that seemingly apolitical films didn't exist in political isolation, that in the Nazi state "politics and entertainment were inextricably bound,"45 as too limiting. Is it not possible that the inconsistencies we encounter in National Socialist film culture only appear as productive contradictions that ensured the public's acceptance of the fascist status quo? Recent studies by Sabine Hake and Markus Spieker underline this position. Hake's study of popular cinema in the Third Reich calls for a normalization of German film history by looking at Third Reich film culture as allowing audiences to continue to "partake in the ongoing transformation of mass culture and modernity, including in an international context."46 Spieker's history of Hollywood cinema in the Third Reich further highlights the continuing presence of American film ideology within fascist everyday culture. 47 Of course, the mere maintenance and expansion of totalitarian power has never required ideological consistency; it requires hypocrisy and the will to dominate by any means necessary. No analysis of German fascism that I can imagine, cultural or otherwise, will ever find that the Nazis didn't attempt to bolster their power at all cost. Yet if all of National Socialist culture-in whatever manifestation (given that overt opposition was actively suppressed)-served as a "mass deception,"48 then any examination of single elements of the period-films, directors, press publications, stars-would ultimately have the same result: that the Nazis used these films, directors, publications and stars to distract

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 21

people from the political reality of fascist totalitarianism. And what of overtly propagandistic materials? Are their masculine heroes and narratives of sacrifice in the end no different from their counterpartssprightly comedies starring sexually ambiguous film divas-insofar as both helped to manipulate their viewers into political compliance, albeit by radically different means? Again, if one assumes that National Socialist culture in all its materializations participated in making the Nazi state a functional system (itself a questionable notion), one might convincingly argue that ultimately they are no different at all. Rather than examining the rationale behind the fascists' cultural agenda and their apparent politics of (limited) toleration then, it may be more productive to make room for readings of National Socialist culture that problematize an airtight unidirectional model. If we not only acknowledge the range of cultural materials produced under National S0cialist rule but also conceive of contemporary National Socialist spectators as a potentially diverse audience--whose contradictory preferences might speak to the continuing existence of extrafascist perspectives-we find interesting, different historical results from those produced by a tapered gaze at the period. 49 More interesting than the idea of Nazi culture including extrafascist elements as an "alternative" reality or a distraction that supported the overall functionality of the regime is the possibility that it was not ideologically consistent. Although the Nazis clearly liked the idea that their cultural tolerance of problematic discourses helped them to maintain a tight control over the public by making a the National Socialist everyday feel less oppressive, these results do not necessarily mean that National Socialist culture was part of a functional political system. In fact, National Socialist cultural phenomena might very well point to the Nazi state's ideological dysfunctionality, its uncertainty and inconsistency, made manifest in its continual need to rely on its "other." What then do we call "Nazi ideology" for the purpose of this investigation into stars: what the Nazis officially believed in, or what they did to stay in power? The differentiation of these two concepts is the key to understanding the tensions that marked National Socialist culture, its fundamental hypocrisy and ideological confusion. Approaching "Nazi cinema"-or, to employ Axel Eggebrecht's qualified term, "film in the Nazi state"50-as a totality reduces single film texts or star figures to parts of a mass cultural system of repression and exhausts our options

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for interpreting these objects. If we shift the focus toward ideological structures of dominance that included the articulation of the nondominant, we can account for why the Nazi state permitted or produced its own ideological contradictions, and we can inquire into the vehicles that carried these contradictions. If we accept the idea that German spectators harbored notions of the popular that did not correspond to those of National Socialist ideologues, we can account for much of the period's cultural phenomena, including many of its female film stars. My particular interest is not only the means by which the Nazis sought to control German film audiences through stars, but also how these stars addressed viewers in ways that departed from National Socialist ideological imperatives. As I inquire into the star discourse of female performers, I am able to trace the problematic articulation of gender issues in Nazi popular culture. WOMEN IN THE THIRD REICH

If in earlier times the liberal intellectualized women's movements contained many, many points in their programs, ... the program of our National Socialist women's movement essentially only contains one point, and that point is 'the child' ... Women's emancipation is just a word invented by Jewish intellect. Adolf Hitler, speech at the Reichsparteitag September 8, 1934

The male figure engaged in heroic struggle was one of the most frequently invoked images throughout Nazi rhetoric. Hitler regularly presented himself as Germany's self-sacrificing servant and all-powerful leader figure-as the solitary suffering idol of the Filhrerkult, who led "a Spartan personal life" and was "a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a nonsmoker, and a celibate."51 According to Klaus Theweleit, the central tenets of National Socialist masculinity included strictly maintained boundaries of self enabled through male collectivity. The idealized protofascist soldier preferred same-sex comradeship to romantic (heterosexual) eroticism and found his identity as a member of a racial/ national/ideological male group. Women, associated with fluid ego boundaries and the threatening temptation of self-dissolution by way of sexual union, were excluded from the masculine sphere of fascist selfexpression. 52 Because of its preoccupation with fantasies of military conflict and sacrificial death, Nazi propaganda thus primarily ad-

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 23

dressed male audiences. To counter the male crisis of identity of the Weimar years-linked to World War I defeat, economic crisis and the new German democracy's political chaos-Nazi rhetoric promised men a regained virility and the rebirth of national pride. 53 Along the same lines, their presumed negative experience of a fragmented, isolating modernity in the 1920s was targeted with the utopian National Socialist vision of undying camaraderie and everlasting unity. Hitler envisioned a social arrangement that ultimately reduced women's role to reproduction. While the Fuhrer hid his relationship with Eva Braun and declared instead that "Germany" was "his bride," he upheld matrimony and motherhood as the singular goal of fascist maidenhood. Although the Reich's popular culture addressed women in a variety of ways-and not all conformed to its "ideal" -Nazi "philosophy" sanctioned only a few, clearly delineated models as appropriate for female identification. The tensions between these paradigms consequently emerged in theory as well as in practice: on the one hand the state's biological essentialism oppressed women politically, while on the other it allowed "alternatives" to persist in the field of fantasy production, National Socialist entertainment. According to state "philosopher" Alfred Rosenberg-who wrote some of the period's most notoriously sexist and racist texts-in the imaginary thousandyear-long reign that was to follow the NSDAP's victory, German females would neither have the right to vote nor otherwise influence affairs of the state through political appointment ("woman is woman thanks to a certain inability"), but their particular value was to be found solely in "the maintenance of [Aryan] blood and in the proliferation of race."54 For Rosenberg and other National Socialist ideologues, racially "pure" marriage and, more important, motherhood consequently constituted the categorical imperative of a woman's life, her singular raison d'etre. 55 Nazi "philosophy" thus conceived of a radical division of gender that infringed on almost all areas of Germany's social and political sphere. 56 While men were the center of the Nazis' ideological system, women's significance was relegated to clearly demarcated fields on the margin, areas of activity "which most closely agree with her [woman's] nature."57 Beyond prohibiting women from participating in the political arena or the legal apparatus alongside men (shortly after the Nazis' successful election, women could no longer vote or be elected58), women were fur-

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ther constrained in many other avenues that promised individual liberty or enabled "alternative" forms of self-realization. The education of girls concentrated on preparing them for motherhood or work in the "caring" professions, and young women's access to universities was rigorously restricted through the introduction of a quota system (a numerus clausus that prescribed that the female student body not rise beyond a maximum of 10 percent).59 In addition, female state employees who were married, as well as married women doctors, were fired from their jobs to make room for unemployed males;60 to the same ends, the Ehestandsdarlehen (marriage loan) promised young couples state credit to enable the formation of a small household, under the condition that the bride would leave her job once married. 61 Moreover, sexually "deviant" behavior was severely punished, leading to the incarceration of prostitutes, forced sterilization, and the public persecution and humiliation of women who had interracial sex (which was defined as sex with non-Aryans, primarily Jews). Meanwhile, "non-Aryan" women or female dissidents were treated just as brutally as men (resistance fighter Sophie Scholl, to cite just one example, was executed along with her brother and, of course, the Nazis' Endlosung conceived of the merciless murder of all Jews).62 Fascist entertainment culture and beauty standards similarly adopted National Socialist specific determinations. From an early age, girls were recruited to join a series of fascist groups-such as the Jungmiidel (girls ages 10 to 15) and the Bund Deutscher Miidchen, in short BdM (girls ages 15 to 21)-that organized leisure activities and advanced National Socialist "education" above and beyond what was taught in schools. Adult women were invited to join the Deutsche Frauenwerk or the elite organization Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft. The goal of these institutions was not only to control and monitor the female population, but also to further point women in the "proper" ideological direction, which in many ways meant away from both the radical concerns of 1920s feminism and the traditional culture of bourgeois femininity. This coincided with the renunciation of women's political power, as described above, as well as with a reconceptualization of feminine aesthetics and beauty ideals. The National Socialist women's journal, NS-Frauenwarte, for instance, wrote in 1938: [After World War IJ a number of foreign "cultural goods" found their way to Germany. That's when jazz, the Negro music, came across the ocean-

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 25 and also at that time a beauty ideal came to us ... and a kind of beauty routine ... that had been alien to us before. For a thinking person at that time it was often confusing how, for example, all those young working girls found the time to take care of their hands and nails in such a refined manner, that they didn't regret spending money on powder, lipstick and make-up, that they found it beautiful to present themselves painted and made up on a work day ... In addition, there was the unconditional worship of slendemess.63

This "false" ideal, argued the author, had led women to develop a negative attitude toward pregnancy and an unhealthy body image. To remedy the "mistakes" of Weimar's role models, women were accordingly urged to turn to a new understanding of female beauty and to reject "any kind of beauty cult that may contradict the highest purpose of woman, to be mother of a horde of healthy children."64 As Liliane Crips has pointed out, fascist publications-such as the 55-journal Das Schwarze Korpswere highly suspicious of "symbols of luxury (like jewelry and fur), getup (lipstick, powder, perfume, high-heeled shoes), and male attributes (such as smoking or very short hair)," which they declared to be "indecent, or rather, degenerate."6S What propagandists like Rosenberg now passed off as the desirable standard was "the Nordic beauty of woman," the familiar Nazi archetype of blonde and blue-eyed Aryanness. 66 Yet the Nazis' invocation of Aryan motherhood as the dominant female paradigm should not be read only as the articulation of its fusion of patriarchy with fascism. The National Socialist leadership knew that women's ballots had substantially contributed to the Nazi party's victory in the 1933 election. Women had voted not only for stability for their deteriorating families, work for their men and food for their children, as Annemarie Trager suggests,67 but also for the official validation of their work as mothers-a demand that had originated much earlier in the women's movement and is not unlike that of today's feminists who call for the acknowledgment and compensation of female labor in the home. 68 Although the Nazis-including fascist women---condemned the "degenerate" images of women as sex objects (another complaint shared by contemporary feminists) as much as they departed from antinatalist feminism, the National Socialist "new woman" indeed did contribute "her share" by shining in her own, however limited, space. In fact, Hitler pronounced that her suffering in childbirth equaled that of the soldier's in battle,69 and for that she received her own holiday,

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Muttertag (Mother's Day), and her own medal of honor, the Mutterkreuz (mother's cross), received for having four children or more.7o It is important in this context not to conflate previously established models of patriarchy, which traditionally limited women's options, with the specifically modem issues that also arose here. The unique move of fascist rhetoric in terms of the "woman question" was that it stressed motherhood not as a tradition but as the ultimate goal of its "women's movement," its suggestion that National Socialist policies liberated (working-class) women from the negative constraints of modernity, namely, work, to allow them to benefit their children and themselves by staying at home. In other words, in contrast to contemporaneous social understandings of womanhood that articulated conventional patriarchal norms, particularly noticeable in the case of fascism was its combination of feminist discourses that foregrounded gender issues with a move toward a repressive antimodern gender separatism. Moreover, a number of female activists who had engaged themselves to further the National Socialist cause initially continued their work under Nazi rule; some of them did not accept that the role of women should be limited to a merely reproductive function. Although motherhood was clearly the dominant model available to women in the Third Reich, the image of the "female fighter" and "comrade" (Kiimpferin und Gefiihrtin) also circulated in National Socialist discourse, showing residual traces of the Nazis' "revolutionary" rhetoric and the concessions made to the women's movement and female voters before the National Socialist victory. Sophie Rogge-Borner-publisher of the journal Die deutsche Kiimpferin (The Female German Fighter)7L-even turned against the underlying essentialism that informed the gender theories of other contemporary female authors (such as Gertrud Baumer, Gertrud Baumgart, and Bertha Braun) and in its place suggested a nongendered elitism. She argued "that the central term for women was not 'motherliness' but 'people's community,'" which in tum would be best served if the state's most gifted men and women were both able to assume leadership over the common "masses."72 Furthermore, the 1930s effort to drive women out of the workforce to solve the unemployment crisis gave way to wartime rhetoric that quickly reactivated the concept of the "female fighter" to enlist women as the cooperative workers on the home front. Matters of concern to

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mothers-for instance, worries about single parenthood, working mothers, and home births, all of which had been declared "solved" by the state's foregrounding of marriage, homemaking, and improved public health-had to be revisited once most wives had husbands at the front (or were widowed), labored in weapons assembly, and had less access to hospital care (now primarily reserved for the wounded of the Wehrmacht).73 Many working-class women were already active in the labor force even before the advent of war, largely because the Nazis' promise to meet their families' economic needs was hardly realized in practice. The role models provided for women in the Nazi state hence emerge as transmutable, serving to manipulate women to accept whatever function the state needed them to perform at the time and thus exceeding fixed ideological inscription. In this context, even female images that exploded National Socialist ideals fit well within the Nazis' hypocritical pragmatism. Still, investigations into the role of women in the Third Reich initially concentrated primarily on Nazi ideology and the resulting National Socialist policies, ignoring the contradictions that emerged in the overall cultural sphere. Parallel to the academic treatment of National Socialist film culture discussed earlier, historians in the 1970s (when "women" started to interest scholars as a category) began their debates regarding women's victimization and/or complicity under Hitler by turning to the Nazis' "official" political and ideological positions or probed into how these discourses were realized in the everyday lives of women. Correspondingly, female representations in Nazi cinema-if they were dealt with at all-were tested only in relationship to dominant Nazi paradigms, and films that deviated from such models were largely left unexamined or became the domain of apologist fan publications.74 In fact, until the 1970s National Socialist histories by and large dismissed women as marginal because of their assumed political insignificance, while isolated cases of women who had partaken in Nazi brutalities (such as female concentration camp guards) received sensationalist attention, arguably because their "unfeminine" violence rendered them exceptionally perverse. Women did receive blame, however-by Marxist and conservative historians alike-for their supposed lack of political sophistication resulting in a profascist vote, which was attributed to women's special susceptibility to propaganda.75 Women's identifica-

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tion with mass culture in various social theories, as Andreas Huyssen suggests, thus served to reduce them to a manipulated force that overran the progressive advances of a masculine, modernist left.76 Academic studies of women in the Nazi state have largely neglected the notion that what drew women to the cinema in the first place were predominantly female images that depicted neither passive house slaves nor political acolytes. 77 What happened to the progressive energies excited by women's suffrage? And what became of earlier Weimar models, the ongoing problem of shifting gender relations, Hollywood culture and international fashion? A view toward the popular culture of women's everyday life points to a number of answers that not only allude to the Nazis' attempt to redirect or even persecute these tendencies, but also show how persistently instantiations of prefascist themes continued to resurface, necessitating repeated revisionist correction or simply opportunist tolerance. A case in point: when Goebbels ordered the closing of all beauty salons (which flourished despite the Nazis' official "beauty reform") in 1943, because they "wasted light, heat and human labor," he almost cynically reassured women, that they would "appeal to our victoriously returning soldiers even without a peace-time get-up."78 Goebbels's sexual innuendo, however, also testified to the fact that even by 1943 women had not embraced the aesthetic package advertised as the Nazi ideal. By and large, neither German men nor German women-including the Nazi leadership itself-toed the party line on women's styles. Eva Braun is reported never to have worn a dress twice and frequently appeared before the Fuhrer wearing gowns that had been copied from movie stars' outfits; Goebbels's predilection for Ufa starlets, especially the Czech actress Lida Baarova, an almond-eyed brunette (Fig. 1.2), blatantly confirms this double standard. Yet while the National Socialist elite's personal practices simply attest to the fragility of their convictions (succumbing, despite themselves, to the standards of Hollywood beauty), the observation that many women adhered to conventional, prefascist beauty ideals is of larger significance. Recall that women's questionable identification with mass culture nevertheless strongly suggests female viewers as a mass audience, an audience that expressed its consumer preferences at the box office as much as in the beauty parlor. 79 Rejecting as inaccurate and misogynist the idea of popular culture as providing "low" and "feminine" consumer goods,

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we can still ask questions about how popular culture addressed women, given that they were so very interested in it. Moreover, if the images of women that circulated in the popular culture were at times incompatible with those propagated by National Socialist organs, and existed alongside them as alternative identificatory models for women, do they not speak to the imaginary preferences of female spectators at the time? It has often been remarked that Nazi films used popular strategies to first engage their audiences and then redirect them toward a more politically

Figure 1.2. Foreign affairs: Goebbels's Czech mistress, actress Uda Baarova.

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acceptable, new status quo, but the insistent reappearance of the same old predilections in itself says a great deal about the persistence of alternative models of womanhood. It is in this context that the female star becomes vital to a larger inquiry into women's culture in the Third Reich: although the most prominent, politically elevated and privileged prototype of "woman" was the generic figure of the "mother," the most visible individual images of actual women in the National Socialist state were Ufa's film divas. Nazi wives were seldom foregrounded in the press to maintain the impression of masculine individuality for Nazi leaders; Hitler, for instance, hid Eva Braun from public view entirely and even compared himself "to a matinee idol who loses its allure once married."BO Similarly, Magda Goebbels was often excluded from her husband's public appearances and diminished in status through his well-known (yet never publicly reported) philandering. Ironically, though, politicians invited being photographed in the company of female movie stars, women who hardly fit the political ideal of self-effacing subordination and sacrificing female servitude, even if the films they starred in made narrative concessions to this paradigm. To make sense of these ideological complexities then, we need to shift from "a closed and static, singular and homogenous notion of ideology," as Louis A. Montrose once put it, to "one that is heterogeneous and unstable, permeable and processual."81 NAZI STARDOM AND FEMALE REPRESENTATION

Film, aside from causing the spectator's personal connection with the film protagonist during the filmic unfolding, also creates the desire to be like him. How he clears his throat or spits, how he is dressed, how he acts, if and how he drinks, what and how he smokes, if he is a straight arrow or a bon vivant, all that not only has an effect in the film but also in the spectator's life .... It is equally indisputable that the women represented in films influence the beauty ideal of the common masses. For this reason, the casting of film roles cannot receive enough attention. It is not only a matter of this or that woman appearing attractive in this or that movie. No, the right woman chosen according to her external appearance as well as to inner qualities and attributes may, after repeated and successful use, positively influence the general tastes and beauty ideal of a great number of men, totally unconsciously but with lasting effect. This is not only valuable from the perspective of reproductive politics, but also in the sense of raising qualitative standards. Dr. Fritz Hippler Reichsfilmdramaturg, 194282

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 31

The power behind Nazism's ideological engine, despite its many different instantiations and variations, essentially derived from its oppositional attitude toward its historical predecessor, the supposed horror of Weimar's Systemzeit and its numerous anti-volkisch (antinationalist, antiracial, anticommunal) transgressions. The idiom of National Socialist publicists frequently alluded to the concept of historical change and the notion of political and social reform. And as we have seen, this perceived need for transformation had an immediate effect on cultural production, including filmmaking, influencing both form and content. Gone were the days when, as Anita Loos observed, "any Berlin lady of the evening might turn out to be a man; [and] the prettiest girl on the street was Conrad Veidt, who later became an international film star."83 The time when the media was preoccupied with androgynous imagery now firmly belonged to the past. Female representation in the Third Reich left no room for articulations of gender that were irreconcilable with the Nazis' understanding of the essential difference between the sexes. 84 Moreover, while Oskar Kalbus's 1935 film history still ca tegorized popular female images of the silent screen into types-types that included "the woman in pants," "the man in women's clothing," "the juvenile," "the naive," "the girl," "the sweet maiden," "the womanly type," "the worldly lady," "the vamp" and only finally "mothers and grandmothers" -his description of contemporary National Socialist film culture carefully abstained from assigning female type delineations.85 This was because the Nazis were concerned that the idea of "type" might suggest an avenue of self-creation for women---or to borrow Foucault's term, a "technology of the self"-that countered the prescriptive strategies of their own concept of biologically preordained life roles, and in particular women's essential linkage with reproduction. As Karen Ellwanger and Eva-Maria Warth elaborate: Fascism attacks the concept of women as "type" ... insofar as it smacks of Weimar emancipation; yet it is taken up when female modernity stands for activity, mobility and discipline and turns against the idleness of the bourgeois women of the tum of the century. The closed type descriptions of the Weimar years are dissolved---on the one hand, in favor of propagating the idea of belonging to a larger community, thus promising a social mobility which was actualized to a certain extent ... -but on the other hand especially because the notion of "type" was connoted with women's urban professionalism. 86

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Indeed Fritz Hippler's theories about the power of stardom cited earlier indicate that Nazi demagogues felt strongly about the necessity to redefine female star images. National Socialist film publications consequently argued that the depiction of women in Nazi cinema had undergone a deep transformation. Its "new screen heroines," insisted the journal Filmwelt in 1941, showed qualities that were the opposite of those spectators had encountered in Weimar cinema: The "film heroine" of today is one of us .... The line of her body is athletic, trim, healthy and quick. Her face is natural, fresh, pleasant, relaxed and real. Her inner feelings are not repressed and speak through the glow in her eyes and the shape of her mouth. There is nothing left of the maneating villainy of the vamp, of the playful moodiness of the capricious or worldly lady.-All in all, they are of a channing versatility. They are serious and cheerful, brave and womanly, childlike and yet, when it needs to be, of surprising maturity. They are lovers and friends, they are feminine, sympathetic and motherly.87

Thus, according to National Socialist discourse, images connoted with bourgeois decadence and sexual promiscuity, rampant in Weimar cinema and Hollywood films, had supposedly disappeared. And while the media continued to perpetuate stardom as a female fantasy, it also attempted to bow to National Socialist politics in redressing what stardom was supposed to mean. The National Socialist journal Der Deutsche Film, for instance, approached the issue by insisting that the times when film stars didn't need talent were over: "More and more will be done about those stars who have no particular qualities and no special skills, at least none that are relevant to film art. Let us think kindly of them, of those charming ladies and interesting gents! But they have got to go!"88 National Socialist discourse on popular culture thus took up the contention that movie celebrity previously had been void of content, a situation to be remedied in the National Socialist state. 89 On a more radical note, some National Socialist theorists even argued that the notion of stardom as such was due a fundamental overhaul. Regardless of the fact that Nazi propagandists stylized Adolf Hitler and other leading politicians into media superheroes with quasi-religious overtones, real movie stardom was suspect to state ideologues. Certain National Socialist publications hence lobbied against the general privileging of individual star players over the collective process in film production: "Not the single person-whose egotism is elevated to the level of delu-

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 33

sional grandiosity-can, may, should and will be the hero of the future, but only the genuine and honest artist, who integrates himself into the community and becomes a useful member of the ensemble, of its collective labor. Maybe some members of the public will mourn when one of their favorites will disappear. But the majority will surely join our desire to end the star disease in film: The star must die, so that film can live!"90 Of course, Ufa's star system did anything but disappear. The typical Nazi picture was always a star vehicle. And despite the Nazis' official rejection of woman as "type," typecasting was a useful promotional strategy for Ufa products. Goebbels and his ministry did not share the concern of ideological hard-liners and instead sought to fully pursue the primary goal of their propagandistic policies: popularity. To do so, they sought to instrumentalize stardom for their purposes. However, this vision of total appropriation-which Goebbels repeatedly invoked and took credit for-was not necessarily achieved. Instead, another pattern emerges: although the National Socialist press pointed to a number of significant modifications of Ufa's star culture, a closer look reveals that these so-called changes were rarely implemented in actuality. In almost every case we encounter a kind of double articulation of the given star persona, one that upheld her glamorous star appeal and another that posited that she conformed to the new National Socialist model and thus did not belong in the outmoded category of superficial, artificially elevated star figure. In other words, the paratextual star coverage paid lip service to National Socialist doctrine, all the while doing business as usual in most cases. The problem inheres in the concept of stardom as such. No matter how hard the star discourse argues for the "normalcy" of its object, the star-by virtue of the media prominence that guarantees her the recognition she needs to function as a box office draw-is never really "ordinary." Yet, in contrast to the practices of the international film market, which at the time sold their stars primarily as exotic dream figures, it was the Nazis' decided goal to present their popular culture as one of radical equality in which actors assumed equal rank with all other German workers without the "false" illustriousness they had previously enjoyed. Grandeur and special treatment were reserved for the "true" genius figures of German culture-from Frederick the Great to Beethoven-who were in tum frequently represented in film dramas that indulged this kind of hero-worship, the so-called "genius pictures."91 At the same

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time, images of Hitler's own genial grandiosity dominated documentaries and newsreels. Hence, while this tension between the "ordinary" and "extraordinary" qualities of the star also permeated Hollywood discourse, as John Ellis has shown, the specific bias toward "ordinariness" privileged in Nazi rhetoric speaks to a specific National Socialist articulation of stardom, albeit one that was impossible to realize in practice. 92 Officially then, there were no stars, only the genius/artist (a celebrity in music, literature, theater, or even film) or the ordinary creative member of the collective ensemble. In reality, Ufa continued to promote its screen actors as glamorous icons whose lives were marked by their special talent and unusual experiences. Nazi performers thus articulated larger ideological conflicts in National Socialist popular culture and spoke to the difficulties Ufa faced in trying to moderate between official doctrine and popular preferences. In fact, it is often argued that stars as constructed popular figures generally negotiate a number of social tensions that emerge from the overall culture in which they are produced. To further explicate this concept, Richard Dyer draws on Max Weber's notion of charisma to discuss the star phenomenon. 93 Dyer takes up the idea that political leaders often rely on their "charisma" to win popular support, especially during historical moments "when the social order is uncertain, unstable and ambiguous and when the charismatic figure or group offer a value, order or stability to counterpoise this."94 He further proposes that "linking a star with the whole of a society may not get us very far in these terms, unless one takes twentieth century Western society to have been in constant instability. Rather, one needs to think in terms of the relationship ... between stars and specific instabilities, ambiguities and contradictions in the culture (which are reproduced in the actual practice of making films and film stars)."95 Vis-a.-vis Nazi star culture, Dyer's suggestions regarding the social and psychological functioning of star signs and the star-audience relationship seem particularly relevant. Not only was the charismatic personality of the starleader central to the self-understanding of fascist political culture, which evolved around the belief in the Fuhrer figure, but star images that were not directly linked to politics also served as contested figures onto whose personae larger ideological questions were mapped. Owing to the particular dichotomies surrounding National Socialist stardom, the stars of fascism must be seen as containing the cultural in-

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35

congruities of the period, or better, as the embodiments of particular societal conflicts and contradictions. Female actresses' star images incorporated particularly difficult and often contradictory social elements and discontinuities in their construction. In addition, female stars primarily addressed an audience-namely, women-whose concerns were allowed only very limited modes of selfrealization outside the realm of fantasy. As I said earlier, in contrast to what National Socialist publications repeatedly put forward, the changes implemented in German star culture after the Nazi takeover, especially with respect to female performers, were far less substantial than they were portrayed. They primarily consisted in adapting screen narratives-in particular their endings-to the changed political climate by foregrounding plots that worked to overcome gender conflicts and moral dilemmas in ways that were congruent with Nazi guidelines. In other words, Nazi cinema generally privileged plot resolutions that placed the female protagonist in an ideologically "correct" position (Le., a wife, a mother or even a self-sacrificing tragic heroine). However, these were not the only or even the most appealing gender role representations offered by the films, nor did these representations necessarily extend outside the filmic context to the actresses who performed in them in their role as stars. Moreover, conservative narrative conclusions do not necessarily guarantee a viewing experience that is pleasurable only once the spectator embraces these values. The narrative conflicts and role models expressed in earlier parts of the film, as well as the general associations triggered by its mise-en-scene, film style, and cast are equally important. In her analysis of women in Nazi cinema, Ute Bechdolf mobilizes jameson's concept of reification and utopia in mass culture to suggest that to function ideologically, Nazi films initially tapped into actual social and historical contents, thus lending their voice to established collective fantasies, before giving a film's particular problematic a uniquely National Socialist bent. 96 In its simultaneous reliance on positive narrative elements that carried what Jameson has termed "utopian or transcendental potential," she suggests that Nazi cinema presented female images that did not always correspond to the ideal type of the "German woman." Bechdolf's reading of two exemplary film texts, Die Gottliche Jette (The Divine Jette, 1937) featuring Grethe Weiser and Capriolen (Caprioles, 1937) starring Marianne Hoppe, demonstrates that the films point toward "the withdrawal and appropriation [into patriarchal

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discourse] of women's desire for autonomy, but can also ... be interpreted as (limited) manifestations of this very drive."97 Bechdolf insists that "counter-images to the National Socialist ideology of femininity exist as a potential in these films."98 It is thus questionable whether the narrative maneuvers executed in the endings automatically worked to produce a reception that affirmed the National Socialist Weltanschauung. 99 Along the same lines, stars who, as female icons, invoked fantasies of creative talent, universal desirability, financial independence, and public adulation might very well have been popular because of, rather than despite, these qualities, even if the National Socialist press officially denied such a reception. Looking at stars instead of distinct films makes it possible to move from the analysis of singular narrative instances to include the realm of popular culture at large. Jackie Stacey's work on Hollywood stars points to the possibility of similar work on National Socialist actresses. 1OO Stacey proposes an investigation of Hollywood stardom and film reception that concentrates on female spectators and their relationship to female stars on screen. The viewers whom Stacey cites often describe their identification with strong female characters and disregard the frequently regressive plot resolutions, which had led earlier critics to dismiss the films. Stacey's viewers consequently avoid the conservative and patriarchal tendencies that the film narratives may contain, while selectively reading for representations of female strength and autonomy only. In shifting emphasis from textual analysis to a spectator-based form of reception studies, Stacey shows that factors above and beyond the narrative trajectories of individual films determine why certain female stars become popular with female spectators. A wide range of elements-including a star's visual appearance, performance style, and extrafilmic associations such as the star's lifestyle and relationships-influence audience preferences. Stacey, in departing from close textual readings in favor of critically foregrounding viewing practices, thus enables a polysemic interpretation of film function. She also allows for the kind of contradiction and ambiguity that is central to my own argument. Although it is difficult to assess the responses of actual National Socialist viewers owing to the lack of historical data, it is possible to investigate the various modes of address implicit in particular star discourses which in turn may point to fan practices similar to those revealed in Stacey's findings.

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 37

Among the male stars, we do find several examples of the heroic leader figure who was glorified by Nazi ideology. The masculine hero incarnate was Hans Albers, whom Kalbus saw as the "embodiment and messenger of the German idea of man itself."lD1 Otto Gebiihr was primarily associated with the role of Prussia's Frederick the Great-a historical figure much revered by National Socialist ideologues-whom he played sixteen times over twenty years. Emil Jannings's roles in Nazi cinema also frequently foregrounded authoritative figures. Together with Heinrich George, Kreimeier suggests, he most closely approximated the National Socialist ideal of "the leader-type or the Teutonic man of steel."l02 But as stars themselves, many of these theater-trained character actors (with the exception of Albers) lacked the youth, appearance, and erotic appeal that are crucial elements for many screen idols; in addition, their narrative preoccupation with higher purposes in favor of romantic engagement largely disqualified them for sexual projection. "Rather than crafting Siegfried-like supermen," argues Rentschler, ''Nazi propagandists created the disturbed great men of the genius films and fixated On the mortal enemy of the race [the Jew]; ... their sense of being derived more strongly from a negative image than from an ideal type."103 At the same time, some male stars were not so easily enlisted as ideological models. Willy Birgel's gentlemanly attributes reminded audiences of the appeal of aristocratic personage and upper-class codes of dress, style, and behavior; Victor Staal, despite his "Aryan" good looks, usually appeared as a "feminized" romantic lead,l04 and in the comedy genre, we encounter characters like Heinz Ruhmann's cheerful everyman or Willy Fritsch's boyish flirt, whose funny escapades seemed to dissolve the humorless seriousness often encountered in representations of Nazi masculinity. "In the films of the-thirties, Ruhmann, Willy Fritsch, as well as Gustav Frohlich and Hans Brausewetter expressed the degradation and secularization of stars to people of the everyday," argues Kreimeier, "in their figures the 'man of the streets' became the hero of grotesque narrative convolutions ... -mere shadows of an already wilted culture."105 These actors' escapist qualities and their insistence on a "depoliticized" private sphere, however, were also expressive of the general social tensions between politics and culture discussed earlier. The same logic, moreover, explains why Ferdinand Marianwho frequently played villains, such as the notorious Jud SuB-found

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unexpected popularity with female audiences, who were attracted to Marian's sexy otherness.1 06 By and large, argues Friedemann Beyer, the male screen stars of the Nazi era did not seem particularly masculine:107 They were to embody virtuous values and were meant to be honest and true. But they seemed pale, obedient and of weak character. No inner conflict haunted them, and no abyss opened before them. Their appearance was without sensuality and erotics. They hardly fired up the fantasies of their female spectators. They lacked force and virility .... In the films of this epoch, women were much more important. They are strong, mysterious and intelligent. They sacrifice themselves and help their men out of a rut. Where those waver, they appear confident and make the right decision, independent of the men. And even if they have to subjugate themselves, the action seems to circle around them. Some of them lead surprisingly autonomous lives. They are the more interesting, more complex personalities next to whom the men often seem like mere shadows.1°8

In female performers, the inherent ideological complications that emerged were even more overt than in the case of their male counterparts, whose colorlessness almost seems intentional. The male leads of Nazi cinema never meant to compete with the real star of the regime, Adolf Hitler, stylized into a grandiose cult leader in almost every newsreel that inevitably preceded the feature presentations at the theater. While the newsreels celebrated Nazi politicians, the Ufa hit film of the period centered on the star actress. Given that women were encouraged to identify with motherhood as fulfilling their life's purpose, the prominence of female film idols---especially when the narrative content of their films advertised motherhood-made them into highly oxymoronic figures. Various articles in the popular press of the 1930s and early 1940s indicated that many young German women wanted to become movie stars, instead of dreaming only of motherly joys. The publications of the period eagerly fed their film-crazed readers' desire for information about the glittering world of the movies. "Could you be a star?" asked the weekly Stern in 1938, followed by a quiz that prompted female readers to check whether they "were as photogenic as Brigitte Homey" or as "charming as Lilian Harvey," as "expressive as Zarah Leander" or possessed as many "special skills" and were as "disciplined a worker as Marika Rokk."109 Promotional materials sustaining the star frenzy were circulated in abundance. Fan booklets published movie stars' anecdotal histories detailing "how we became actors";110 and while one journal informed aspiring actresses on talent requirements and casting practices,

Nazi Culture? National Socialism, Stardom, and Female Representation 39

another kept them up to date with the events going on in "Hollywood wonderland."III Female stars were very prominent examples of working women and did not conform to the physical ideal of Nazi womanhood. If fashion and makeup were considered outmoded signifiers of "empty" modernity, Ufa actresses for the most part looked just as artificial as Hollywood's divas and never outgrew the stamp of Weimar stardom. Kalbus described Lil Dagover, for instance, whose career had started in the Weimar years, as "firmly embedded in modernity: she is the mature, intelligent and worldly woman; Germany's female ideal between 1919-1929."112 Ironically, she is also known as Hitler's favorite actress. I13 Brigitte Homey and Sybille Schmitz also failed to conform to the standard. As Cinzia Romani suggests, Homey was "intense, understated and highly expressive" and Schmitz was marked by her "enigmatic, somewhat troubled appearance."114 Kreimeier concludes that " ... the typology of the female star proved itself widely immune to the National Socialist cliche of the Jungmadel, the fertile German mother and the brave life companion. ... The dreams of German men were ruled by Marlene Dietrich, Lilian Harvey and Zarah Leander: their international flair and worldly eroticism dominated the emotions and elegantly triumphed over all guidelines of the Reichsfilmkammer and Rosenberg's theory of Aryan man."115 In addition to being visibly made up, extravagantly dressed, and carefully coiffed, National Socialist actresses didn't necessarily look German. In fact, a large percentage of them were foreign imports. Kristina S6derbaum and Zarah Leander were Swedish, Lida Baarova was Czech, Marika R6kk was Hungarian, and Lilian Harvey was British. Ilse Werner and Lil Dagover had grown up overseas. II6 Jt seems that these actresses' exotic looks, charming accents, and worldly flair were precisely what distinguished them from the overdetermined imagery of the "German woman," which in tum enabled them to function as stars. Leander, moreover, had an androgynous appeal and her postwar gay following allows us to speculate about her appeal to homosexual audiences during the Nazi era. Although none of the stars I closely investigate in this study-S6derbaum, Harvey, or Leander-was German-born, their foreignness was not a criterion in choosing them for this work. Rather, I looked for actresses who seemed to best cover the wide range of performers, genres,

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and star histories of the period in order to represent the spectrum of female film idols in the Third Reich. Taking into account both the stars' overall popularity, evidenced in the number and success of the star vehicles produced, as well as the extent of the press discourse engineered by Ufa's propaganda machine to promote its performers-it would have been difficult to corne up with more authentically "German" exemplars of the typical Nazi film diva. Capitalizing on actresses' foreign allure and exotic looks simply was the rule rather than the exception. Moreover, the fact that so many of the female stars of the Third Reich were indeed foreign in a culture so obsessed with German identity and racial purity sheds an interesting light on the friction between the National Socialist ideal of womanhood and the demands of female star appeal. "It was not so much the positive points of orientation that energized Nazi films," Rentschler points out, "but rather the non-German-that is to say, alien and outlandish-attractions."117 Ironically, Nazi cinema's film heroines were also the most popular women in Third Reich history, and their looks carried into the very culture that repeatedly demanded them. Just as Charlotte Herzog and Jane Gaines have shown in respect to Hollywood culture-where "women bought star products and tested star beauty recipes, circulating ideas about star image in their own improvised 'looks'" -many German women walked the streets as movie star look-alikes, along with uniformed BdM-girls and matronly housewives. 118 Thus in maintaining cinematic attractions antithetical in nature to the project of National Socialism proper, National Socialist culture expressed its ongoing need to address female spectators in ways similar to those exercised by international cultures of modernity elsewhere, and thereby confirmed Goebbels's pragmatic decision to continue entertainment practices seemingly free of ideological streamlining. In respect to women, this meant to represent fashions and attitudes that spoke to modern gender conflicts and female fantasies of a contemporary cosmopolitan mode. That is to say, to attract female (and male) audiences to begin with, the Nazis' attempt to educate and contain women through the popular media-while simultaneously bowing to concerns regarding economic profitability-had to rely on a language that was often antagonistic to National Socialist fantasies of womanhood. Examples of this are evidenced in my investigation into Lilian Harvey's and Zarah Leander's star personae. Further films that featured stars that seemingly embraced

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National Socialist prescriptions of womanhood, such as Kristina Soderbaum, revealed the more fundamental problems contained within its repressive formulations of gender and sexuality. I suggest that a number of cultural notions introduced in Weimar's modem times, which were actively kept alive through international COnnections until at least 1939, must be seen as forming parallel social discourses that were never eradicated but existed alongside the succinctly fascist messages that marked the period. Ufa's dream factory was informed by an uneasy binarism, a doubleness, that seems emblematic for the almost characteristic inconsistencies we can find in many National Socialist cultural productions. Thus, the schizophrenic operations of the Nazi media can only be described as fraught with irreconcilable antagonisms. We find these in the oxyrnoronic figure of the "new film heroine" who was a "natural" and a "diva" alike, but they also emerge in film narratives that celebrated the romanticized freedom of gypsy life, as KerstinLuise Neumann has remarked-such as Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy King, 1935}-while the SS rounded up Europe's Sinti and Romany pe0ple for deportation to concentration camps.119 Likewise, it is through the paradigm of the female film star that womanhood most clearly articulates itself as one of the central areas of contestation in fascist Germany.

2

Kristina S6derbaum: The Myth of Naturalness, Sacrifice, and the "Reich's Water Corpse"

Kristina SOderbaum, the young Swede, who is considered the biggest natural talent in German film these days, certainly isn't educated. Her acting lessons mainly consisted of refining her German pronunciation .... [I]t is her untrained skill, her genuineness and the pure nature of her being that is the precious source of her talent ... This small, blonde creature with bright eyes and a strong, but finely formed and well-proportioned body comes from the North, where people act restrained .... Her art is simple, but not her character.... Her severe nature is the foundation for genuine tragedy. Ufa promotion, 19421

AMONG THE actresses who gained prominence in National Socialist culture, Kristina SOderbaum is frequently identified as most singularly representative of the Nazi ideal, as the quintessential Nazi star. Cinzia Romani calls her lithe embodiment of the fresh, ingenuous German Fraulein-modest and selfless-as well as the strong and healthy Aryan-the fruit of Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy). The eternal child-wife, she provided an image of the feminine ideal of the Third Reich in a series of films that carried a strong message of propaganda." 2 Richard Grunberger similarly opined that as "a snub-nosed Nordic naiad cocooned in little-girlish femininity she packed cinemas with a series of marrow-withering characterizations which mingled treacle with hymeneal blood."3 As one of National Socialism's most homogeneous star personae, Kristina Soderbaum indeed starred as the heroine in many of Nazi Germany's most notorious propaganda films (Fig. 2.1). Although other Ufa actresses' success in Nazi cinema was later often mitigated by the ambiguity of their star image, Soderbaum, whose frequent filmic drowning had earned her the nickname liThe Reich's Water Corpse" (Reichswasserleiche), was later singled out as the prime ob42

Kristina SOderbaum 43

Figure 2.1. Kristina S6derbaum in Veit Harlan's The Sacrifice.

ject of antifascist criticism and ridicule. Spectators in the immediate postwar years heckled her off the theater stage and even threw rotten vegetables at her. When she attempted to attend the 1948 film premiere of Kurt Maetzig's Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in Shadow, 1947), which dealt with the double suicide of the Ufa actor Joachim Gottschalk and his Jewish wife, S6derbaum and her husband, National Socialist director Veit Harlan, were asked to leave. 4 Many of their films were initially banned after the war; Jud Sufi (Jew Suss, 1940) is still unavailable for commercial viewing in Germany today. However, S6derbaum also remained remarkably popular with less vocal audiences, who felt a quiet or even defiant nostalgia for Ufa's golden years. In 1953, polls showed S6derbaum to be the second most popular female star with the German public, despite the commercial failure of her postwar films. The Gennan weekly Stern further concluded in 1969: "At one time, Kristina S6derbaum was the blondest of all the Swedish women Germany imported-and the most successful: She was the biggest box-office magnet of German film history. Her films

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earned more than 200 million Marks, Die goldene Stadt [The Golden City] alone made 43 million."5 This grandiose assessment of SOderbaum's marketability, however, deserves as much suspicion as does the simplistic reduction of her star persona to a Nazi prototype. 6 That anyone actress alone deserves to be considered the most successful is, of course, arguable. Zarah Leander's earnings, for instance, far exceeded SOderbaum's, and star figures whose careers had peaked a decade earlier, such as Lilian Harvey, certainly enjoyed similar success and popularity at that time? What separates Kristina Soderbaum from her National Socialist colleagues is that she uniquely condensed what was distinctive in Nazi stars; her star persona as well as many of her screen characters most directly communicated the beliefs of National Socialist ideology. The style and tone of her films, as well as her narrative characterizations and acting style, display an immediate inflection of cultural tenets of Nazi propaganda. This is no coincidence. Rather, it is the logical outcome of Soderbaum's strangely unique career history, which is entirely dependent on her discoverer, her only director and husband, Veit Harlan, whose work is marked by its privileged relationship to fascist discourses. In fact, Harlan is the only film director who was tried (and acquitted) after World War II for creating overtly propagandistic works and in particular for his direction of the anti-Semitic 1940 production Jew Suss. BAs Regine Mihal Friedman has pointed out, Harlan "launched her [Soderbaum's] career and made her not only into his star, but also his wife. For a long time she stayed with this tyrannical Pygmalion-like character, seeing herself as his oppressed and unhappy Galatea."9 In contrast to the other stars treated in this work, Soderbaum further began her career as a bona fide ingenue. Her extraordinarily fast rise to prominence was thus accompanied by the Nazi assertion that Soderbaum's was a specificaIIy National Socialist success story. One might argue that Zarah Leander was another Swedish import who arrived after 1933, but Leander was deliberately built up to resemble Marlene Dietrich, whose worldly eroticism hardly conformed to National Socialist aesthetics. Alternatively, Soderbaum's career was fuII of National Socialist resonance, and so was Harlan's. In the 1920s Harlan had worked as an actor. By 1933, he publicly declared his aIIegiance to National Socialism, and the Nazi press praised him as a National Socialist artist who had triumphed over his former cultural enemies (such as the Jew-

Kristina SOderbaum 45

ish publisher of the cultural journal Weltbuhne, Alfred Kerr).10 In 1934, he made his directorial debut in the theater. In the following years, Harlan became a film director who specialized in literary adaptation. He directed twenty pictures from 1935 until 1945, many of which were characterized by motifs sympathetic to the Nazis' idealized conception of both nature and death. His political convictions and his ability to complete film projects quickly and economically gained him additional favor with National Socialist film institutions and further brought him to Goebbels' special attention. It was because of Harlan's privileged relationship with Goebbels, who repeatedly ordered him to direct highly propagandistic films {such as Jew Suss, 1940, and Kolberg, 1945)-which Harlan subsequently claimed to have resisted-that Harlan was later accused of having been the "devil's director"l1 or even a "mass murderer."12 Soderbaum's exclusive association with Harlan, on which he jealously insisted, thus fixed the couple into a union that is hard to separate. "He made me and, in the end, he also destroyed me/' she said after his death, forever re-enacting the role Harlan had created for her, that of a tragic heroine caught up in a fate that far exceeded her powers.13 Moreover, as Harlan's "creation/' the private (postwar) Soderbaum not only mirrored her cinematic representation as the eternal victim of Harlan's National Socialist melodramas, but her micronarrative also articulated a scaled-down version of what some have argued was National Socialist women's overall position under Nazi rule, constituting a group who equally suffered under the control of a paternalistic despot. At the same time, however, Soderbaum's character remained forever mired in the controversy surrounding her husband's guilt and responsibility, which led to questions that addressed her own complicity. The debates initiated by feminist historians who argued about women's accountability and/or victimization in Nazi Germany thus also surfaced in discussions of Kristina Soderbaum.1 4 Conversely, during the Third Reich Soderbaum, the star, was perceived not as a figure of suffering but as a talented actress who happily united her career with marital and maternal duties; as a performer whose privileged involvement in the artistic family seemed to exempt her from the ideological limitations imposed on women elsewhere. Harlan first cast Soderbaum, then an unknown acting student, after noticing her in a minor role in Erich Waschneck's Onkel Brasig (Uncle Brasig, 1936). As the lead in Harlan's 1938 melodrama Jugend {Youtht

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Soderbaum, age 26, began her career as Harlan's star wife. Altogether, Harlan and Soderbaum made ten films together under Goebbels; another six followed the war. Consequently, Soderbaum's star construction cannot be attributed to studio decisions alone; rather, it was more directly influenced by both Harlan and Goebbels themselves, especially since Harlan worked with several production companies. All of Soderbaum's early pictures, for instance, were done with Tobis and Terra, whereas her major color melodramas-Die Goldene Stadt (The Golden City, 1942), Immensee (1943), Opfergang (The Sacrifice, 1944) and the propaganda epic Kolberg-were Ufa productions. By using Soderbaum as the incarnation of German womanhood, the Nazi-controlled film industry in many ways killed two birds with one stone. The tradition of importing Scandinavian actresses-which began in the early Weimar years with performers like Asta Nielsen, whose dark "Nordic-foreign beauty," as Knut Hickethier suggests, signified an exotic allure-was continued, while the particular kind of Swedishness Soderbaum embodied was congruent with the National Socialist foregrounding of wholesome earthiness. IS SOderbaum's appearance, argues Stephen Lowry, "conformed to the ideas of beauty and femininity we can also find in the fine arts, the advertising and in the official attestations of the time." She was "blond, young, strong, and more athletic than she was elegant."16 In addition, her voice and demeanor further emphasized this impression. Her naive mode of self-presentation made her appear childlike, innocent, decent and pure but also vital and spontaneous.1t was these aspects of Soderbaum's persona in particular that were favored and underlined by the publicity discourse surrounding the star. In fact, Goebbels at times protested the casting of SOderbaum in roles that seemed to undermine the positive identification of her Aryan image and insisted on plot corrections for some scripts (The Golden City, 1942; The Sacrifice, 1943) or attempted to replace Soderbaum with a more appropriately brunette actress (The Sacrifice).17 Her inscription as a nature child further linked SOderbaum to the "blood and soil" motifs that informed Harlan's screen narratives. Harlan's emphasis on landscape is often related to works by Leni Riefenstahl and has reminded critics of Luis Trenker's mountain films. "Riefenstahl," suggests Ulrich Gregor, "sharply separates a romantic, intuitive, 'naturebound existence (glorified with all possible camera lyricism) from a more urban, civilized way of life that, of itself, smacks of decadence."ls Like-

Kristina SOderbaum 47

wise, Harlan's melodramatic characters are often either extensions of the landscape surrounding them or are bound up in a "naturalist" destiny that is beyond their control. According to Herbert Marcuse, nature is an element central to the fascist concept of the Volk: "Nature is interpreted as a dimension of mythical originality (well characterized in the phrase 'blood and soil') present in all things as a prehistorical dimension .... As something justified through its mere existence, this nature stands opposed to that which requires rational justification."19 "Blood and soil" films, Julian Petley elaborates, "while not concerned with nationalist movements or the theme of the return to the fatherland, are nonetheless highly nationalistic in the particular way in which they represent the German people and the German landscape, that is to say, in their representation of the 'folkish community.' "20 Soderbaum's implication in this discourse, however, was somewhat qualified by the demands imposed on her persona as a star. Her "naturalness" alone did not satisfy the demands of contemporary film audiences in general, let alone adequately address and satisfy the desires of female viewers. In Lowry's words, "The flip side of Soderbaum's screen persona was her quality as an erotic object. ... These erotic components were passively produced through a voyeuristic camera and actively enforced in her roles via coquetry, flirting and bashful allusions to sexuality. This must have contributed to her effect as a star. A pure innocent, an 'Aryan' model female, wouldn't have the kind of attraction a star needs in the culture industry (even in National Socialism)."Yet Lowry also suggests that Soderbaum's "erotic side was rendered innocuous through her infantilism."21 In other words, although SOderbaum needed to be sexy, she managed to be so in a way that was not threatening. Along the same lines, Klaus Kreimeier argues that the de-eroticization of the body was one of the central projects of National Socialist cuIture,22 This argument is frequently repeated in studies regarding National Socialist aesthetics and finds its psychological explanation in models like those of Klaus Theweleit, who argues that one of the aspects of fascist ideology was to remove the threat female sexuality posed for the male subject.23 Still, we must also acknowledge that this evident desire to somehow "clean up" sexuality, either by avoiding it altogether or by replacing it with same-sex camaraderie for men and virtue and motherhood for women, also revealed an anxious and paranoid preoccupation with the subject of sex. Nevertheless, if we pay close attention to the

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females in Nazi cinema, the presentation of women as erotic objects cannot be overlooked. As Hans-Dietrich Schafer points out, the Nazis were not successful in ''breaking the attractive power of guileful, 'un-German' eroticism or in preventing its circulation."24It was SOderbaum's body, in tandem with its naturalist linkage to the German landscape, whose corporeality marked the visual aesthetics of her films. One of Harlan's most prominent directorial characteristics, as Erich Liith has proposed, was the director's "exploitation of his own wife's physicality."25 To complicate things further, the actress's easy identification with Aryan strength and vitality must be questioned. Ute Bechdolf has pointed out that despite the fact that the National Socialists saw women as subordinate to men politically, they were not meant to be the weaker sex in the traditional sense: While the National Socialists looked at women primarily as child-bearers, men's assistants and keepers of the German family, their female ideal was not a reconstruction of the delicate, weak creatures of the nineteenth century. The "new" woman was supposed to be healthy and robust, athletic and strong, tenacious and brave; thus in a certain sense she was asked to assimilate to what surely were "male" norms and characteristics. Since the National Socialists wanted to make the German people into the biggest and strongest in the world, they needed physically and emotionally strong women-albeit only insofar as their female strength was not directed towards independence and self-sufficiency, but was productively placed in the service of the state. 26

Discussions of Soderbaum frequently connect both her film roles and her star persona to this conceptualization of National Socialist womanhood. Although these stereotypes of Nazi rhetoric almost exclusively informed Soderbaum's official star discourse in the press, Harlan's melodramas also reveal tendencies that speak to the opposite. The central question we must ask when looking at a star like Kristina Soderbaum is whether or not her star persona and screen representations were not only capable of expressing the National Socialist ideal of womanhood, but whether they also stayed contained within it. Did the Nazis manage to encapsulate their absolute in a star image that functioned on its own within the socioeconomic context of TIUrd Reich culture, or did German audiences ask for more than could be accommodated by the framework set up by Nazi ideology, even in the case of Harlan and Soderbaum? Beyond Soderbaum's image as a National Socialist star, what appealed to German audiences were the tragic com-

Kristina SOderbaum 49

ponents that were inevitably produced through her womanhood in Harlan's films. In other words, S6derbaum showed female audiences that even for women who seemingly corresponded to the Nazi ideal of femininity, life was a melodrama. In the destructive environment of Hitler's warfare, S6derbaum thus became the wartime star who most passionately addressed the experiences of loss and deprivation that had become an everyday occurrence in ordinary women's lives-not an idealized super female, but the tragic embodiment of fascist misogyny.

THE "NATURAL" AS STAR CONSTRUCTION

Star images that suggest stability and consistency are rare. Part of what makes celebrities exciting is that they keep their audiences wondering; speculations about what really goes on within the world of fame and fortune are the fodder of the media and its gossip industries. The tension among the media presentation of star images, the filmic representation of stars within screen narratives, and the insinuations of gossip often conspire to produce a paradoxical image that promotes the public's impression of the star as star. The notion of "scandal and haute couture" as a requisite for fame, for instance, which was circulated in both Hollywood and Berlin in the 1920s,27 suggested that it was glamour and hints of dangerous sexuality that constituted the potential for stardom.2B As discussed earlier, even in Nazi Germany the majority of National Socialist film divas' star images drew on the traditions of sex and glamour to erect their status as extraordinary figures. Yet stardom's flip side, the ordinariness that is an equally important aspect to the functioning of star personae-insofar as this quality enables audiences to identify with the star on a more immediate level-was prioritized in Nazi star culture. While National Socialist actresses were presented as at once ordinary and extraordinary, just like the Hollywood actors John Ellis has described,29 their ordinariness was a key aspect of the National Socialists' attempt to integrate the problematic star images that circulated in popular culture into a fascist everyday that emphasized collective identity and "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft). What made Third Reich actors "stars" was their specialness, yet what made them "National Socialist stars" was the proposed idea that they were ordinary workers who put their "talent" at the service of the German people, just as laborers or bureaucrats contributed their special skills to a larger whole.

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It was very difficult for Ufa's publicity machine to toe the line between fabricating stars that were attractive and exciting and simultaneously describe them as the kind of ordinary folks Nazi doctrine demanded. Trying to do so resulted in tensions that rendered most popular female star images ideologically problematic in relation to National Socialist philosophy. In Kristina Si:iderbaum's star persona, however, popular cinema found an exemplar that fully adopted the "reformed" National Socialist concept of stardom. A close investigation of Si:iderbaum's construction as a Nazi icon provides a detailed case study of how female star signs, which embraced the suggestions National Socialist ideologues had made in respect to stardom, attempted to shift the imagery by which women's identificatory desires were addressed. The actress was clearly promoted as a individual star-no National Socialist star could conform to the impossible maxim that "stardom must die" and still serve the German film industry by attracting audiences-but Si:iderbaum also was promoted in a way that closely approximated Nazi ideals: (1) the ideal of female innocence, (2) the notion of the artist/worker as a natural, (3) the ideal of motherhood, (4) the ideal of marriage, (5) the physical National Socialist ideal of beauty, and (6) the ideal of the Aryan race. In 1936, Si:iderbaum emerged in the German film press-among the many film novices that entertainment journals introduced regularlywith brief mentions of her supporting role in Uncle Briisig. The success of Harlan's Youth two years later, however, catapulted the actress to the fore of the public eye. Publicity efforts were overwhelming. The National Socialist press did not fail to recognize a newcomer so suitable to its efforts to redescribe German womanhood, and Kristina Si:iderbaum reports immediately appeared in numerous film journals and her image soon graced film calendars and star postcards. Biographical accounts of Si:iderbaum's private history usually began with the depiction a bourgeois childhood (her father was president of the Swedish Academy of Science) with a strict father and an artistically inclined mother. 3D Describing her as a tomboy with a profound love for sports and nature, the Nazi film press firmly connected the actress's past with her later representation in the National Socialist media. In addition, Si:iderbaum's history lacked the complicated elements that other Nazi stars needed to address in their star images. Zarah Leander,

Kristina SOderbaum 51

for instance, had a failed marriage in her past, and Lilian Harvey, during her career as a Weimar star, not only had been previously linked to several men, but also looked back on a stint in Hollywood. By contrast, Soderbaum's introduction as the National Socialist ingenue par excellence insistently foregrounded her image as an innocent with a "strong, innate gift." Soderbaum's path to fame always read like the fantasy scenario of an adolescent female spectator: the tale of a young woman's fantastic rise to prominence, which was achieved through the magical event of being "discovered."31 To uphold this scenario, Soderbaum's supposed status as a born "natural" was tirelessly invoked: her previous acting experience was described as consisting only of child performances in the home (her acting lessons were disguised as language training), while her "courage" and "bravery" (a young orphan alone, coming to a foreign capital to follow her calling32) created an association with the notion of "inner strength" that was frequently called on in Nazi rhetoric. This promotional strategy separated the star from the anti-image of the Hollywood starlet that National Socialist ideologues found so objectionable. In 1938, an article on Soderbaum in the National Socialist journal Der Deutsche Film, written in the form of an open letter, indeed cautioned the young actress not to err in the same direction that other European stars such as Soderbaum's compatriot Ingrid Bergman had gone, namely, Hollywood: 33 It wouldn't be a miracle if your ears were singing after all that has been

written about you in the last six months. No, it wouldn't be surprising if you consequently went crazy like a little American vamp, but it would be too bad! ... Do not become too secure, Kristina, due to our epistles. Because the one who doesn't doubt herself anymore, who doesn't have any doubts to overcome, who thinks that she can walk right into the creative process with the shining assumption of her triumph, she will walk right into a hollow, inflated nothingness .... Or will you, as soon as your wings are fully spread, fly off across the ocean? You still are-which is the nature of your charm-a fundamentally natural, simple creature--or are you suddenly already the kind of star to whom nothing is enjoyable and beautiful, and for whom the ordinary as well as the special things have been degraded to what is tired and average?34

Concurrently, many of the first person accounts published to promote the star reassured spectators that she wasn't a diva and never wanted

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to become one, that even in her private life, she resembled the child-like character she had played in Youth and was not a "spoiled and conceited goddess."35 To strengthen the public perception of Soderbaum as the National Socialist ideal, the performer's Aryan appearance ("light blonde, blueeyed, fresh, a country girl") was repeatedly emphasized in almost every article written about the actress. National Socialist star reporter Edith Hamann placed Soderbaum among the "new film faces" of 1938, who supposedly distinguished themselves from other stars by showing less "emptiness covered by make up" and "more personality," supposedly indicating a shift in public taste that was in accordance with National Socialist ideas about female beauty.36 Soderbaum's visual identification with country life further reappeared in her interviews. In an article entitled "1 want to be a real farmer," for instance, she was cited: "One of these days, I want to have a farm in the country, somewhere in Germany or Sweden, and there I want to ride horses and work. I think that I know more of agriculture than I do of theater acting and film work."37 Why a young women coming from an academic family in Stockholm should have such skills seems unclear, yet a different source reported that Soderbaum "came from a long line of farmers,"3B a phrase, incidentally, that also appeared verbatim in Zarah Leander's star publicity. It seems that National Socialist publicists simply invoked peasantry as an antidote to the association provoked by the privilege of celebrity. Another area related to Soderbaum's heritage was the racial aspects connected with her Swedish background. On the one hand, we must concede, the star's Swedish nationality served to render her exotic in the traditional sense, invoking the memory of famous Scandinavian predecessors such as Asta Nielsen and Greta Garbo. Simultaneously, however, being Swedish once again integrated her into the racial framework of Aryan superiority. She "doesn't have this tired expression," wrote the journal Licht-Bild-Biihne, "that some may find so interesting in other foreigners."39 A fan booklet dedicated to Nordic Film Stars-featuring Zarah Leander, Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman and Kristina Soderbaum on the cover-further explained that the Swedish people "are closely related to us by nature, [they are] beautiful, proud and of a robust vitality! And maybe this is the reason that their Nordic film stars have always been so popular with German audiences."40 The publication

Kristina SOderbaum 53

further described Kristina SOderbaum in the usual manner, insisting that, in essence, she was the quintessential Nazi star: "She is as she acts, her whole self is passionate and full of life's joy, fresh and simple. She shows no affectations, nothing is 'pose.' Kristina Soderbaum is the prototype of the unspoiled and uncomplicated Jungmiidel41 of our time. She is fundamentally healthy."42 Aside from using Soderbaum to counter the notion of artifice that informed the public's impression of stardom, attributing unusual natural talents to the actress moreover served to justify her overnight fame, which had not been earned by the years of struggle and sacrifice that the Nazis frequently invoked to account for other actors' privileged position in Nazi culture. Harlan's own National Socialist star biography was similarly marked by the suggestion that the actor / director had to overcome countless obstacles before becoming a celebrated National Socialist artist. Nonetheless, Soderbaum's star narrative initially avoided any references to her personal link with Harlan. The fact that hers was essentially a casting couch career was carefully hidden from public view. Detailed descriptions of her early relationship with the director were avoided in discussions of Soderbaum, even after the couple's marriage. The press avoided the otherwise popular anecdotal history of how the pair "found one another."43 This was because, even though both functioned well in National Socialist contexts their union could easily have been perceived as highly scandalous in a traditional sense. Soderbaum's background was easily available to suggest virginity and innocence, but Harlan's marital history was problematic for the Nazi press. In 1933, Harlan had described his loving relationship with his second wife at length ("At the bottom of his heart, he is a husband and a father. Harlan is happily married to Hilde Korber and they have three delightful children.").44 Even worse, his first marriage was to a Jewish woman, a detail that was never mentioned in National Socialist reports on the director. When Harlan's relationship with Soderbaum began in 1937, Harlan was still married to Korber. In addition, when Harlan married Soderbaum in April 1939, she was already pregnant with their son, Kristian. Incidentally, adultery is frequently the subject of Harlan's melodramas, and Goebbels personally intervened several times to order rewrites that reestablished the existing marriage in the film. While National Socialist ideology was not traditionally conserva-

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tive, a country at war-with millions of wives home alone----could not condone an atmosphere that allowed for extra-marital activity. It follows that although both Harlan's and Soderbaum's professional lives enjoyed significant attention in the propaganda press-Harlan even received an honorary professorial title-their romantic liaison became a promotional part of their film publicity only in the 1940s and avoided all mention of the couple's beginnings. Instead, press releases and photographs concentrated on depicting the Harlans as an "artistic family" dedicated to their joint creation of "German art." Soderbaum's union with a German national additionally strengthened her ties with the country. ''Through her marriage to Veit Harlan," one publication proudly announced, "SOderbaum is now German."45 In lieu of a presentable marriage narrative, coverage of SOderbaum concentrated on her motherhood. Star postcards and photo stories in film journals repeatedly presented her as a caring mother, and featured numerous photographs of the actress with her son (Fig. 2.2).46 SOderbaum's private image now fused girlhood with motherhood; in a National Socialist writer's words, she became an "enchanting mama, slim, strikingly blond, and blue-eyed," whose appearance made it "hard to believe that this young girl is a mother already, let alone the mother of such a strapping young boy."47 In addition, the performer was often depicted in her function as a housewife. The journal Filmwelt, for instance, published an article entitled 'The Female Film Artist as a Kitchen Fairy," arguing that movie fame was perfectly reconcilable with women's more domestic duties: "When looking at our film actresses, many a smart housewife may have thought that they might be great artists but have no knowledge of housekeeping and cooking. They will sit down at a set table, this housewife may think, without knowing how to make a scrambled egg, for instance. Of course, there are some of those, but most of our female film stars have much domestic talent, yes, some are true chefs from whom many young housewives could learn a 10t."4B A picture of Soderbaum dressed in Swedish folk dress as she worked in the kitchen accompanied the above text, and below we find her special recipe for cabbage soup. In fact, the star was frequently shown in peasant costume, both in her star publicity and in Harlan's films. Soderbaum's public representation as a hostess further extended to more overtly propagandistic contexts. In 1940, the publication Erikadie frohe Zeitung fUr Front und Heimat ("Erika-The Happy Newspaper

Diva, Mother, Martyr: The Many Faces of Zarah Leander 201

Figure 4.11. Request Concert: Hanna is less of a seductress and more of a comrade in arms serving at the home front as she encourages the troops to sing that "it's not the end of the world."

join in the singing, thus creating an atmosphere of community and solidarity. Hanna's last stage appearance in Rome finally shows her in an ethereal dimension. "I Know One Day a Miracle Will Happen" is almost a fervent prayer for relief, an adjuration directed at sublime powers and intended to bring about the virtually impossible, an incantation. Hanna, dressed in white, is elevated on a stage of the same color, the image of heaven, revue theater style (Fig. 4.12). As she performs her song, she no longer makes eye contact with the audience, there is no longer a wink or an encouraging smile. Instead she gazes upward, Madonna-like, anticipating the final shot of Wendlandt and herself gazing skyward, thus putting their fate into larger hands. Eroticism has given way to transfiguration, prayer is substituted for desire.

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2

Figure 2.3. Folkloric vacation: Star postcard of SOderbaum in Swedish costume.

that ... "[w1e feel that this activity provides women with a way ... to keep up with the military exercises of men, which will, if necessary, enable them to prove their endurance and their ability to brave physical pain." so The vacation "snapshots" of Kristina Soderbaum thus went far beyond advertising fashionable lifestyles for the aspiring leisure consumer. Rather, within the context of National Socialist propagandists' wartime rhetoric, her photographs were effectively exploited to mobilize the female populace, suggesting that industriousness and physical fitness were qualities women needed to survive.

Kristina SOderbaum 57

It follows that Soderbaum's star text was "put to use," in Stephen Neale's terms, to advance the propaganda purposes of the Nazi state.51 Beyond providing diversion and entertainment, or even a space for escapist fantasy production-an accusation that must include all National Socialist stars and all forms of Third Reich entertainment to a certain degree-Harlan and Soderbaum participated in creating public images that were directly related to National Socialist contents. In this respect, Soderbaum's extrafilmic representation strongly advertised the National Socialist ideal of womanhood and addressed both female audiences who were sympathetic to the Nazi cause and those who had a continuing interest in movie stardom. In fact, Soderbaum's star persona sought to reconcile the antagonism that existed between the conflicting notions of femininity that inspired either group. Her political significance consequently reached far beyond that of female film stars whose exoticism served to create an impression of cosmopolitan internationalism, which strengthened Nazism despite its contradictory relationship with Nazi ideals. Rather, her example shows that it was possible to conflate commercial popularity with ideological substance. At the same time, even the National Socialist press wondered whether this kind of political promotion was effective with the contemporary public and cautioned that S6derbaum's representation in the media was overwrought kitsch. "Unfortunately, the plague of the schmaltzy interview has not yet been completely eradicated," complained a National Socialist film reviewer in 1938, arguing that sentences like "the blonde color of her hair shimmered in the magical twilight of midnight ... it was Christine [sic], the farmer's daughter" made him want to reach for a sledgehammer. 52 Given that film criticism was no longer permitted and that National Socialist media's output was tightly controlled, this critique seems somewhat surprising. What we encounter here is an attempt to reshape star publicity from within, to make it less transparent in respect to its sugar-coated and frequently inaccurate propaganda. It was a warning that the media's ideological proclivities were too overt. Considering that S6derbaum's unofficial nickname later became ''The Reich's Water Corpse," an ironic allusion that made fun of the actress's role in film narratives that celebrated female sacrifice, it seems that certain restrictive measures that limited the star's overdetermined association with ''blood and soil" tropes would not have been ill-advised. Nonetheless, the majority of film publications that addressed the actress's private

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life continued as they had before. In SOderbaum's case, ideological star publicity was anything but subtle. Nevertheless, certain fundamental tensions could not be neutralized this way. SOderbaum remained an exception, both among Nazi film divas and in respect to the general population. While she came across as more wholesome than other National Socialist actresses, as a film star, she did remain "special." Her function as a Nazi role model hence always remained partial. As an actress and a star she certainly was no role model; only the domestic aspects of her persona really connected with the central tenets of Alfred Rosenberg's ideal. Also, SOderbaum's film characters were hardly ever fully suited to uphold the foundation of the Nazis' essentialist gender descriptions. Rather, they frequently exposed the very tensions they contained. As a result, the para textual star discourse on the actress struggled to underline that the real SOderbaum was not as she appeared in her films. As in Hollywood culture-where, in Richard de Cordova's words, "the star becomes the subject of a narrative which is quite separate from his/her work in any particular film"Kristina Soderbaum's official star construction shared some elements of her onscreen characteristics, while neutralizing others through the counterdiscourse of her "private" star sign.53 "But she doesn't want to be dramatic," insisted a SOderbaum fan biography, "she is a cheerful, charming and well-balanced person, who doesn't remind us at all of the tragedies and suicides of her filmic existence."54 Hence, although SOderbaum's tragic heroines usually failed to achieve happiness, SOderbaum's extrafilmic star construction sought to counter this impression by creating an illusion of female fulfillment that conformed to Nazi ideals. To a certain degree then, SOderbaum's star persona, despite the concerted efforts made to control her image, was implicated in the very ruptures that are generally associated with stardom. According to Christine Gledhill, most stars produce a melodramatic identity that is build on disjuncture: ''The first promise of the star is access to the personality itself ... Second, the star in condensing select social values becomes him or herself a theatre for the enactment of conflicting forces much in the manner of the melodramatic persona ... If in melodrama the theatre is a public space, and its conflicting forces embodied in opposing personae, in the star the personality itself is theatricalised, with conflict taking place within and around the persona."55 Gledhill's conception of the star thus takes us back

Kristina S6derbaum 59

to Richard Dyer's argument, which describes the star as embodying the very tensions of the social environment that produced her. The two conceptual frameworks Gledhill builds upon, stardom and melodrama, are of great significance to National Socialist culture. In fact, two of the biggest stars of Third Reich cinema were exclusively melodramatic performers: Zarah Leander and Kristina Soderbaum. Soderbaum's generic association with melodrama, however, produced a number of additional conflicts that neither her carefully maintained star discourse nor the narratives themselves managed to repeal.

NAIVETE, CORRUPTION, AND SUICIDE: SODERBAUM AS THE HEROINE OF FASCIST VIRTUE?

"The male state, racism and masculine superiority are unbearable in the world of women. Under this trinity, weakness is as unprotected as beauty." Ernst Bloch56

According to Karsten Witte, German cinema accomplished its most remarkable achievements in its melodramas. Detlef Sierck's films with Zarah Leander, Victor Tourjanski's Verklungene Melodie (1938) and Illusion (1941), and Helmut Kautner's Romanze in Moll (1943) skillfully connected the far-reaching feelings of longing with fatalistic resignation. Here, the superficial extensiveness of Nazi aesthetics made room for intensity and differentiation and allowed for modernity and restraint to triumph over exoticism and pathos. 57 Yet emotion was not only the "star," as Witte put it, in films directed by Spielleiter, who sought to circumvent the kind of political "kitsch" foregrounded in propaganda pictures. Pathos and politics were also effectively fused in many of the more infamous Nazi melodramas. 58 "Fascist art," in Susan Sontag's words, "glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death."59 Rentschler correspondingly elaborates that "fascist artworks exercise a powerful and persuasive effect: they present seductive intimations of oblivion with visual beauty and operatic glory."60 Nowhere in film "art" were these elements more strikingly employed than in the cinematic spectacles created by Veit Harlan: his use of emotion was his stylistic trump card and constituted his unmistakable signature. The emotional energy of his narratives almost always centered on Harlan's star actress: Kristina Soderbaum.

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With the exception of one film (Pedro soli hiingen, 1940), Soderbaum appeared in all of Harlan's National Socialist productions following her initial starring role in Youth. And it was through the figure of "woman" that Harlan's films most clearly articulated their political message. How this was achieved, however, depended on the generic significance of SOderbaum's roles. It is important to note that not all of Harlan's films featured the actress in a leading role. In fact, those of his pictures that were more overtly propagandistic left no room for the elaborate figuration of female concerns, while his melodramas primarily focused on questions of sexuality and emotional fulfillment, which were in turn commonly considered "feminine" at the time. The type of politics pursued in Harlan's films therefore divides into two camps: the politics of race and war and the politics of gender. That is not to say that some elements of one could not also be found in films that centered on the other; these categorizations must remain fluid and are sometimes even interchangeable (race and gender, for instance, share certain common denominators in both Harlan's films and in National Socialist philosophy). Nevertheless, when we contrast the actress's use in both of the genres Harlan worked in-melodramatic tragedy and propagandistic drama-we see that Soderbaum's varying narrative characterizations in Third Reich cinema expose the fundamental tensions contained in the Nazis' philosophical and political conceptualization of womanhood. Harlan's propaganda epics, Jew Suss, Der grof3e Konig (The Great King, 1942) and Kolberg, belonged to the most expensive productions of the Third Reich. Goebbels had suggested all of them to Harlan personally, arguably making it impossible for him to refuse the assignment. Goebbels hoped for the creation of a new National Socialist film art, which didn't separate the personal from the political, but foregrounded nationalist goals as the private destiny of ordinary Germans. Furthermore, with the onset of the war some of the Nazis' political agendas became ever more visible, even in the entertainment cinema. The purpose of Jew Suss was to promote anti-Semitism in the public; by 1940, the dispossession and deportation of Jews could not be overlooked by even the most disinterested observer.61 The focal point of the narrative was the destructive dealings of an assimilated Jew who, by attaining financial power over the corrupt Duke of Wiirttemberg, not only gains entry for his people into the city of Stuttgart, but also ''bleeds to death" the decent burghers of the state in the process. Drawing on historical events

Kristina SOderbaum 61

that took place in the independent duchy of Wurttemberg in 1733--1737, which ended with the public execution of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer in 1738, the film coated its anti-Semitic message in the tradition of the bourgeois tragedies of Lessing and Schiller. As Linda Schulte-Sasse points out, Jew Suss thus appropriated narrative conventions that belonged to a tradition of social criticism that Germans remembered as progressive, while at the same time shifting the focus away from a corrupt aristocracy and toward the supposedly destructive influences of the Jewish race. 62 Eighteenth century plays, such as Lessing's 1772 Emilia Gaiotti, often presented their female heroine as the symbolic victim of a much larger political malaise. 63 Similarly, Dorothea Sturm's (Kristina Soderbaum) rape by Suss, and her subsequent suicidal drowning, triggers the final revolt against the duke and his Jewish courtier in Jew Suss (Figs. 2.4 and 2.5). "Dorothea Sturm's body," argues Schulte-Sasse, "is a contested territory."64 Subject to conquest and corruption, she personifies the possibility of miscegenation, making her death as necessary as the eradication of the Jew. In Mihal Friedman's terms, if Jew Suss sought to corrupt, it was women who were available for corruption. 65 The town's symbolic degradation and ideological violation thus converged in the female body. The German woman's rape by the Jew-which constituted the most monstrous metaphor of Nazi rhetoric articulating their irrational fear of racial contamination-in tum legitimized his destruction and the casting out of the Jewish people, both in the film and in National Socialist ideology. By the same token, however, women were rendered the weak link in Germany's armor, which connected them to the figure of the "other" represented by the Jew by virtue of their shared anticommunitarian desire for self-realization. 66 In this respect, it has often been mentioned that Ferdinand Marian's portrayal of Suss enticed hundreds of female spectators to write enamored fan letters to the actor, pointing to the fact that the film's erotics superseded its ideological bent for a number of viewers.67 ''What the Jew embodied in the film, and what women thought to see in him," argues Friedman, "was precisely that kind of sexualization of the body which the regime disavowed and neutralized." 68 That notwithstanding, Jew Suss's representation of Dorothea Sturm never openly suggests her possible willingness to become sexually involved with Suss. It is her naivete and innocence that expose her to his gaze, thereby attracting his desire to marry a Gentile woman. While SOderbaum's sexuality is clearly

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2

Figure 2.4. Race relations: Suss Oppenheimer's desire for a gentile German woman ends in Dorothea's rape.

displayed visually-her dress reveals much of her heaving breasts-the female stereotypes of fascist maidenhood are maintained throughout the narrative. Because the film spends less time on Dorothea's character than it does on drawing a negative image of Suss, the narrative limited the complications of womanhood the film broaches. In The Great King, Soderbaum's role similarly challenged Nazi role prescriptions, while simultaneously functioning in a larger propaganda framework. 69 Also commissioned by the state, The Great King is a war drama that, in Goebbels's words, was to serve "as an excellent expedient in the struggle for the soul of our people and in the process of cre-

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Figure 2.5. Reichswasserleiche: Dorothea's body is found after her suicide in the river.

ating the necessary German resistance needed to see us successfully through the war."70 If Jew Suss had demonized the Jewish people, The Great King glorified authoritarian leadership, patriotic sacrifice, and martial glory. "In both films," argues Schulte-Sasse, "Soderbaum's character is a metaphor for the social body, for Volk ... ; in both her character is sadistically tortured." While in Jew Suss she loses her life, in The Great King she loses "the private sphere that is the only sphere of women, leaving her symbolically transformed into a man."71 As the miller's daughter, Louise, Soderbaum encourages her lover to embrace his soldierly duties in Prussia's seven-year war against Austria by following his army as a soldier-wife. When he falls in battle, she keeps up her strength and, heartened by a caring Frederick the Great, returns home to run her mill as a single, widowed mother. The narrative is dominated by male characters and concentrates on the achievements of its royal leader, but the film script's inclusion of Soderbaum's part, which Har-

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Ian added on at a later stage, points to a specific address directed at female spectators at the home front. As traditional patriarchal values of womanhood were expressed through SOderbaum's motherhood and her admiring deference toward a paternalistic father figure, her independent resourcefulness also pointed to tropes associated with the early National Socialist image of the "female fighter," which Nazi propaganda reactivated during the war. But again, the film contained the independent energies of its heroine through its narrative context; if Dorothea Sturm's sexual vulnerability was atoned for through her suicide, Louise's "masculinity" was justified by circumstance and counteracted by her maternity. In Kolberg, SOderbaum's character Maria finally willingly surrenders all she has to aid the war effort, and she is without a home, family, or lover at the end, leaving her only the knowledge that her total sacrifice was part of her town's victory. "1 hereby order you," Goebbels had written to Harlan, "to produce a monumental picture named Kolberg. The purpose of this film shall be to show, by example of this town which gives the film its title, that the joint politics of home and front will overcome any opponent."72 Kolberg's narrative was based on a historical scenario, but key historical facts were falsified in the film to produce an ending that culminated in a German victory. Set during the Franco-Prussian war (1806-1807), the film combines numerous historical events to produce its own fictional dream war. Goebbels's tum to this "spiritual war-the war in one's head, war as a scenario of an unlimited delirious phantasm," as Kreimeier calls it-marks the final decline of the Nazi leadership into a psychic realm devoid of any reality.73 To personify the tragic sacrifice and immeasurable pain that this political stanc~oebbels's "total war"would necessitate, Harlan again turned to his wife. ''You have given all you had. But it wasn't in vain," the town's mayor reassures Maria in the film's final minutes, "the greatest things are always born in pain. And if someone has taken on all our pain onto herself, then she is great. You are great, Maria, you have done your duty and weren't afraid to die. You have participated in our victory. You too!" What Maria actually contributes to this success, however, is firmly linked to her feminine attributes. When she volunteers to act as a secret messenger, she uses her girlish charms to break through Napoleon's blockade isolating Kolberg and bring a message to the Prussian queen.

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"I know how to do things like that," she explains to a curious court official. When she smiles and bats her eyelids, he is convinced. Maria's subsequent appeal to the queen (the king is too busy with strategy planning to see her) and the queen's interest in the plight of her common subjects further underlines the importance of women's humanizing support in the war effort. In the end, it is the men who have to be willing to lose their lives (all four men in Maria's life die; even her pacifist, French-loving brother is accidentally killed when trying to rescue his violin), while the women must provide emotional fortification and be ready to give up everything else. By the time the film was finished, many German women had little choice but to do just that. Marching west in endless refugee treks with their families, owning only the clothes on their backs, they hardly needed the cinema to remind them of the cost of war. Needless to say, Kolberg was Goebbels's last propaganda spectacle; produced for close to nine million Reichsmark, the film used 185,000 extras, 10,000 historical uniforms and 6000 horses; several Wehrmacht divisions were withdrawn from the besieged front to act in battle scenes.74 Goebbels's absurd belief in the power of his media machine thus culminated in an epic monstrosity most Germans never saw. When the film was released in January 1945, Germany's infrastructure had largely broken down, and where there once had been cinemas there now was rubble. It is obvious that Kristina Soderbaum's representation in Harlan's state-ordered propaganda pictures spoke directly to the mobilization of womanhood for distinctly fascist purposes. In all the films discussed thus far, "woman" was the heart and soul behind all the male action, its supporter and its inspiration. Ultimately, audiences were led to believe, it was in the interest of the German family, and by extension the German Volk, to strike out against the enemy-whether an exterior foe or the internal threat of Jewish degeneracy-and in Harlan's films, this family was embodied by Soderbaum, who was placed at the center of the community as its motivating force. Despite SOderbaum's heroines seeming either overly vulnerable or excessively resourceful in the films, the limited expression of these attributes within the narratives (in each film, Soderbaum only has a supporting role) allowed them to function within the political framework of the filmic content. Although Soderbaum's characters were always tortured rather than rewarded, their suffering

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was linked to a larger social problem by which it was relativized. In addition, the films' political finales avenged her individual torments (i.e., the Jew is hanged or the battles are won). Once Soderbaum played the lead of a Harlan film, however, this balance shifted dramatically. The actress's status as a first-rate film celebrity first and foremost derived from her success as the star of Harlan's melodramas. In contrast to the propaganda films, in the melodramas, SOderbaum's most genuine star vehicles, elements that only momentarily rendered her screen representations problematic in the propaganda pictures emerged as the full-fledged melodramatic content of the narratives to complicate the films' ideological tendencies. The cause for this tension might very well be contained within the nature of melodrama itself. Melodramatic forms have often been described as a generic framework that promotes the articulation of tensions between the individual and the social as the source of insoluble tragedy. In Peter Brooks's words, "Man [sic] is seen to be, and must recognize himself to be, playing on the theatre that is the point of juncture, and of clash, of imperatives beyond himself that are non-mediated and irreducible."75 Thomas Elsaesser further sees melodrama as containing "elements of interiorization and personalization of what are primarily ideological conflicts," conflicts that consequently reach far and above the capacities of the individual to understand, let alone solve them. 76 In other words, as a generic tradition melodrama plays out unresolved social tensions in personifying larger social conflict in its characters, who in turn cannot solve the problems they encounter because they are unable to see their personal tragedy as a result of social construction and restrictive morality, and even if they could, they would be unable to change it. The family melodrama thus "more often records the failure of the protagonist to act in way that could shape the events and influence the emotional environment, let alone the stifling social milieu. The world is closed and the characters are acted upon. Melodrama confers on them a negative identity through suffering, and the progressive selfimmolation and disillusionment generally ends in resignation."77 Following Jean Mitry, the causes of the melodramatic situation are accepted rather than analyzed: "The pathos of their situation derives from this, and the consequences are: impossibility of forbidden love, or wrongs committed against morality, custom or social institutions."78 As a result, Christine Gledhill suggests, "the production of melodramatic

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identities involves excess of expression: hyperbolic emotions, extravagant gestures, declamatory speech, spectacular settings and so on."79 In addition, argues Robert Lang, "[a] woman (or a woman's point of view) often dominates the narrative of the family melodrama because individual identity within patriarchal context-always defined by a masculine standard-is problematically for women." 80 Harlan's melodramas, very much in keeping with the formal strategies of melodrama that surfaced in the bourgeois play of the nineteenth century and continued in Hollywood narrative, followed the pattern of heightened emotion, hysteria, and excess. In these films, women's internal conflicts were foregrounded and had a distinctly private dimension. Moreover, film narratives that featured SOderbaum as the central protagonist were driven primarily by conflicts that were produced through their heroine's sexual desires. Confusion and despair about romance and sexuality were privileged within the drama rendering the narrative a personal and individual tragedy and therefore separate from the concern of the larger Volk. Kristina SOderbaum's sexual body frequently was the cause for conflict. In Youth, for instance, SOderbaum played an innocent teenager named Annchen, whose sexual ignorance and naivete leads to her seduction and suicide. Worried about her illegitimate birth and influenced by a bigoted priest, Annchen cannot come to terms with what she fears is her heritage of sin. 81 When she falls in love with a young student and spends the night with him, his subsequent departure and her fear of pregnancy motivate her to drown herself, a first instance of SOderbaum's frequent linkage with water and death. The film, however, blamed the men (the dogmatic priest, the careless uncle, and the irresponsible student) for Annchen's demise and foregrounded her suicide as tragically unnecessary; its moral message remained ambiguous. While SOderbaum's purity and virginity were underlined, her sexual body was strongly foregrounded (Fig. 2.6). The poster campaign for the film, for instance, depicted the new star with her mouth seductively opened and revealed cleavage and a big cross dangling around her neck. Even though one might argue that the film conformed to the Nazis' antireligious leanings to foreground women's reproductive role, it cannot be said that the text created a blueprint of ideal fascist femininity. What came to the surface, rather, were the various contrary discourses pulling at this model. Correspondingly, Harlan's subsequent films, Verwehte Spuren (Lost Traces, 1938)82 and Das unsterbliche Herz (The Heart that Never Dies,

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Figure 2.6. Sexy virgin: Annchen's naive sexuality brings about her suicide in Youth.

1939),83 also show the actress in various states of confusion over where or to whom she belongs. Harlan's adaptation of Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Journey to Tilsit, 1939)-previously adapted by F. W. Mumau as Sunrise (Fox, 1927)-also depicted S6derbaum (named Elske in the film) as a seemingly wholesome wife and mother caught up in a love triangle. Her psychological response to her husband's adultery, however, results in her psychotic willingness to let him kill her. "00 you want to die?" he asks. "If you want me to. Yes," is her masochistic reply. Medea-like, she also threatens to take along their child. Although the married couple are reconciled in the end-Elske's dark-haired Polish competitor retreats-the film's narrative problematic as well as Elske's perverse longing for death and oblivion once again point to the tragic components that were transported through S6derbaum's image. The ethnic difference of Elske's rival, the operatic natural scenarios of Harlan's photography, and the close connection of the film's protagonists with the East

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Prussian landscape display a striking example of Harlan's naturalist embrace of "blood and soil" motifs, thereby linking nature and race with human destiny, but the private drama played out here hardly advertised marriage and reproductive bliss. 84 In fact, SOderbaum's performances in her melodramas have led redemptive critics, such as Frank Noack, to argue that Soderbaum's characters must be seen as contradicting the official image of woman in the Nazi state: "[Soderbaum] was the opposite of the obedient, submissive girl. ... In almost all her roles she is hungry for life, reckless and disobedient, hardly fulfilling a model function. She doesn't play by the rules and that's why she gets into trouble .... Security is never her COncern in her films ... She is the little rebel, too weak to win, but she stays tenacious until the end and would rather risk death than give in."85 In this respect Kristina Soderbaum's melodramatic roles may be read as symptomatic, insofar as they expressed the very conflicts that were also problematic in the Nazis' stance vis-a.-vis women in general. In fact, Soderbaum got much closer to the core of these tensions than any other star of the period. In the ideological framework of Nazi culture, the positive description of women as individual figures or characters was extremely difficult because they could be directed only toward the personal (romance, family) and were therefore only indirectly linked to the concerns of the nation or the political. That is to say, in the figure of "woman" there always resided a political tension, albeit not one between the Nazi ideal of womanhood and its alternatives, but one that inevitably arose once the focus turned away from the male and towards the psychologized figure of the female. Although the Nazis advocated a somewhat masochistic stoicism, in terms of their expectation that women bravely endure extraordinary hardship, the excessive suffering of melodrama exceeded this framework.

Die Goldene Stadt (The Golden City, Ufa, 1942) The Golden City was one of the most celebrated successes of Nazi cinema. Playing in theaters in Germany as well as abroad (the film was shown successfully in France, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and Finland and in many occupied regions in eastern Europe86), the picture served as the showpiece of German cinema used by Ufa to promote the German film industry internationally, while simultaneously assuring German audiences that Nazi art had a universal dimension. At its premiere

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at the tenth Biennale in Venice in September 1942, where Harlan and Soderbaum attended in Goebbels's company, the film received various awards, including prizes for its color cinematography and for Soderbaum's performance. Its enduring popularity lasted throughout and beyond the Third Reich. In 1944, The Golden City was listed as the leading moneymaker in the pantheon of films made in the so-called "Greater German Empire" (Grossdeutsche Reich),87 and even postwar polls showed that The Golden City was the number one film Germans wanted to revisit (all Harlan pictures were banned until 1954).88 With an audience of more than 42 million, it may very well have been the most profitable picture in Third Reich film history.89 With Harlan's move to ever-larger melodramatic productions, The Golden City was also his first film with Ufa. In addition, it was the company's first successful venture into color cinematography. Ufa's first color film, Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten (Women Are Better Diplomats, 1941) with Marika Rokk, still lacked a skillful dramatic employment of the medium and was an altogether unremarkable movie. Harlan's subsequent color films, in contrast, effectively used new Agfacolor technology to underline the narrative conflicts of his pictures by integrating color effects into his characteristically overwrought and excessive mise-en-scenes. Witte, who calls the director "the baroque fascist," attests that Harlan's central contribution to the Third Reich was his "heavy melodramas, which he staged with bombastic effects, symphonic music, and mass spectacles. His artistic ideal was gigantism .... "90 Indeed, in consonance with the general tendencies in National Socialist culture, Harlan's films were anything but subtle. Replacing Hollywood's rule of thumb of "show-don't tell" with "show and tell," the director counted on, in Lowry's words, "plump pathos" to "stage films full of ideologically effective stereotypes."91 The Golden City is set in the Bohemian countryside, where German farmer Jobst owns a large estate. He is a prominent and respectable personage in his region: his estate is worth a small fortune. His daughter Anna, played by Kristina Soderbaum, is his pride and joy. She is a lively, enthusiastic girl full of lust for life and brimming with an enterprising spirit. An only child, she will inherit the family wealth, and Jobst is eager to see her married to his trusted young farm hand, Thomas. In her father's opinion, Anna desperately needs to be settled, and thus bound to his estate without entering any romantic involvement that would

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take her away. According to Jobst, Thomas is a "weakling" (literally, limp dick [Schlappschwanz]), scarcely in danger of corning between the oedipally determined bond between father and daughter, and thus the ideal son-in-law (an early scene ends a confrontation between father and daughter with a close-up that shows them sharing a big kiss on the mouth to settle their quarrel).92 Because Anna's "wildness" alarms her father, he is strict and intolerant, suspicious of anything or anyone who might interfere with how things are done (and always have been) in his world. The reason behind this, we learn, is a repressed tragedy in the family's past. His actions are bound up with the memories of his late wife, a city woman from Prague who found the confining circumstances of country life (and implicitly her marriage to the patriarchal Jobst) so depressing that she killed herself in the nearby moor when Anna was a small child. In forbidding in his daughter any memory of her mother, he seeks to eradicate the heritage of difference that threatens his status quo. Anna in turn loves her father, but she also feels suffocated by his eversuspicious governance. We are introduced to her as she gazes lovingly at a glossy photo book of Prague, which has become the center of her escape fantasies. Next, we see her racing her horse cart through the picturesque countryside-laughing with her hair blowing in the wind-toward the sight of the moor, where a dashing young engineer from Prague, Leidwein, is working on plans for draining the swamps. The contrast between the couple could not be starker (Fig. 2.7). She is the peasant girl par excellence, a maiden in colorful local costume, fresh from the creamery with golden locks under a big yellow straw hat. Her enthusiasm for the big wide world moreover attests to her naIvete and ignorance, which at the same time constitute her appeal. It is Anna's innocent country charm that attracts the cosmopolitan Leidwein, whose appearance, background, and technical occupation firmly connect him to modernity, which the film locates in the city. And while Anna longs to see the city as much as she longs for her freedom---encapsulated in her imaginary concept of the mothershe does not look misplaced within the beautiful landscape that surrounds her, but rather seems to be very much of it. The representation of Anna Jobst in the beginning of The Golden City thus depicts the character through the same stereotype that the National Socialist press applied to SOderbaum's offscreen image, suggesting the possibility of a "perfect" female National Socialist heroine. It is this very stereotype, however, that is subsequently problema-

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Figure 2.7. Culture clash: Country girl Anna falls in love with the urban engineer Leidwein.

tized and taken apart by the narrative. The film shows Anna's world as beautiful, just as the moor looks innocuously pretty on the surface, but Anna is restless and unhappy.93 "Every third word you say is always 'my father says.' What do you say yourself, Fraulein Anna?" Leidwein prompts, clearly suggesting to her the possibility of making independent decisions. When Thomas later questions her about what she wants, she answers emphatically "I want to live!" thereby expressing an unspecific desire for authentic experience. Yet when Anna finally does break loose from both her father's and Leidwein's guidance to momentarily follow her spontaneous drives and impulses, and consequently loses herself in the city and in the arms of her fortune-hunting cousin, she simultaneously seals her fate. In his detailed analysis of the film, Lowry points out: "The film tells the story of Anna's search for her own identity. Her longing for freedom and 'living' are essentially nothing but the wish to separate from the father to lead her own life, pursue her own dreams, to generally become 'herself.' Yet this search for identity is already condemned through the rules and reality of patriarchal soci-

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ety. Because Anna can only become 'herself' by becoming a 'woman: But being a woman in this society is always defined in relationship to the man. This paradoxical situation is at the core of Anna's and the narrative's dilemma."94 The conflicts driving the continuing plot development oscillate around a number of different tensions-city / country, Germans / Czechs, father / daughter, male / female-many of which can be seen in a distinctly National Socialist light. The melodramatic force of the film, however, remains caught up in the tragic dimensions of being female in a male world. When Jobst realizes that Anna has formed a bond with Leidwein, he cancels the moor drainage project and drives Leidwein off his property. His jealous protection of his daughter thus fuses with an antimodern discourse, symbolized in the draining of the moor, in favor of a traditionalist stance against change and modernization. When Anna confronts him about Leidwein's dismissal, Jobst angrily strikes Anna's cheek. The tearful reconciliation is only short-lived; the father's control has become too oppressive. Anna tries to be contented with the life she was clearly made for: the film shows her in sweeping scenes at the local village festival, where she participates in a horse race (Thomas wins, Anna comes second) and dances in the traditional country costume. The exalting sequence once again celebrates a link with Kristina SOderbaum's extrafilrnic representations in the National Socialist press and further suggests that Anna could be happy at home, if it weren't for her despotic father and her longing for a mother she never knew. 95 But while Harlan visually glorifies country life, Anna's frustrations accumulate. When the men leave the village for a few days, the estate's housekeeper, intent on winning Jobst and the estate for herself, talks Anna into undertaking a day trip to the "forbidden" city. Finally in Prague, she visits her mother's sister, Frau Opferkuch, and her (illegitimate) son, Toni. Here, she is introduced to a life of looser morals; her aunt is visibly tarted up and drinks, and the dapper Toni is a waiter at a trendy coffeehouse and has a tumultuous liaison with its owner. They live in a small flat above a cigarette store run by Anna's aunt, which points to a low-class urban existence that negatively contrasts with Anna's wealthy country background. It has often been mentioned that the housekeeper, Frau Opferkuch, and Toni all have Czech accents to suggest that there is a strong racist component to the film. Nazi officials further underlined this interpretation in various internal state-

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ments. Nonetheless, the race-related aspects of the film remain somewhat ambiguous. It seems that if spectators brought anti-Czech sentiments to the film, a racial dimension became visible; if they didn't, the film played out on the level of city versus country and tradition versus social reform. 96 To complicate things further, even the city was not rendered as entirely negative. 97 Quite to the contrary, Harlan shoots the golden city of Prague in festive tones, the city's beautiful old architecture is celebrated, and Smetana's music is on the sound track, all of which serve as a seductive invitation to bourgeois tradition and high culture. The educated Leidwein, who visits Anna and takes her to the opera also isn't a negative figure, but a respectful, if paternalistic suitor. Instead, it is Toni and his mother who convince Anna that Leidwein is married, thereby paving the way for a romance with her cousin, who has alienated his mistress and sees Anna as an heiress. Rather than engaging in a clear-cut city/country opposition that favors one over the other, the film points to a discourse of "belonging," of understanding the rules by which city or country spaces are governed, of knowing whom to trust and which acts are irrevocable transgTessions. This is where Anna fails, once she is removed from her familiar surroundings. The film's allusions to anthropological heritage linked with destiny thus point to a direct invocation of "blood and soil" motifs, which surface primarily in the film's insistence that people's identities are fundamentally bound up with their heredity and their innate connection with their homeland. Anna's alienation from these concepts results from her unstable inheritance; the city mother's absence in her upbringing leads to both her lack of familiarity with her maternal family and her inability to negotiate her femininity. Leidwein's critical and patronizing attitude toward Anna's behavior in town irritates her; consequently, she does not adopt his cautious reserve toward her city relatives. It is her rebellion against patriarchal dominance, rather than a more conventionally romantic nature, which leads to her seduction. This rebellion, however, brings the film back to the gender conflicts that ultimately power its drama. When Anna allows herself to be seduced by Toni, it is her loss of control over her sexuality that triggers her demise. Moreover, her fall is not mired in the conventional trope of passion and deceit; she is not really in love with Toni, and laughs at him when he tells her they should spend their lives together. Rather, it is as if she pretends to be in love with him, so that she can succumb to her sexual desires. Toni's visual reconstruction

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of Anna ("You went to the opera like that?" he laughs, when Anna returns in her dirndl) further points to the idea that when Anna abandons her peasant dress for fashionable city clothes (a red polka-dotted dress) and makeup, she loses the very identity she hoped to gain when leaving her father (Fig. 2.8). Anna's transformation virtually literalizes the kind of de-Germanization that Nazi ideologues condemned in their philosophy, where makeup and fashion functioned as signifiers of unGerman degeneracy. For the same reasons, Leidwein is finally driven away at his last visit, when he sees Anna without her traditional costume, because the fantasy of pure country maidenhood that initially attracted him to the girl is now visually and narratively undone. 98 Anna soon finds herself in a familiar position. Pregnant and disowned by her father, she assumes the traditional tragic figure of the fallen woman; a kind of National Socialist Gretchen. Merely tolerated in her aunt's flat, and exploited for her labor in the cigarette store, she quickly realizes that her romance with Toni is a sham. When Toni learns of Jobst's plans to marry his housekeeper, thus making Anna's future ownership of the farm even more unlikely, Anna is asked to leave. AI-

Figure 2.8. Kissing cousins: Toni transforms Anna into a city woman.

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though her aunt realizes the desperation of her niece's position, her ability to empathize does not exceed Toni's will. None of the Opferkuch women, it seems, have any luck with men. Anna returns home to find her father celebrating his engagement. When he coldly ignores her, she decides to join her mother: "Mother, little mother, father has not taken me back. I'll come to you, little mother, I'll go down the same path as you. Mother, I hear you, you're calling me." Now fully engaged in a fundamental crisis of belonging, Anna chooses death. "My child doesn't belong here on the farm," she cries, "but I belong with my child. You were right, father, always right, until the end .... Forgive me that I didn't love my homeland the way you did." Before the search party led by a repentant Jobst can find her, she has submerged herself in the dark, swampy moor, from which her corpse is raised looking clean and angelic. Overcome with grief and guilt, Jobst abandons his marriage plans, hands the farm over to Thomas and orders the drainage of the moor. The film ends with an image of Anna's place of death, now golden with wheat crops blowing in the wind. 99 Two different discourses emerge through the significance of the moor in the film's highly melodramatic ending. The moor as the place where Anna finally belongs simultaneously stands for femininity and female sexuality as well as for the repressive traditions of patriarchy. Anna's "damaging" inheritance, which her father anxiously sought to suppress, is not the result of only the racial flaws of the mother (if we accept reading her mother as Czech) but her legacy of womanhood. 1OO Rather than simply constituting a problem of race genetics, Anna's hereditary curse is femininity. The drives and passions that propel her to rebel are triggered by her subordinate position and only result in her ruin because she is female and must learn to repress these wishes. Moreover, for all women in the film, life results in failure. Both Anna's aunt and her mother had tragic lives and unhappy unions with men; the same is repeated for Anna and her father's housekeeper (who is dumped after Anna's death). The idea that the moor needs eradicating is therefore not only a move toward eliminating the female from the text, as Lowry has suggested, but also a critique of an outmoded social practice. 101 The film invites the audience to identify with Anna; her end is not so much an inevitable tragedy, but places responsibility with the father figure (a similar suspicion dominates our understanding of what happened to Jobst's wife).lo2 The press discourse on the film similarly

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located the source of the conflict less in the danger of the city than in the overdominance of paternal control. 103 The film is tom between celebrating traditional country life and critiquing the antiquated morality of yesteryear. Nazi films often wanted to be modem and volkisch at the same time-just as Nazi philosophy saw itself as traditionalist and revolutionary, introducing a strange mix of reactionary and modem elements in their formulations of fascist womanhood. In fact, Nazi rhetoric often pitched the "rural" against the "modem," to then advertise Nazism as the conciliatory solution to the problem. Caught in the middle of this inherently contradictory discourse, women's happiness often ended up falling through the cracks. Although Anna's "death is quite clearly an indication of the fate which women who step outside their traditional role can expect," as Petley insists, the spectators' sympathies are melodramatically aligned with her character and further critical of the male actors in the narrative. 104 Unless we privilege the film's racist dimension above other possible readings, and thus see the narrative as a cautionary tale that strategically sought to promote racial purity, the heroine's suicide is profoundly meaningless. Neither does her death unite the people against evil (i.e., the Jew, as in Jew Siiss), nor does her suffering support a military victory as in The Great King or Kolberg. We can imagine a different ending. lOS As a matter of fact, the original stage play by Richard Billinger closed with the death of the father, not of Anna. It was on Goebbels's insistence that Anna had to die, "because her pregnancy would have resulted in the birth of a 'Czech bastard,' " while Harlan had argued it "unmodern and unreligious" to have a girl kill herself just because she will be an unwed mother. 106 Ufa press releases before the film's premiere often referred to the film's positive ending, meaning Anna's surviva1. 107 Importantly, I do not wish to propose here that readings that emphasize the use of race in the film are invalid, or belittle the impact of this analysis. Obviously, racist considerations shaped both the film-especially its altered ending-and its reception through Nazi officials and National Socialist audiences. I do suggest, however, that the film's representation of Anna's problems is not exhausted or limited to this interpretation. Clearly, the film made sense to a large audience that did not pick up on its anthropological racism, but saw it in the tradition of the ninteenth century social drama. I wish to foreground the inevitable conflicts that arise in the repre-

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sentation of women in Nazi cinema, even if they conform to the National Socialist ideal. In The Golden City, Kristina Soderbaum looks and acts like the embodiment of the vivacious nature child that the extrafilmic star discourse had constructed as the perfect image for the actress. At the same time, The Golden City points to the idea that the very vitality and natural sexuality the Nazis praised in their ideal could not function once placed in the central position of a film narrative. Women's pursuit of individualistic desires in Nazi cinema could never end in success. As is often the case in patriarchal cinema, the problem of female sexuality knows no positive solution. All of Kristina Soderbaum's melodramas illustrate this with striking clarity. Even film narratives in which Soderbaum's character commits no transgressions and in fact insists on staying at home-as we will see played out in Immensee-do not protect her from tragic disappointment.

Immensee (Ufa, 1943) In Immensee we encounter a Harlan melodrama that pays close attention to both its male and its female lead, while giving a certain preference to the male. In contrast to The Golden City, both Immensee and The Sacrifice are as much male as they are female melodramas. In each case, the impulses and actions of the male protagonist are stressed and determine his female partners' equally melodramatic fates. Immensee was Harlan's second color film; The Sacrifice, made simultaneously but released a year later, was his third. Shot back-to-back in northern Germany, the films function as mirror images to one another. If Immensee situates its romantic triangle by positioning the female star, Kristina Soderbaum, between two men, The Sacrifice places its hero, Carl Raddatz, between two women. lOB Moreover, beyond the similarities between Immensee and The Sacrifice, the films also show a strong intertextual connection with earlier Soderbaum melodramas. Immensee's homey Elisabeth, who watches her lover leave without being able to hold on, reminds us of Elske in The Journey to Tilsit who similarly struggles to hang on to her unfaithful husband; the same also happens to Octavia (Irene von Meyersdorff) in The Sacrifice. Likewise, Immensee's male lead, Reinhart (Raddatz), as well as the adulterous couple in The Sacrifice, Aels (Soderbaum) and Albrecht (Raddatz), bear a distinct resemblance to Anna in The Golden City, in terms of their desire to break away, defy convention, and follow their sexual impulses.

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Furthermore, Immensee was promoted under the subheading"A German Folk Song" and took up the themes of homeland and belonging that we already encountered in The Golden City, once again pointing to ''blood and soil" motifs. In Immensee, however, it isn't Soderbaum's character who leaves home to go "out into the world," but her girlhood sweetheart, Reinhart, who wants to seek fame and fortune in the big city and even abroad. Yet here, the melodramatic impact of leaving home does not mean that the protagonist has betrayed his roots. Rather than ending in suicide, the narrative describes a journey that, while marked by the familiar National Socialist elements of loss and renunciation, results in the male hero's refinement into a brilliant, if lonely musical genius. Where Anna loses her identity in The Golden City, the male protagonist in Immensee maintains his sense of purpose by sharing his artistic talent with the larger Volk. Still, romantic male characters in Nazi Cinema must be seen as feminized figures, who occupy a complicated ideological position vis-a.-vis the larger ideological framework of the National Socialist masculinity. If we compare Raddatz's role in Immensee and The Sacrifice with Willy Birgel's part in Sierck's To New Shores, Leander's musical director Rudnitzky in The Great Love, or Willy Fritsch's characters in Harvey's musicals, we find that the male partner in the romantic couple frequently doesn't harmonize with Theweleit's concept of the armored male. Victor Staal's performance in The Great Love further shows that if the male lead tries to approximate this model, the resulting tensions provide the conflict of the romance narrative. By and large, the male model of the heroic soldier was not suitable for melodrama or comedy, the leading genres in National Socialist entertainment (individual melodramas were most successful; comedies were most frequent). In Reinhart's case, it is his musical nature that allows for his emotional sensibilities and exonerates him from the accusation of being oversentimental. More significantly, in National Socialist contexts sentimentality and pathos as such, although they did need containment, did not carry the same connotations as in other Western cultures. American films of the 1930s and 1940s frequently feature cynical, self-depreciating male heroes-we might think here of the films of Howard Hawks-whereas this type of male is almost entirely absent from National Socialist pictures. Coolness, sarcasm and emotional detachment, which are often coded as male attributes in twentieth century culture, were not desirable in the

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Nazi state, which relied on nationalist hysteria, emotional overidentification, emphatic dedication and ritualized death. That notwithstanding, it is interesting to note that Immensee and The Sacrifice present very similar characters whose gender is reversed correspondingly in each film (i.e., Erich = Octavia, Elisabeth = Albrecht}.l09 Based on an early novella by Theodor Storm, Immensee is a melancholic reminiscence of a bygone youth and its lost promises. 110 The film begins with a framing story set many years after the main narrative events. In a great concert hall, Reinhart, the famous conductor, performs his masterpiece (entitled The Water Lily) with a full orchestra. Elisabeth, in widow's black, is in the audience. When the couple meets in a restaurant afterward, we realize they haven't seen each other in years. Gazing at the water lily that decorates the table, the symbol of their love, they initiate their joint walk down memory lane, and the flashback begins. The film thus initiates the anticipation of melodrama and introduces an intense feeling of predestination, which serves as a support system for the film's ideological fatalism, a notion that increasingly figured in National Socialist culture during the war, responding to the escalating negative personal experiences of wartime audiences. Immensee ("lake of the bees") is the name of both Elisabeth's hometown and the country estate of Erich, who is part of the adolescent friendship trio that also includes Reinhart and Elisabeth. While Reinhart feels a higher calling that propels him to "see the world," Erich and Elisabeth are steady and conventional, happy at home. Yet Reinhart and Elisabeth are in love; Erich, who also loves the heroine, suffers in silence. In an early scene, the couple's families take one last carriage ride through the countryside before seeing Reinhart off to Hamburg, where he will study at the music conservatory. As in The Golden City, Harlan depicts the small German town and surrounding landscape in picturesque images, replacing The Golden City's Bohemian peasant culture with the petit bourgeois idyll of small town domesticity as the object of his aestheticizing gaze. The dialogue, however, counteracts the impression of peaceful coexistence. When Reinhart declares that he is looking for variety and novelty ("New things, always new things!"), Elisabeth's dismissive mother compares him negatively to the gypsies. When Reinhart's father calls Elisabeth a real homebody, she concedes, "1 don't know what I am." Reinhart's daring is further expressed when the young people bathe in a lake. Despite Elisabeth's protest, Reinhart swims far out to

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pick a water lily floating on the water and, as she had warned, the tangled roots below the surface almost pull him down. The resulting argument metaphorizes the larger conflict motivating the plot: Reinhart prefers a "dangerous" path in the pursuit of beauty, while Elisabeth chooses the security of conventionalism (Fig. 2.9). Furthermore, in Immensee the underlying antagonism of "home" versus "world" plays out along a traditional understanding of gender. Reinhart's pursuit of his career away from home is an inevitable result of his talent, whereas the questionable morals of the women he encounters in the artists' milieu are represented as at least ambiguous. Erich, whom Elisabeth marries once she finds out about his "artistic" lifestyle, simultaneously strikes her as boring and unexciting. The wagon wheel nailed to the top of the Immensee bam remains empty, no stork will nest, pointing to the lack of fulfillment in the childless couple's sex life. Alternatively, Reinhart and Elisabeth's sexual attraction to one another is rooted in their opposition, in the contrast between the idealized figures of the male (genius) and the female (country girD, both

Figure 2.9. Golden cage: Reinhart and Elisabeth in Immensee.

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of whom agree with stereotypical National Socialist formulations. Correspondingly, even though both partners suffer because of the failure of their romance, Reinhart embraces a promiscuous lifestyle, whereas Elisabeth chooses the sexual boredom that is associated with her marital loyalty. Reinhart's erotic adventures are further coded as "different," and by extension un-German, whilst the disembodied notion of the pure Elisabeth lingers as his artistic inspiration and finally enables him to create great German works. "Music and plot," suggests Hartmut Redottee, "melt into an inseparable whole."111 Reinhart's compositions (one of which is entitled Elisabeth) are performed four times throughout the film, first in the opening concert sequence, second it is sung by one of Reinhart's fellow music students at a party at his Hamburg flat, next by Elisabeth herself, and last by an Italian opera diva in Rome. The first solely instrumental concert is simultaneously the last, the finished masterpiece, whereas the different renderings of Reinhart's music through songs in between also narrate his romantic trajectory. The music student in Hamburg is a casual fling with whom Reinhart shares the occasional night. "These are artists," explains the landlady, when Elisabeth finds the girl in Reinhart's bed on a surprise visit, "they are more liberal in these matters." In contrast, Elisabeth's own singing in Reinhart's home, which is only heard by Reinhart and his father, resonates with the traditional performance of feminine accomplishments, apt but not professional, contained in the performative space of the private sphere. The professional performer Loretta finally embodies Reinhart's temporary digression into a foreign culture. Reinhart takes off for a year in Rome after learning of Elisabeth's marriage to Erich because Reinhart had ceased writing to her. Harlan depicts the city as an impressive memorial to Italian history and culture. In a Germany cut off from international travel, the film celebrated the foreign allure of Italy (still a possibility) and expressed a yearning for international glamour that could not be contained by the story line. In fact, Reinhart and his friends seem awestruck by the monumentalism of Roman architecture. Remarkably, the group even wonders if Germans have as much "passionate faith" as the Italians, until one of them pushes aside their nationalist confusion by asserting, "1 believe in Bach, Beethoven," thus pointing back to a cultural identification that eclipses the National S0cialist stress on racial superiority. Yet, the film upholds the assumption of

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a fundamental difference between nations. Loretta, the Italian opera diva, is the opposite of Elisabeth's natural countrywoman. Dark-haired and glamorous, she is a star ("1 had more flowers in my dressing room than you," she tells Reinhart), suited to Reinhart's lifestyle but also an alienating presence (Fig. 2.10). When she performs Elisabeth in a striking operatic delivery in a Roman amphitheater, Reinhart's friends can hardly recognize the piece. "That's not you anymore. That isn't Elisabeth!" remarks one. Reinhart is bewildered: "This isn't my song, this is ... Verdi." "No," retorts his companion, as the Italian soprano finishes in a stunning finale, "this is Loretta." The next scene shows Reinhart and Loretta in an Italian villa. When Reinhart wants to join his friends at a German restaurant, Loretta convinces him to stay and make love to her instead. "It is hard to believe," he observes looking at the nightly sky, "that this is the same Venus as it is at home in Germany." "Is not the same," Loretta answers in accented German, "is a different Venus." When she tells him she loves him in Italian, he reluctantly replies with "te amo," as if saying it in another language cannot really mean that it is true.

Figure 2.10. When in Rome ... : Reinhart and the Italian opera diva Loretta.

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Of course, Reinhart returns home from his Italian adventure without Loretta. Back in Immensee, Erich invites his friend to spend a summer at his home to compose, knowing well that the relationship between Reinhart and his wife was never fully resolved. As the initial constellation is reestablished, the fundamental tensions of the narrative come to a conclusion. The attraction between Reinhart and Elisabeth still exists. At a local dance given to celebrate Erich's founding of a factory on Immensee's property-an element that suggests that the "home" space of Immensee is also moving into a progressive contemporary modernityElisabeth swings joyfully in Reinhart's arms, throwing back her head as if in sexual ecstasy. Erich witnesses the scene and realizes his inability to satisfy his wife. That night he releases her from her marriage vows ("1 want your happiness, because I love you"). As a result, Elisabeth realizes that Erich is the better, nobler person-just as Albrecht will come to understand the superiority of his wife's goodness over SOderbaum's Aels's sexual appeal in The Sacrifice. Dressed in a country dirndl-as we have seen, a typical Soderbaum image-Elisabeth informs Reinhart of her decision to stay with her husband through the infamous bee analogy. "You are free now," says Reinhart, "free to choose the fittest. That is the right of the queen bee." "Erich is the strongest," Elisabeth replies, "Now I know." Reinhart is flabbergasted: "You want to sacrifice yourself? Your happiness, your life, me, your love?" But Elisabeth explains that the larger social context of one's life is more important than individual feelings: "Your circles, this kind of freedom, that isn't my world. I am anchored here." Thus, Elisabeth finally overcomes her erotic attachment to Reinhart to find meaning in the larger concept of selfless, self-effacing, sacrificial love (Erich), while simultaneously embracing the notion of "belonging," the love for one's Heimat. When we return to the restaurant scene from the beginning, both partners have learned to move beyond individualist desires. Even though Elisabeth is now widowed, the couple chooses not to continue together. Presumably aided by his pain, Reinhart has achieved his great work, entitled The Water Lily, in dedication to their love. As the relationship is dissolved permanently, sexual love has finally transcended into art: Reinhart's mature composition is an orchestra piece from which the female voice has finally been erased. Whereas Reinhart's calling is music, Elisabeth's purpose is her small-town domestic sphere, pointing back to Soderbaum's frequent association with the social body

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and the homeland. "We have to be true to ourselves," she explains, "you to your work, me to my little world." It is not love-or another partner-that keeps them apart, but life, destiny itself; according to this philosophical perspective, the only possible response is fatalism. Once again, Harlan invokes romantic motifs that were ideologically connected to the Nazis' belief system. The final scene shows Reinhart departing on a small airplane, as Elisabeth waves her quiet good-bye. Shot in dim tones, the images look almost black and white. Moreover, her black dress and the airport imagery suddenly conjure up the scenario of war with its inevitable ramifications of separation and loss. The promotional copy of a Ufa-press release on the film summarized, "Stronger than any youthful love, is the law of duty!" suggesting that injury and renunciation are unavoidable components of "life" with all its overdetermined meanings.1 12 In addition, Julian Petley sees the film as a didactic lesson essentially concerned with female transgression and sacrifice. ''This exemplary moral tale," he further points out, "with its idealized protagonists, beautiful 'German' settings and 'picturesque' German peasant customs won it the subtitle 'A German Folksong' from Goebbels."113 Still, although Nazi films never allowed a German marriage to collapse (without the death of a partner), the ideal embodied by SOderbaum in this film centers on women sticking to their roots, rather than avoiding sexual temptation, as in The Golden City. It is Reinhart who falls under the spell of a more worldly eroticism, forsaking the more stable and less intriguing, but authentically German happiness he might have found at home. And although the act of leaving does produce in him the melancholic emotion of loss, it is this very experience that in turn serves to inspire him to create great art. Again, SOderbaum's character, even though she is now steadfast in her attachment to her homeland and morally virtuous, suffers more. As Redottee points out: "Going away-wanting to hold on, wanting to leave-having to stay: each has its price. And with Harlan, it is the women who have to pay."114 But Elisabeth's moral rectitude toward Erich, her understanding and acceptance of life's existential difficulties, and her love of home nonetheless make her an unremarkable and dull character, much less suited to move audiences the way Anna did in The Golden City. Elisabeth is an ideal that lacks allure, just as S6derbaum's star image could never animate the kind of excitement offered by other Ufa divas. Instead, Reinhart's feminized male emerges as the film's most interest-

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ing figure. From the outset, Elisabeth's positioning as a positive role model is engulfed in negatives, hardly the stuff that dreams are made of. In fact, the highly melodramatic contexts surrounding her characterization oxymoronically point to a strange kind of realism, reminding audiences that life hardly ever turns out anything like our (film) fantasies. The film is a dedication to nostalgia and remembrance, rather than a promise; quite fitting for a time where there was nothing to look forward to and the memory of peacetime domesticity was located firmly in the past. Redottee even goes so far as to argue, "we can perceive in the conflict between staying and leaving certain political undertones in these years of emigration."115 Rather than functioning as a morale-boosting Durchhaltefilm ("keep-on-going" fibn), a purpose that was more likely to be fulfilled by the many comedies released at that time, Immensee was an object lesson in self-denial. The suspension of desire and the promise of a delayed happiness that we find in fibns like Die grope Liebe (The Great Love, 1941/2) do not drive the narrative. Instead it follows a learning curve that finally results in the embrace of life as predestination, fate, and pain. The film addresses the issues of hope and desire, but is marked from the begiruting as a story that ends in melancholic nostalgia. Without question, Promi sought to use Harlan's melodramatic tearjerkers to pave the way for the equally sad experiences Gennans stood to endure in their real lives or to soften the pain of losses already encountered by creating an atmosphere of emotional bravery. Yet it is hard to imagine that Harlan's melodramas energized the spectator, giving her strength or spreading optimism. Instead, their stress on the inevitability of tragedy spoke to contemporary audiences by reflecting a mood of resignation and depression.

Opfergang (The Sacrifice, Ufa, 1943) Unlike Immensee, The Sacrifice could never have been called" A German Folksong." Despite its inversion of many of Immensee's themes, nothing about the film brought the narrative back to the Nazi ideal of a Germanic idyll. Instead, The Sacrifice engaged particular National Socialist values-especially the myth of naturalness and the notion of glorified death-and explored them in such an overwrought mode that the ideological undercurrents of much of Nazi cinema exploded in its excessive melodrama: on the one hand, the film's overaesthetization made

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these concerns clearly visible, and on the other their ideological purpose dissolved in the contradictory nature of the narrative. Goebbels interjected his objections to the project several times during production. First, he protested against the casting of Soderbaum in the role of Aels, a free-spirited young woman who almost destroys the marriage of an haute-bourgeois Hamburg couple, because a seductress of this kind did not correspond to the Nazi ideal of the Nordic type and should better be portrayed by a brunette actress. 116 Harlan persisted in casting his wife, but Goebbels did successfully change the ending. As in The Golden City, Rudolf Binding's original novel culminated in the death of the male protagonist and left the woman alive. Goebbels, however, demanded otherwise. According to Harlan, he argued that "thousands of soldiers were deserting at the front because they were plagued by the fear that their wives at home were cheating on them .... the woman guilty of causing the adultery had to die, not the husband. The marriage must be preserved. This was better not only for the front, but also at home in an educational sense [volkserzieherischen Sinne)."117 The finished film still left Goebbels undecided. Deeply moved by its "erotics of death" as he called it, he privately screened the film frequently, while holding it back from public release, presumably because the film's mood was too dark and hopeless. lIS When The Sacrifice finally premiered in December 1944, he had apparently given in to the somber tone of the narrative, knowing well that the war was coming to an end. Spectators, both in Germany and abroad, liked the film.119 Kristina Soderbaum herself would refer to The Sacrifice as her best work and her favorite film throughout her life po Just as The Journey to Tilsit and Immensee, The Sacrifice is essentially a love triangle. Where Immensee's Elisabeth finds herself caught between two men (Reinhart and Erich) and two lifestyles (one artistic, the other bound to traditionalist country-living), The Sacrifice positions the male lead Albrecht (Carl Raddatz) between two women and two lifestyles: Octavia (Irene von Meyersdorff), the overbred, ethereal senator's daughter identified with aristocratic "high" culture, and Aels (Kristina SOderbaum), the unconventional but doomed "migrant bird," who even in her association with death embodies pure physicality. The film begins with Albrecht's return to Hamburg after a three-year journey through the world-upholding the German "colonial spirit," as a speaker for Hamburg's Hanseatic League puts it. He has brought souvenirs from his

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travels to be given to yet unchosen female companions: an Indian statue of Kwannon, the virgin goddess of compassion and mercy, and a red kimono, which alludes to the sensuality of the Geisha. Both objects will come to stand for the two women in his future: one larger than life, the other firmly of it. "Octavia is heavenly," he will later complain to his friend to explain his adultery, "Aels is earthly." Yet, initially Albrecht is attracted to the translucently beautiful Octavia ("how can one give a girl a Roman name these days?" he mocks) with her all-encompassing goodness and empathy, and he soon asks to marry her. Octavia is seen as a creature of luminous light. She is an angel, engulfed, as a contemporary review put it, in a mise-en-scene of visual excess of a "snow-white, silky-shimmering palatial salon ... , the floor covered in a ankle-deep carpet."121 The cultural traditions that describe her, however, are also steeped in deep shadows: on Sunday mornings the family gathers in the dark hall of their mansion on the river, the curtains drawn (Fig. 2.11). Octavia plays melancholy tunes, the old senator recites Nietzsche's morbid poem "The Sinking Sun." In Frieda

Figure 2.11. Cool elegance: Octavia in her bourgeois Hamburg home.

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Grafe's words: "The art of the upper classes is colorless and shy of light. Poems about the premonition of death, Nocturne by Chopin, they give each other orchids from their greenhouses, instead of flowers from their gardens. They favor wearing black and white, and when they allow themselves excess, they wear silver or gold, more shiny than colorful."l22 Albrecht feels suffocated. "Night, night, night, always night and death," he protests, "and outside the sun is shining.... Tell me, don't you find this spooky?" Through Albrecht, the film expresses its inherent critique of an "overeducated" bourgeoisie and its perceived lack of physical fitness and joie de vivre and presents as its counterpoint the daring vitality of bodily expression-a move that resonates with National Socialist attitudes toward class. Insisting that he needs "wind and waves, the burning sun," he storms outside, tolerated by his benevolent fiancee who will, throughout the plot, selflessly encourage whatever makes him happy (akin to Erich in Immensee). As Albrecht sails out onto the water, his next love, Aels, appears out of the waves like a mermaid holding on to the back of his boat. She is swimming naked (SOderbaum is also seen this way in Immensee during the bathing scene), yet is disguised by the water, a virtual spirit of nature. The intrigued Albrecht soon learns that she is Octavia's neighbor, a wealthy Swedish woman who restlessly travels the world. "She is like a migrant bird," explains Octavia, "and generally adopts a very unorthodox way of life." Dora Traudisch consequently juxtaposes the two heroines as personifying two opposite nineteenth century types, the trope of the femme fragile and image of the mermaid: the first is marked by an anemic beauty free of erotic signifiers, the latter by her engulfing, mysterious and dangerous sexuality.123 Yet despite the film's clear invocation of these literary figures, an unequivocal identification of its female characters with these tropes is made impossible by the continuing narrative. Aels is not at all healthy, but terminally ill, and Octavia's self-sacrificing forbearance will not result in the femme fragile's consumptive demise but give her the strength to win back her husband. As Albrecht runs away from the morose contemplation of night and death in Octavia's drawing room, he embraces a woman who thinks and speaks of nothing else. In his move toward the other lover, then, he turns away from abstraction and toward experience. In Harlan's melodramatic universe the only experiences waiting for its occupants are those of loss and dying. Along the same lines, Friedemann Beyer points out:

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Indeed, in most of her roles S6derbaum played women with the primary German virtues: she is loyal (rather than lascivious), naive (rather than cunning), and willing to make endless sacrifices (rather than selfish) .... [Butlleaving those cliches aside, new perspectives open up. Even though she likes to ride horses and swim in her films, she hardly embodies the type of a healthy, vigorous superwoman. The more vital she appears, the more vulnerable becomes her over-sensitive soul, incapable of coping with the harshness of life with its rules made by men. Despite her external robustness, Kristina S6derbaum is the "femme fragile" of Third Reich cinema. 124

Although Aels initially presents herself as a seductive Lorelei-like figure, the impending narrative doom is directed at her, not Albrecht. It is Aels who is the femme fragile, pretending to be the mermaid. While an unsuspecting Albrecht begins his daily horse rides with his fascinating neighbor and falls in love with her, the spectator is privy to her private conversations with her doctor and hears her explain her attitude of uncalculated risk. Surrounded by a "pack of spotted Great Danes that are meant to express Aels's spiritedness:'125 she explains that she put her favorite dog to sleep when it became too sick to enjoy life-an analogy which has often been read as the film's implicit approval of euthanasia-insisting that she wants to "live," not "vegetate."126 "The erotics of death that bothered Goebbels about the film is undisguised," propounds Grafe, "Its healthy look is only appearance, a sickly red glow caused by fever and excitation. Aels is burning." The Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter similarly observed: "The passionate urge to want to die young, to ride on the waves like the elegant bride of the wind, to race along on horseback, that which is unrestrained, feverish, and addicted to life is expressed very effectively through Kristina Soderbaum."127 Her defiant stance, however, and her daring sensuality are what attract Albrecht. Their joint excursions, which are alluded to in this quotation, become increasingly erotic. Aels, dressed in red, literally aims her (love) bow and hits a bull's-eye. In another sequence, she is seen riding bareback in a white bathing suit (Fig. 2.12), leading her horse into the ocean, riding the waves in a sexually unambiguous manner. She further angTily rejects the intervention of Matthias, Octavia's cousin, arguing for her right to pursue her own unconventional happiness. Under pressure, it is Albrecht who moves away to avoid the collapse of the marriage he has now entered. His relationship with his wife, how-

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Figure 2.12. Nature child: Aels's hysterical joie de vivre is not the result of her healthy vitality but indicates fatal disease.

ever, is represented as dysfunctional. At an extravagant carnival party, a scene were Harlan explored his sense for mass spectacle in glorious color, Octavia is seen as incapable of enjoying herself. Dressed as a Roman goddess at the masked ball, her attempts to please her husband are merely pretenses of self-enjoyment. While he flirts with two ladies in tuxedos and top hats-a faint allusion to 1920s lesbianism-one of whom looks like Aels, Octavia is miserable. Riding down the tongueslide of a gigantic Harlequin's head (Fig. 2.13), she looks almost violated. And when she is elected the queen of carnival and lifted up by the crowd, she escapes in tears rather than delighting in her coronation. Amidst Harlan's spectacular mise-en-scene-meant to suggest a colorful, vibrant world-Octavia longs for the quiet contemplative atmosphere of her river house. Moved by his wife's unhappiness and homesickness, Albrecht decides to return to Hamburg. But the "migrant bird" has not moved on: weakened by lovesickness, Aels is now bound to her bed and only Albrecht's return lets her regain her strength and continue the

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Figure 2.13. Harlan's spectacular carnival scene in The Sacrifice.

affair. "We are in love, my friend," she tells him, "and it will get bad." Beyond her mysterious disease, love too acts like an illness. An additional element of the Aels characterization is her unwed motherhood, which is left unexplained and unexcused by the heroine. As Octavia's acceptance of Albrecht's extramarital pursuits gives way to jealousy, Aels's confusing identity is further investigated. In a striking scene, Octavia and Matthias follow Aels down the street, watching her without being seen, as Octavia is intent on discovering Aels's "secret": Octavia: Look, how all the men turn around after her. Nobody looks at me on the street, even though everyone tells me that I'm beautiful. You've often told me, Albrecht told me. Why is this? She's just like a magnet! Matthias: You can say that, yes! Octavia, be glad that no one looks at you on the street. You are a pure human being. Octavia: No, that isn't it! That she is too. She is superior to me. There's no need to pretend otherwise.

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As Traudisch points out, the pair soon detects that Aels has a daughter and thus locate her "superiority" in her "true womanhood."128 But the narrative simultaneously complicates the character's motherhood. Aels's nebulous "tropical" fever forces her to live separately from her child to avoid the pain of separation she herself suffered when her own mother died young. The hereditary aspects of this curse/ disease further complicate her easy identification with the life-affirming stereotype of National Socialist motherhood. Just as for Anna in The Golden City, the legacy of femininity with its potential for sexual fulfillment comes with an early expiration date; for Harlan, it seems, where there is female pleasure, death cannot be too far away. Aels is a "good" woman, in the National Socialist sense, and simultaneously its opposite. Likewise, the film's resolution is caught in a number of contradictions. As Aels's illness worsens, a typhoid fever takes hold in Hamburg, threatening Aels's young daughter. Albrecht is sent to rescue the child, but catches the fever himself. Weakened, he apologizes to Octavia for all the suffering he has caused. Moreover, when Octavia learns that Aels is also dying at home, waiting in vain for Albrecht's daily ride by her house to greet her through the window, Octavia makes her final sacrifice. Fulfilling the deadly love circle, she dresses up as her husband once a day to deliver his silent message of love to her dying rival. Albrecht's discovery of Octavia's altruism, however, finally enables him to separate from his desire. In an almost psychedelic superimposition, Aels and Albrecht are both seen in bed, communicating with each other as if in a fever fantasy: he explains that he must return to Octavia, Aels understands and dies. Ironically, then, it is because of Octavia's superiority and selfless nobility-which, as we have seen, the film associates with aristocratic breeding and high art-that she triumphs in the end, thus resurrecting what the film initially sought to criticize. Its suggested dichotomy between art/ death and life/nature is proved false in the end, stripping the film of its ideological consistency to make room for the expression of inescapable doom. ''Veit Harlan's The Sacrifice," Rentschler concludes, "culminates in a hypnotic demonstration of sickness unto death as another transgressive heroine takes her place in the procession of female martyrs."129 In the final scene, the married couple ride along the beach on horseback (Octavia has clearly absorbed some of Aels's characteristics) commemorating the

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dead women by throwing roses into the sea, a last gesture, one might be tempted to gibe, for "The Reich's Water Corpse." Cinzia Romani further contends that the film's ending does not necessarily negate SOderbaum's role: "Once again SOderbaum dies; but despite the unhappy ending, the character she plays is not wholly a negative one. Romanticism and pantheism and the wish to become 'one with the universe' are mingled in a character of a woman who speaks in terms of dreams and other worldS."130 At the same time, the film's reliance on romanticism and pantheism are precisely what locks it firmly into a National Socialist framework. As Petley observes, the film is critical of the aristocracy through Albrecht but uncritical of pantheism, fatalism, and romanticized death, all of which are staple components of National Socialist ideology.l3l He further argues that the film's "glorification of physicality," even SOderbaum's nudity, firmly connect with the Nazis' simultaneous celebration of the "body beautiful" and its deeroticization.132 Consequently, the question of whether or not Kristina S6derbaum's role in The Sacrifice can be read as transgressive is subject to some debate. Petley argues that Aels could "hardly be described as an earthy sensualist, particularly as played by Kristina S6derbaum," suggesting that the actress's star image and performance style worked against the controversial elements contained in the character.1 33 Alternatively, one can also read the character of Aels as condensing the very components that had marked S6derbaum's star construction-naturalness, a large capacity to suffer, physicality, sexuality-in such a way that it was impossible to contain them. It is wrong to argue that the Nazis had stripped their stars, and S6derbaum in particular, of sexuality, even though the National Socialist discourse itself disapproved of the frivolously "erotic."l34 To a large extent, what S6derbaum melodramas are about is sexual desire, as well as its containment. Along these lines, Redottt~e asserts that "a clear-cut definition of a character-type, whom Kristina S6derbaum embodied, is hardly possible. Her description as an innocently naive blonde cannot be maintained. Aels in The Sacrifice is neither innocent nor naive."13s Moreover, as in earlier Harlan melodramas, the film's embrace of pantheistic fatalism is disconnected from larger nationalist concerns. And as is common in female-centered National Socialist narratives, Aels's readiness to live life to the fullest and then die does not serve a purpose-it is uselessly tragic. In fact, each woman's "great sacrifice" is

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intensely private; they have nothing to offer to "the people," nor does the male protagonist, Albrecht, whose preoccupation with leisure and romance overshadows his token introduction as a messenger of German colonialism. In addition, the film's excessive style and pathos-its marked readability as "kitschy" or "corny"-add an element of reflexivity to the film's already confusing ideological messages. l36 Ultimately, what makes The Sacrifice so complicated is that it related to many cultural tropes-some generally linked to German culture, others specifically connected to National Socialist denominations-albeit in a way that did not fully cohere with anyone of them. While the film wholeheartedly embraces the notion of sacrificial death, it also maintains an ambiguous attitude toward its "weak" characters, none of whom can be seen as fulfilling a representative model function and whose obsessive preoccupation with their own identities never leads to their approximation of a National Socialist "ideal." As Michael Althen wrote in 1995, "The Great Sacrifice whips itself into a feverish frenzy, which lets the film oscillate between ecstasy and exhaustion, between the lust for life and the longing for death .... There is something in Harlan's films, which may be considered German apart from nationalist delusions. A self-tormenting melancholy lives in these characters, a sadness about being unable to leave their skins, to be caught in so-called German virtues, and also a tendency towards self-destruction."137 Immediately after the film's premiere, Harlan and Soderbaum relocated to Hamburg to escape the dangers waiting in a falling capital. Released only five months before Germany's total capitulation, The Sacrifice reached fewer spectators than earlier Harlan/Soderbaum triumphs. It does, however, strikingly reflect a national absorption in the very discourses of death and survival that Althen has suggested. We must conclude, then, that although Veit Harlan's melodramas with Kristina Soderbaum vividly articulated the Nazis' obsession with nature, sacrifice, and death, they also pointed at the problems contained within this ideological system. An article in the Siiddeutsche Zeitung published on Soderbaum's eightieth birthday explained: [In The Sacrifice] appearances are as deceptive as in the pair's other films. Soderbaum, who looks like the embodiment of naturalness and health, is anything but nature impersonated. Like Dietrich and Garbo, she is an absolutely artificial creation, the perfection of suffering. Synthetic nature,

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the nature of synthesis: with Harlan, melodrama seems to have lost some of its innocence by putting itself in the service of propaganda. But melodrama wasn't the Nazis' genre. As much as it might have functioned to support the state ... through films which moved Goebbels to tears, the closer it moved to the edge of the abyss; and never closer than in Harlan's fi1 ms. 138

In addition, Harlan's films painfully illustrated the problematic status these ideas assumed once they were focused on female protagonists. That is to say, SOderbaum's film characters addressed the very tensions that are inherent in the female-centered melodrama-namely, the contradiction between the foregrounding of the female figure and the subordinate position of women vis-a.-vis men in National Socialist ideology and, by extension, in all patriarchal cultures, which result in her representation as conflicted and torn between different discourses. Soderbaum's lead characters oscillate between their desire to fulfill themselves individually and the social pressures imbedded in their environment, and thus describe both women's desire to break out and their failure to do so. What was enjoyable about watching SOderbaum, especially for female audiences caught in an identical dilemma, were her characters' tireless efforts to fight for their happiness, even if this meant that they might have to die in the process. Whereas Harlan's propaganda pictures managed to contain the "female problems" that emerged in the narrative by reducing the significance of the female figure to that of a minor character whose feelings and motives were absorbed into National Socialist stereotypes without deeper investigation, the melodramas fully explored the tragic difficulties of female identity under the Nazis' ideological system. In its recurring odes to death, Nazi cinema revealed German fascism's self-destructive tendencies. Veit Harlan's melodramas show that the trajectory of dying extended far beyond the "glorious" death on the battlefield or the atrocious extermination of "undesirables" in Nazi concentration camps. In the ideological economy of National Socialist philosophy and its cultural fictions, death also called for ordinary German women, all of whom possessed fatal qualities, anchored in their problematic physicality, which could ultimately never be resolved in a positive fashion. Even in her status as an idealized figure, Soderbaum always remained a victim. Ironically, postwar accounts turned this description on its head.

Kristina SOderbaurn 97

While Soderbaum eventually gave up acting to take up star photography, the news media as well as SOderbaum herself now embraced the star's prior filmic description as the perpetual victim of male society and applied it to Soderbaum's career as a Nazi star. 139 If in Nazi cinema she had often been the victim of "degenerate" males (Jews, Czechs, religious zealots), now she became the victim of the misogynist figures of Goebbels and Harlan. l40 The melodramatic description of Soderbaum, the star, thus remained forever mired in the very discourse that had also informed her screen popularity: women's supposed incapacity to take charge of their destiny.

3

Lilian Harvey: International Stardom, German Comedy, and the "Dream Couple"

"Look here, there is our little dancing flea!" Minister President Hermann Goring, receiving Lilian Harvey upon her return to Germany in 19351

The press is asked not to take notice of actress Lilian Harvey's expatriation. National Socialist press orders, October 9,1942 2

LILIAN HARVEY always appeared as a sprite, a dancing figurine in a glass menagerie, a fairy ballerina engulfed in tulle and taffeta, a pixie as cute as a button, who between the years of 1924 and 1940 performed her idiosyncratic mix of romantic heroine and tomboyish comedienne in fifty-five romantic dramas, musicals, and comedies (Fig. 3.1).3 In the 1930s Lilian Harvey was in fact the most popular star of German musical comedy and, while melodrama was the dominant women's genre of the 1930s and 194Os, both in the TItird Reich and in the United States, among the whole of the feature films produced under Hitler, comedies led. Indeed, an overwhelming 48 percent of all movies available for German audiences between the years of 1933 and 1945 were Lustspiele, plays of a humorous nature. 4 Most of them were German-produced, but among the most successful were also a significant number that wore the label "made in Hollywood," an occurrence that seems less surprising when we consider that American films remained in distribution in Germany until 1939 and in certain places even until 194J.5 Karsten Witte has pointed out that following the Nazi takeover in 1933, rather than going through a short episode of radical transformation, the German film industry experienced a long period of transition. 6 Moreover, what was initially envisioned as Ufa's transitional phase by Promi in many ways became the normal film practice. Nazi cinema, especially the films made in the years immediately succeeding the Nazis' seizure of power, often 98

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Figure 3.1. Publicity photos of Harvey frequently looked like Hollywood glamour shots.

showed more affinities with Hollywood and Weimar traditions than they did to the "new way of thinking," the National Socialist neue Geist? This was especially apparent in Ufa's construction of new screen idols, and in particular Marlene Dietrich's "replacement" Zarah Leander, as well as in its treatment of already established stars such Lilian Harvey. Unlike the "innocent" Soderbaum or the "instant-diva" Leander, Harvey was not an ingenue, but a seasoned star figure deeply rooted in Weimar and Hollywood. With respect to National Socialism and its conception of "new womanhood" Harvey's general association with extrafascist prototypes created a number of complications.

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To make matters worse, on January 30, 1933---the day Hitler came to power-Lilian Harvey was already on her way to America, a fact that would later result in her being accused of "escaping the Reich"(Reichsflucht).B She was soon followed by screenwriters Walter Reisch and Robert Liebmann, composer Franz Wachsmann, director Friedrich Hollaender, producer Erich Pommer, and actors Mady Christians, Conrad Veidt, and Heinrich Gretler. All of them had worked on Harvey's latest picture Ich und die Kaiserin (The Empress and I, Ufa, 1933), which finished shooting in January 1933.9 Lilian Harvey had decided to leave long before the political upheaval that motivated many of her colleagues and especially the Jewish ones to emigrate. Like other European superstars of the time, she had been wooed and won by a seductive offer from Fox, which was eager to appropriate overseas talent, hoping to thereby gain Europe's most charismatic actors for their own productions and simultaneously destroy their foreign competitors by luring away their biggest stars.l0 As one of the most popular female actresses of the Weimar period at the height of her Ufa career, Harvey had every reason to assume she would be successful in the United States. In 1933 a reader poll conducted by the journal Licht-Bild-Bahne confirmed Harvey as Germany's number one female star, ahead of both Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. l1 In fact, Harvey-who was born to a British mother and a German father12 but largely raised in Germany-was already an international star. She had performed in several successful multiple-language versions of her Ufa musicals (French, British, and German versions that, aside from Harvey, costarred different national actors) that had made her popular not only in Germany, but also in England and France.B Readers of the French magazine Pour Vous, for instance, voted her the most popular non-French actress in 1932.14 In addition, 52 percent of all foreign film imports on the American market came from Germany, among them, of course, Ufa's most popular films starring Lilian Harvey. Once in Hollywood, however, Harvey encountered fierce competition and only moderate success. Dissatisfied with her status as a small fish in a very large pond, and because of a personal romance with her protege, director Paul Martin, Harvey returned to Berlin only two years later, having made only a few unremarkable films in Hollywood. Hollywood's other big German hire, Marlene Dietrich-an actress who had

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been less firmly established as a long-term German star when she first came to the United States, but was already very successful in Hollywood by the time Harvey arrived-would later be canonized as the quintessential female star emigre. Conversely Lilian Harvey, in lieu of Hollywood fame, almost instantly resumed her big screen success in Germany when she returned in 1935, starring in some of National Socialist cinema's most successful and, many critics agree, most interesting comedies. However, despite her desperate attempts to find film work in France, Hollywood, and postwar Germany, Harvey's film career ended abruptly only a few years later with a second emigration in 1939. Lilian Harvey first appeared on the German screen in the Austrianproduced Der Fluch (The Curse, 1924) and subsequently appeared in more than thirty silent and sound pictures before shooting her first American movie in 1933. As a Weimar actress, she did not star in films we nOW associate with German expressionism. Instead she often portrayed frisky coquettes in comic dramas of mistaken identity, playing, as Karsten Witte puts it, "the heiresses of the Germanized versions of the Hollywood comedy."15 Her attraction was that of a "girl," an image reminiscent of Mary Pickford or Lilian Gish (Fig. 3.2). "Ufa exploited Lilian Harvey's cuteness," argues Witte, "her spruceness combined with a twist of overwrought sauciness," which resulted in the "fusion of child-woman Shirley Temple and the German Gretchen."16 A popular song from the 1930 film Liebeswalzer (Love Waltz, Ufa, 1930) dubbed Harvey the "sweetest girl in the world" and thus solidified a characterization that she would not be able to escape thereafter. Although Harvey's early roles showed her as a generic girlish flapper, her appearances in the late 1920s paired her with silent-screen heartthrob Willy Fritsch and quickly constructed Harvey into the female half of Ufa's number one, and arguably only, "dream couple."17 Harvey's success as Fritsch's perpetual love interest in a number of romantic comedies, and the enormous fascination the press and public developed in their private relationship, subsequently locked both actors into a partnership that dominated the rest of their careers. By 1933, the Harvey-Fritsch pair was an established fixture in the Ufa firmament, and the officials of the Ministry of Propaganda quickly declared its reconstruction upon Harvey's return in 1935 as a cultural triumph, rather than an unfortunate atavism. 'The emancipation of the day," Ernst Bloch wrote in 1937, "was the return of the prodigal daughter."18 Har-

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Figure 3.2. Little Lilian: Harvey's body seemed. almost preadolescent and avoided. the associations with adult sexuality and desire that other female star images accentuated..

vey was presented as reformed, tired of Hollywood superficiality, and happy to turn to more "serious" screenplays.19 Despite the familiar Heim ins Reich narrative, however, Lilian Harvey remained in many ways more of a Weimar or Hollywood star than she became a National Socialist heroine. Newspaper headlines from the 1920s and early 1930s, proclaiming that Harvey bathed in champagne and had her nails cov-

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ered in mother of pearl and reports that Willy Fritsch lived a homosexuallifestyle, linked the couple to "prefascist excess" and were not easily forgotten, especially since Harvey continued to frequently present herself as enjoying her well-deserved luxuries. 2o In addition, the standardized narrative that came to mark Harvey films of the Nazi era often initially represented Harvey as an unruly or androgynous figure. Even in her National Socialist films, Harvey's erotics still derived from a certain pubescent appeal; often, she is mistaken for a teenage boy or displays qualities that were not considered feminine. Although these attributes tended to become the starting point for a narrative "taming of the shrew," as Eric Rentschler suggests, Harvey's almost asexual screen persona also moved away from the National Socialist ideal of womanhood. 21 A comparison between Harvey and National Socialist stars like Leander or Soderbaum, whose careers began long after the Nazis had established themselves as cultural "reformers," elucidates such differences. If Kristina SOderbaum's melodramas approximated narrative models that pointed toward the ''blood and soil" rhetoric of National Socialist ideology, the problems we encounter in her star persona derived from inconsistencies that were inherent in National Socialist philosophy and political practice vis-a.-vis the role of women-its strange mix of patriarchal conservatism, women's emancipation, and political participation. Soderbaum might have been naive and virginal, but her body spoke of "womanliness" and her physicality was linked to sex. This tension frequently elicited the narrative problematic of her melodramas, furnishing a trajectory from innocent sexuality to corrupted maidenhood or disappointed desire. Zarah Leander, on the other hand, was "all woman" to begin with. Her sexual experience, acknowledged desire, and often her motherhood constituted the starting point for a narrative development that worked in a direction opposite to Soderbaum's films. Leander's films began with a worldly "diva" who was then purified, cleaned up, and brought back to a more conventionally moral status quo. In contrast, Lilian Harvey was not really a "woman" at all, but an audacious, sprightly girl at play in a musical land of song and dance. Further, her musical comedies did not necessarily require her characters to fundamentally change. There never was anything threatening about Harvey's femininity to begin with. Morals were never seriously at stake.

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Harvey's sexuality was innocently romantic; her actions carried the weight of a childish prank. Amusing and light, Harvey's films assumed that their narrative events and conflicts would turn out to be much ado about nothing and inevitably result in the marriage between Harvey's and Fritsch's screen characters. For Karsten Witte, Lilian Harvey's onscreen appearances even recall a mechanical doll, rather than a lively child: Ufa's direction, who wished to launch her, as neither a vamp nor a lady, but as "the sweetest girl in the world," left her with only one facial expression: mechanized jolliness. Harvey always wanted to glide across the parquet floor like a fairy, but her patter more closely resembled a woundup puppet. This siren never sang, she whined out of a built-in voice box. . . . Lilian Harvey, always the dream in blonde and the lucky kid, was the perfect synthetic actress, whose human traits consequently picked up the mechanics of animation. 22

The criticism that Lilian Harvey seemed lifeless and artificial, however, does not make it any easier to connect her exclusively to National Socialist aesthetics. Busby Berkeley's Hollywood musicals, for instance, or Weimar's popular Tiller girls of the 1920s, also engaged heavily in generating mechanized spectacles of femininityP In addition, we must remember that National Socialist ideologues proclaimed that the new German film heroines had left behind all artifice and instead appeared "natural, fresh, pleasant, relaxed and real."24 Both the lack of seriousness and the excessive artifice we encounter in Harvey (in her films, star interviews, and public appearances) indicate that Harvey's persona is not easily absorbed into the National Socialists' rhetorical and aesthetic framework, which on the contrary can be frequently identified by its ponderous stylistics and ideological earnestness. Rather, Harvey's artificiality and antirealism sidestepped politics, functioning neither as an affirmation nor a condemnation but simply existing alongside it, innocently sparkling and ostensibly unbiased. The ideological problems embedded in Lilian Harvey's image point to Weimar holdovers---consumerism, internationalism, modernity, and mass culture--that became visible against the backdrop of Nazism's ideological system. Anton Kaes sees Lilian Harvey as essentially "modern," "neither vamp nor mother, but an audacious coquette with androgynous traits," and thus firmly connects her to her Weimar roots.25 This leads us to wonder just how scrupulously Hitler's regime imp le-

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mented the changes they envisioned. That is to say, while National Socialist culture was repressive in some areas, it was lenient in others, tolerating many trends and fashions that didn't fit the party program in a strict ideological sense. "Nazi aesthetics were anti-Modernist, racistpopulist and neo-classicist," explains Thomas Elsaesser, but "Nazi art practice, by contrast, took the form of an extremely eclectic historicism, ... a coexistence [of stylistic elements] that could be said to prefigure post-modernism's 'anything goes.' "26 In other words, Harvey's troubled gender identities, her insecure position somewhere between glamour star and girl-next-door, and her frequent narrative confusion about heterosexual fulfillment and personal independence all point to the ideological conflicts surrounding the position of women that were triggered by the introduction of women's political and social emancipation decades earlier. Furthermore, these discourses marked the social sphere of modernity in all Western nations at the time and, as a result of the Nazis' repressive politics regarding women, were in fact less prominent in many other areas of National Socialist culture. "[Harvey's] films showed," Klaus Kreirneier contends, "that the 'American' star cult, insofar as it still rudimentarily existed within the National Socialist Ufa, was hard to instrumentalize for the regime's hero- and Fuhrer worship; it didn't stand in opposition to it, but it didn't have anything in common with it either."27 Yet perhaps, as many critics have countered, the existence of a star like Harvey weakened the public's impression that the Nazis fully intended to insert their convictions into every area of cultural and public life. Goebbels frequently underlined the importance of a "politics-free" cultural sphere, suggesting that overindoctrination might exhaust the public'S tolerance for the Nazis' political invasion into everyday life. In fact, as Hans Dieter Schafer has illustrated so strikingly, the prewar years in National Socialist Germany-to those who were not specifically targeted by the Nazi repression (i.e., Jews, Gypsies, communists, and gays)-had an impressive cosmopolitan flair. Schafer's muchquoted stroll through an imaginary Berlin in 1937 convincingly illustrates this contention: "From 25 to 30 September 1937, the Kurbel on the Kurrurstendamm ran, a Marlene Dietrich retrospective. As Mussolini drove down the Via Triumphalis [with Hitler], one could enter the film world of Shanghai Express, and afterward in the Femina-Bar applaud Teddy Staufer, who ... in his own way denied Hitler's militarism and

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chauvinism as he played 'Swingin' for the King' and 'Goody, Goody.' "28 This perceived tolerance of the cultural system, Schafer's "split consciousness," then, might be regarded as an ideological stratagem that deliberately allowed for, in Rentschler's words, a "double identity" that provided "a respite from the hard work increasingly demanded of Germans, the constant sacrifice, the atmosphere of threat."29 Taking these considerations into account, we still can look at Lilian Harvey from other angles. Even if the Nazis rationalized all of National Socialist culture as a box of tricks which in some way or another allowed Hitler's totalitarianism to become a functional system--or, more particularly, if stars under National Socialism could not help but become tools whom the Nazis tried to use to further the National Socialist causetheir sociohistorical function can neither be fixed nor limited to these determinants. In fact, Anton Kaes suggests that the utopian illusionism we encounter in Lilian Harvey's National Socialist films is present in her Weimar pictures as well: "As much as [Harvey's] films were products of the German culture industry and, according to Horkheimer / Adorno's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment,' should be considered 'mass deceptions,' most of them still kept alive a spark of the utopian promise of happiness. 'Somewhere in this world, there is a little bit of happiness,' Lilian Harvey sang in Ein blonder Traum (1932), and thus spoke for thousands, who-with all their false consciousness-warmed themselves at the thought."30 Thus, the debates surrounding the ideological function of mass culture, and not only in Harvey's case, do not produce analytical results that are necessarily germane to Nazi film culture. Rather, Frankfurt school models of cultural analysis disclose the commonalties between fascist and other Western-capitalist operations. "If we consider Nazi cinema as part of popular culture's propaganda for consumerism," says Thomas Elsaesser, " ... then their popularity makes more sense, because we still share the same aspirations toward the good life embodied in lifestyles and consumption."31 To say that National Socialist film allowed for cultural gaps that were deliberately kept free of overt propagandistic content does not explain why a star like Harvey bridges these gaps. Winfried Gunther's fictive critical dialogue cynically comments on the limits of oversimplified readings of stars like Harvey:

Lilian Harvey 107 A: Now we haven't said anything about Lilian Harvey as a

"prototypical image of woman," which "within the cultural politics of the Third Reich didn't only have an unbiased entertainment function." B: ... yes, exactly, how Harvey ideologically supported fascist rule by appearing on screen-or was it the other way round: was she supposed to distract from it through her entertainment function? Or did she support fascist rule precisely by distracting from it? In any case, the master teachers of Vergangheitsbewiiltigung [coming to terms with the past] will accuse us of being totally uncriticaP2

Although Gunther's ironic listing of the prototypical exegetic results that frequently appear in the critical analysis of female star figures serves here as a polemic, the ease with which he summarizes the central arguments of contemporary National Socialist criticism also warns against an overreliance on generalizations and its lack of specificity. As the embodiment of a "cross-over star" -a figure who circulated with astounding ease between systems of political opposition-Lilian Harvey's example attests to the interdiscursive relationships that informed popular culture during National Socialism, as well as its aforementioned reliance on Hollywood models, Weimar traditions, and the historical context of modernity.

THE "SWEETEST GIRL IN THE WORLD" AS AN INTERNATIONAL STAR

From its very beginning Lilian Harvey's star image straddled the notion of everyday normalcy and the overdetermined imagery of superstardom, of cheerful down-to-earth attitudes and lifestyles awash in excessive luxuries and overconsumption. The first model originated in tandem with Harvey's introduction into stardom in the 1920s: the film media's construction of a girl full of enthusiasm and dreamy aspirations. The latter image, that of a fur-clad power player in control of her productions, went along with Harvey's star appearance once she had achieved the status of full celebrity in the 1930s. In this Harvey did not differ significantly from ather stars, especially Hollywood actors; both Harvey representations coalesce into what we generally encounter in stars, that is, a configuration that John Ellis describes as an image "com-

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posed of elements which do not cohere, of contradictory tendencies."33 Harvey's fusion of the ordinary with the extraordinary simply conformed to the general practices of Hollywood star manufacture, which in many ways found its German equivalent in the Ufa studios. The excessive images of "star-ness" that surrounded Harvey, however, were what made her an anachronism in National Socialist Germany, where overindulgence and excess were primarily reserved for inherently fascist fantasies of military strength and nationalist pathos. As we saw earlier, National Socialism had a complicated relationship with the concept of stardom, resulting in the ideological creed that "the star must die, so that film can live!"34 Yet the notion that star status was generally undesirable in popular performers-Harvey or any other-was in itself never fully pursued, by either Ufa or Goebbels's Promi; too precious were the returns guaranteed by star successes within Ufa's studio system. Moreover, the ideological impact that could be achieved through the alliance between a popular performer and a political film narrative was invaluable for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, Harvey's particular association with wealth and light entertainment went beyond her obvious status as a movie star; it also separated her from the ideal of the new Ufa player. In an article, entitled "Brave Little Women," the journal Filmwelt summarized what distinguished the female stars of the previous era from the contemporary National Socialist heroines: The type of woman we encounter everywhere these days is fundamentally different from her most recent predecessors .... The "film heroine" of today is one of us, one of the anny of the everyday, with our problems and worries, who shares our joys and cheerfulness. She is not a "diva", and when we just called her a "heroine", we did it in the hope that we wouldn't be misunderstood. Because these brave little women do not want to be seen as "heroines", they don't think that giving their whole being is in any way unusual or deserving of special mention. 35

This renegotiated interpretation of Weimar's Filmstern described a star concept with which other actresses-led by Kristina Soderbaumeasily harmonized, while Harvey's association with consumption and movie star lifestyles worked against it. The fact that Harvey belonged to a supposedly outmoded paradigm of stardom, from the spoiled yet innocent child ingenue to the glamorous film diva, consequently prevented her from being fully appropriated by what National Socialist

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philosophy saw as its own brand of "political correctness. Instead her image upheld star models belonging to both the antecedent Weimar star culture and the contemporaneous practices of the Hollywood studio system. In I92S-when Harvey had not yet been signed by Ufa and was under contract with her "discoverer," producer Richard Eichberg-"little Lilian" emerged in the press as an adorable child, a Gennan Mary Pickford. The magazine Der Film, for instance, wrote the same year: liThe image of Lilian going to bed with her teddy bear is perhaps the best in the whole film [Liebe und Trompetenblasen, 1925]."36 Harvey perpetuated her infantilized image in public interviews. Asked about the best and the worst role she ever played, Harvey answered in 1926: liThe best part was the one that I have not yet played. (For instance kissing a lover or getting a raise from the director.) The worst part was Die Kleine vom Bummel [Little Girl Shopping, 1925], because I never got to the studio having had a good night's sleep."37 The kind of artistic naivete and sexual ignorance expressed in this statement also emerged in publicity photographs. One, for example, featured Harvey in her apartment wearing silk pajamas, whistling to her canary, and carrying a stuffed animal. Harvey also began to publish her own writings, short magazine segments recounting her views and experiences, a habit she followed throughout her career, thus actively participating in the "writing" of her star persona. 38 One of her first articles, for instance, emphasized Harvey's virginity: "[In school] I didn't yet know the value of innocence, since it consists of losing it. I had no word for it, since it didn't get 10st."39 And again in 1930: "00 you think I've ever had the chance to live an adventure? ... [M]y contract doesn't allow it: a moral life is the main condition .... I'd really like to be just any little girl and experience a great adventure."4o The absence of Harvey's real-life relationships (with Willy Fritsch and Paul Martin) in these texts produced a dreamily romantic sexuality for Harvey that precluded a direct link with sex. Peculiarly, this model of romantic engagement and sexual abstinence continued to be played out in the construction of the Harvey-Fritsch dream couple. As soon as Harvey and Fritsch began acting together onscreen, their private relationship was subject to intense media attention and speculation.41 Harvey and Fritsch regularly appeared as a couple, star postcards showed them vacationing together in exotic locations, and they gave joint interviews. Yet they denied a romantic relationship, perII

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haps in deliberately unconvincing terms.42 Aside from Ufa-controlled press releases, the emerging yellow press of the Weimar years perpetuated the intrigue surrounding the couple's romantic status. A front-page headline of a 1932 daily, for instance, announced liThe Truth About lilian Harvey," "revealing" in the article that Harvey was not British but German and that Fritsch and Harvey were "secretly married," that Fritsch was not "the other way around" (homosexual), and that the couple simply kept separate flats to maintain the illusion of availability for their enamored fan audience. 43 Of course, Ufa denied such claims. Discourses on the stars' private and professional identities were thus closely monitored to maintain a cohesive redundancy between the star and his or her film persona: Harvey and Fritsch could neither be perceived as living together as sexual partners, which would undermine their onscreen appeal as a couple whose romance was always just about to blossom, nor could they be convincingly confirmed as "just friends," resulting in the disappointment of the spectator's fantasies. Lilian Harvey therefore remained an innocent, while fully engaging in the romantic couple. This dual mechanism of star publicity-in support of both the cinematic illusion and the maintenance of a consistent star image-finds its equivalent in the American star system. Harvey's image was also strongly linked with popular fashion, an upper-class lifestyle, and conspicuous consumption. Magazine features showed her giving instruction in Charleston dance steps; she lectured on the virtues of horseback riding and provided insights into the complexities of film fashions. 44 Star postcards and magazine photos of a "private" Harvey further support Harvey's complete immersion in and promotion of Weimar's culture of modernity. She was depicted in her splendid art deco apartment, posed with Fritsch in front of a luxurious ski resort, and went from brunette to platinum blonde. As Lilian Harvey grew up onscreen, joining Fritsch as Germany's quintessential star couple, she was simultaneously transformed into the epitome of the extravagant star actress. While publicity about Harvey continued to point to her natural "girl-next-door" appeal, she nonetheless appeared in splendid movie-star attire: she arrived at her film premieres in ostentatious gowns or mink coats and departed for her villa in the south of France in a much-photographed custom-made white Mercedes convertible with the license plate lA-lIllI, suggesting that her quality rating was of the highest order. Harvey's embrace of upper class

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signifiers thus invited the fantasy of social upward mobility in the female viewer. In other words, Harvey's star image was an open invitation to unbridled consumerism, and a frustrating blueprint for the countless deprived young women of the Depression era. In Weimar Germany, just as in the United States, a relationship existed between star images and their commercial exploitation through consumerism beyond box offices sales. 45 Hollywood and Ufa models heavily stimulated the garment industry, while (privileged upper-class) consumers were inspired to purchase the latest movie styles. In America, Harvey's depiction as a creature of luxury introduced the star in a similar vein. The Mercedes that Harvey had purchased after signing a contract with Fox accompanied Harvey to Hollywood in 1933. It was a unique luxury car rivaled only by Gary Cooper's Duesenberg. 46 The publication Screen Play described Harvey's Hollywood arrival as follows: Lilian Harvey, the prize package of Europe, arrived neatly wrapped in cellophane, and stamped with the official seal of Hollywood. A stranger in a strange land, Miss Harvey was more like Hollywood than any of the natives! ... It seems as if Lilian Harvey, the most famous screen star in all Europe, really belonged in Hollywood. Everything about her was typical of Hollywood. Not only that, she went the local stars one better on every point of glamour. A twenty-five-carat diamond ring weighed down her engagement finger. Diamond bracelets encrusted her arms. Her bare toes, peeking through sandals, revealed manicured toenails lacquered blood red. Her car, a glittering snow-white Mercedes coupe, was longer and more spectacular than any other motor seen in Hollywood! Her gowns were more exotic and extreme than anything worn by native stars .... All the other foreign stars who have been brought here have been a far cry from the types glorified in pictures. Often they have been frumpish in their clothes, shy or quaint in their manner, bewildered or awed by the sights Hollywood had to offer.... The other foreign stars "went Hollywood" after they got here. She was Hollywood when she arrived. 47

Almost daily updates followed in the press. Fashion spreads and star photographs were published in abundance. Harvey's friendship with Gary Cooper led the gossip columnists to romance speculations. Hollywood's star-making efforts worked to perfection. "Here's a new star who's a real star," announced a Fox publicity ad, "she fascinates ... she devastates ... exhilarates ... sings, dances and entrances. It will be love at first sight when your audience sees this diminutive darling in 'My

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Weakness' ... another FOX hit."48 The American press and audiences liked Harvey, even though her films flopped or were even held back from release. 49 Back in Germany, however, the tepid reception of Harvey's Hollywood films inspired gloating comments in the Nazi press, which treated the absentee Ufa star with reservations. My Weakness was banned by the National Socialist censors, and My Lips Betray inspired the journal Filmwoche to taunt, "didn't they say that America could offer her better opportunities than Germany; didn't they say she was overly typecast in Berlin-and that she needed America to achieve new accomplishments, encounter more liberal themes and greater challenges? ... It seems that we'll have to wait."so In fact, Ufa's perception of Harvey's continuing popularity was so unstable that on learning of Harvey's plans to return to Germany in 1934, Ufa sent a memo to all its theaters requesting feedback as to "whether we should take her under contract again," and if so, "what film partners should she be paired with."51 When she finally did arrive, however, she was publicly received with open arms. Her "homecoming" was portrayed as the return of a remorseful daughter, who had learned "[t]hat Hollywood wasn't the perfect film paradise. It had as many disappointments in store for her as it had for all the others who had arrived from Europe with the highest hopes. But then she hadn't gone over to stay forever, but to see new things, to gain experience and learn.... the artistic results of her two years in Hollywood were not productive, but on a human and intellectuallevel they were important."52 Akin to the representation of other film stars in Nazi Germany-especially of Zarah Leander-Harvey was subsequently discussed in a manner that simultaneously sought to justify, or even rectify, her star-ness on the one hand, and uphold and maintain her established star persona on the other. The biography that contains the above quotation also featured numerous glamour shots of Harvey in Hollywood: Harvey in her villa, at the pool, with Gary Cooper, and so on. In fact, the Americanism implied in Lilian Harvey's Hollywood history remained a constant referent in connection with both her films-especially Lucky Kids-and her perception as a star. Gary Cooper's 1938 visit to Babelsberg, where he met both Willy Fritsch and Karl Ritter, further strengthened the public's perception that strong ties still existed between Berlin and Hollywood.53 Moreover, Harvey's U.S. interlude was now justified in the National Socialist press

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as educational, having provided valuable lessons likely to influence and improve the quality of German film work. 54 Harvey also continued to be seen enjoying consumer luxuries and displaying aristocratic pretensions; she purchased a castle in Hungary (Paul Martin's homeland) and bred Austrian Lippizaner horses, a lifestyle that invoked class privilege rather than the labors of a hard day's work. Yet while Harvey continued to appear heavily made up on screen, or even as a cross-dressing tomboy, there were also attempts to shift her physical image. She still dressed in fancy designer gowns on opening night-as did all Ufa stars of the time-but several columns criticized Harvey's figure as too thin, arguing that Harvey had returned with a look that was out of synch with the "healthy" body that was the new National Socialist idea1. 55 Harvey's continuing waiflike appeal, a body image that never fully developed into sexually realized adulthood, did not present a welcome model for female viewers under National Socialism, because it offered an identity that neglected rather than foregrounded the possibility of pregnancy. Consequently, the star discourse Ufa created around Harvey's persona attempted to include elements that would suggest a more contemporary, that is National Socialist-friendly, image for the star. Now Harvey posed in fashion spreads modeling clothing inspired by traditional local costumes (the subheading reads: "Does she appeal, the pretty lass, in her colorful embroidered peasant dress?").56 A 16 mm star documentary available for sale to fans, which presented a day in the life of Lilian Harvey, not only included Harvey undergoing her daily exercise routine and breakfast with her mother, but also showed her weeding in the garden and feeding the chickens.57 Furthermore, her diligence and work ethic, as well as her status as artist, were strongly foregrounded to correct the previous impression of effortlessness and privilege. Her Hollywood reminiscences also began to include critical sentiments or efforts at redemptive retraction. Asked about meeting Greta Garbo, for example, Harvey explained that this Hollywood diva par excellence preferred not to wear makeup and wore practical clothing when in private. 58 In Kristina SOderbaum, we have already encountered the notion of the film artist as "natural" and "worker"; and in Zarah Leander's star persona we will find a concerted effort to fuse these notions with the figure of the tragic diva. We can see here that Harvey's star representation in National Socialist Germany also showed

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traces of this model. Yet they were implemented only with considerable difficulty. Edith Hamann's biographical Harvey booklet from 1938, for instance, struggled to rewrite Harvey's life story as follows: There still are plenty of people, especially among the young ones, who imagine the life of a film actress as being idle happiness and pleasure, particularly of an actress like Lilian Harvey ... who continuously appears as cheerful and radiant as a little Fortuna .... And even those older and more contemplative, who know that being an artist means being a worker, often allow themselves to be deceived by superficial appearances: elegant cars, wonderful clothes, beautiful houses and all the other things that belong to film actors as much as advertising belongs to their films. But even Lilian Harvey will look back on her life some day and ascertain with great amusement that it has all been "a lot of effort and work."59

In this passage the very tensions that prevented the ready integration of film stars into the overall paradigm of the National Socialist social sphere are clearly spelled out. In fact, most National Socialist writings that dealt with the star "Lilian Harvey" attempted first to address and then to correct the public's perception of the actress. The Nazi journal Der Deutsche Film, for instance, wrote in 1937: "Yet we have to remove all sorts of obstacles to be able to catch a brief glance of the real film actress Lilian Harvey. One will have to imagine as absent almost all of the photo, interview and anecdotal materials of the Harvey publicity: Lilian before departing at the airport, Lilian taking off, Lilian arriving at the airport, Lilian at, on, above or under water, Lilian like this or this or that. Behind this publicity Lilian there is Harvey, the artist, to be discovered anew."60 Another example of such counteractive rhetoric appeared in the publication Gefilmter Tanz: "Lilian Harvey does absolutely not belong to those stars, spoiled by life, who suddenly light up in movie heaven and overpower everything with the shining glare of their successes. It has been a slow, earnest and not in any way easy journey she had to put behind her, before her name became to mean something in film art."61 The "revisionist" discourse that Lilian Harvey's new star coverage engendered, however, must be seen as complementary, existing alongside rather than replacing the star's former image. In other words, these authors' insistence on the notion that a life of a star is not experienced by the star in the way audiences imagine it, does not in any way change that fantasy. Given the strength of Harvey's preexisting star image, and

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her continuing deviation from National Socialist models of womanhood on screen, Harvey's star sign never underwent a complete reconstruction. Richard Dyer has explored the notion of star authenticity arguing that even "features on stars which tell us that the star is not like he or she appears to be on screen serve to reinforce the authenticity of the star image as a whole, ... [while] many star images were authenticated by showing that the star really was like he or she was on the screen."62 Dyers's analysis is particularly relevant to Harvey's case since both her star appearance offscreen and her film roles deviated from what the Nazi media attempted to suggest. Harvey's film roles especially continued to depict her as inexperienced, innocent, and playful (even the professional Maria in Frau am Steuer [Woman at the Wheel, 1939] keeps a stuffed animal in her desk) and thus easily reconnected her to even her early Weimar representations as a vivacious child surrounded by toys, which countered the impression of Harvey as a matured artist. Moreover, one of the central elements of Harvey's star persona, the one that allowed Harvey to be read as sexually conservative, yet reassuringly heterosexual-a set of signifiers that affirm the patriarchal elements in Nazi culture--collapsed in 1937 when Willy Fritsch married the revue star Dinah Grace. Harvey's imaginary real-life relationship with her costar, her involvement in the fantasy of the "dream-couple" was thus dismantled by actual events. 'What should one say about confusion of meaning in the audience, who want to project everything that happens in the unreality of the screen into reality, where it absolutely will not happen?" wondered a National Socialist critic, who continued: "Even as we try to clear out the attic of the German film industry (which includes the German audience), and begin to sweep out the tender cobwebs of false meanings, ... we have to stop and smile at such sweet manifestations of film insanity."63 Once again National Socialist criticism pointed to the Nazis' supposed reformation of film function, its systematic housecleaning targeting both the notion of stardom and film spectatorship. Yet in this case, what needed "sweeping out" was foundational to the illusionism that underlay Harvey's stardom. One can easily argue that Harvey's image after the Fritschian nuptials shifted in a direction that was quite the opposite of the National Socialist ideal of either womanhood or stardom. In fact, the descriptive elements of Harvey's star persona that were left over after the "private" Harvey "left" the romantic couple cumulatively revealed Harvey's rad-

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ical privileging of stardom over all concerns that were generally connected with more ordinary women's "model" lives: ambitious careerism (she was perceived as having left Fritsch to pursue a Hollywood career), single womanhood (Harvey was unmarried until a brief marriage in the 1950s; her relationship with Paul Martin was never publicly mentioned outside Hollywood), childlessness, and the aforementioned emphasis on the excessive enjoyment of consumer luxuries. By virtue of reduction, Harvey's image now mainly consisted of elements that did anything but redress her generic description as a star. What remained instead was a ladylike icon that furnished a model for contemporary female spectators that in no way corresponded to Nazi-propagandist Julius Streicher's 1937 appeal to women never to become "ladies" -associated with bourgeois modernity-but "remain German girls and women."64 Nevertheless Harvey's unruly modernity might also fit another kind of Nazi paradigm, one less ideologically consistent, but no less foundational to the workings of Nazi economics: a system of commodification and commercial advertising. In Thomas Elsaesser's words, "as long as Ufa was profitable, and also an important promotional tool for German goods and the German way of life ... , it could behave as a style-guide, a brand-leader with the zeitgeist on its side."65 Harvey's luxury consumption and fashion styles, if seen in this light, do not serve to counter the workings of the Nazi regime; they actually work to uphold the economic underpinnings of its capitalism. Yet the fantasies of consumption that the overdetermined images of female glamour may have inspired in spectators can also be read as stretching beyond considerations of cultural product placement and invisible capitalist machinations. As Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog have emphasized, women's identification with glamour stars may very well also involve a (perhaps false) empowering component, suggesting that "women who read star beauty and fashion advice would know that this rise [to stardom] could be achieved through good grooming, diet, exercise and proper dress."66It follows that Lilian Harvey's consolidation as such a star, while working within the framework of capitalism, simultaneously described a female fantasy that elides the material considerations of the market and gives way to sentiments of identification and desire. Of course, Harvey was not alone in her alternative representation of womanhood. Nazi cinema provided a whole stable of "ladies." Cinzia

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Romani names Olga Tschechowa, Lil Dagover, and Henny Porten as personifying fashionable life, and similar arguments can be made for almost any other Third Reich actress, at least in tenns of their extra textual appearance as female stars.67 As Liliane Crips has shown, women's magazines that targeted the privileged, such as the journal Die Dame (The Lady), continued to foreground Parisian elegance and the worldly lifestyles of the affluent. 68 In the years 1938-1939, for instance, the magazine published features on the international aristocracy, special travel reports on Italy, reviews of the Paris collections, to name only a few, and even printed society portraits that showed the Nazi leadership, such as the Goebbels family, in a decidedly bourgeois context. 69 What this dearly indicates is that a number of discourses predating the Nazi era emerged in the star figure of Lilian Harvey, as well in the general contemporary of National Socialist popular culture, without significant alteration. That is to say that even in their description of commodity fetishism, these discourses might be productive of, but not gennane to, Nazism. It is interesting to note that the Nazi press worked much less hard to unite the contradictions between Harvey's image and the National Socialist ideal of womanhood than it did in the case of Zarah Leander. Instead they simply tolerated or even encouraged the associations with Weimar and Hollywood that Harvey's crossover image triggered, thereby using her to demonstrate that Nazi cinema also possessed the kind of competitive universalism that might enable it to triumph on the international film front. Zarah Leander's star sign in many ways functioned as a bridge between the image of an absent Marlene Dietrich and the "new" woman of National Socialism, whereas Harvey, as long as she was in Gennany, was an original that had been preserved. This also might account for the fact that the media took no notice when Harvey left Gennany for a second time in 1939. Losing another one of the great prewar Ufa stars, especially one who had returned from Hollywood before, was an embarrassment. In 1942 the office of propaganda (Reichspropagandaamt) issued press orders that instructed the media not to report "the revocation of Lilian Harvey's citizenship"(Ausbiirgerung).7oUnlike the case of Zarah Leander, whose return to Sweden was vehemently condemned in the propaganda press, Lilian Harvey's second "defection" was quietly ignored, while new Ufa stars such as Hungarian Marika Rokk gained popularity in the musical genre. 7l

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Harvey's position in Nazi cinema is therefore limited to a prewar discourse that still allowed for a cultural sphere that was inclusive of elements of transition. Both her Nazi films and the image the National Socialist star coverage tried to produce for the actress clearly showed traces of the regime's ideological propaganda work, but the "star" Lilian Harvey remained at its core embedded within the frameworks of Weimar and Hollywood stardom. COMEDIENNE, DANCER, SWEETHEART: LILIAN HARVEY PLAYS GERMANY'S GIRL-NEXT-DoOR

Lilian Harvey's description as a comedy star combined the physical impression of frailty, connoted through her small body frame, with a standard story line that circulated around Harvey as the narrative source of turbulent mixups that set in motion a comedic carousel of confusion and mistaken identity. Her early Weimar appearances already showed Harvey in a large number of silent pictures that told of her charades and usually involved her assuming multiple screen personae and a number of different suitors among whom Harvey had to choose (e.g., Prinzessin Trulala, 1926; Die keusche Susanne, 1926; Vater werden ist nicht schwer, 1926; Du sollst nicht stehlen. Ein Spiel von Gaunerei und Liebe, 1928). This pattern of joyful confusion, anticipating the American screwball comedy, was further amplified through Harvey's casting in a double role in several films.72 In 1928, Harvey left the Eichberg-Film-G.m.b.H., which had produced her first films, after a legal battle and signed a contract with Ufa guaranteeing her generous compensation and the right to influence the selection of screenplays in which she would star. 73 This union resulted in a solidified paradigmatic story concept for Ufa's use of Harvey to which both parties would stick from then on. To describe her part in Die Drei von der Tankstelle (The Trio from the Gas Station, 1930), one of the most successful Harvey-Fritsch's musical comedies, for instance, Harvey outlined her typical role: "It [The Trio from the Gas Station] points to the rebirth of romantic films and of the carefree, joyful, young heroine. I love such roles. No matter in what time period the story is set, how tight my corset is laced or in what kind of impressive hair-do I appear, I am always the same girl, who is keen to playa prank, cheerful and unencumbered. I have always played such heroines, starring with

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Willy Fritsch, Harry Liedtke and Henri Garat. In Germany, Willy Fritsch has always been my main partner."74 Indeed, Harvey's partnership with Fritsch began as early as 1926 with Die keusche Susanne (Chaste Susanne), which paired Harvey as the morally righteous Susanne with Fritsch as a charming good-for-nothing. While Chaste Susanne ended with Susanne's return to her proper fiance, Ihr dunkler Punkt (Her Dark Secret, 1929) three years later joined the couple in the end, setting a precedent for the majority of the two performers' future productions. The couple's success can be seen to derive from both the contrast and the similarity between them. On the one hand, the physically overpowering Fritsch emphasized Harvey's girlish frailty, while simultaneously giving her self-assured resistance a comical edge. In Ursula Vossen's words, "Fritsch's vital, youthful masculinity that carried paternalistic undertones was most successful next to the doll-like Harvey, whose coquettish girlishness in turn needed the massive Fritsch."75 On the other hand, both players seemed compatible insofar as they suggested a fundamental immaturity; neither fully functioned as a "grown-up" in their joint films, where they shared a tirelessly jolly optimism and-in keeping with the comedy genre-a playful attitude to life that elided a problematized conception of human difficulties. When Fritsch and his two best friends encounter unemployment in The Trio from the Gas Station, for example, they join in a facetious song bemoaning their lost pleasures (drinking champagne, eating oysters), shrug their shoulders, and then quickly fall back on the strength of the male group to open a gas station.76 Lilian (so named in the film), a millionaire's daughter, promptly arrives to get gas from each of the three attendants. She quickly charms the trio, chirping lighthearted melodies and dancing around her expensive automobile, and all fall in love with her without knowing about the others. The resulting plot continues to take on twisted turns: Lilian convinces her wealthy father to employ the group to run a gas station enterprise and hires herself as their secretary. Fritsch (also named Willy in the film) angrily discovers her role in his success. Feeling manipulated, he dictates an outraged letter of resignation, and she types up a marriage contract insteadF In the end, it is Lilian's father, previously helpless against his daughter's pranks (she embarrasses him by calling him Chubby, even in front of his new fiancee), who reconciles the lovers. The

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millionaire's regained paternal authority thus puts an end to the havoc caused by the spoiled Lilian, while the consequences of the depression (the demotion of three dandies to blue-collar workers) are reversed through Willy's union with an heiress. In 1931 the Harvey-Fritsch team starred in the German version of Der Kongrefi tanzt (The Congress Dances), one of the most expensive Ufa productions to date,78 The plot showed them singing and dancing through a few turbulent days during the Congress of Vienna in 1814, enjoying their unlikely union-she is a salesgirl, he is the Russian czar-while the rest of the congress participants discover the joys of ballroom dancing. When Napoleon's troops enter the picture, the frolics on the Danube shore come to a sudden end and all the protagonists return to their official responsibilities, thus reestablishing the order of the earlier status quo. In fact, Karsten Witte sees the film as the embodiment of socially romantic film ideology, the refrain of its theme song ("That was just once, it will never return") paraphrasing the notion of a romanticized yesteryear that "promises the happiness of a status quo ante."79 Viewing the film from a different angle, Anton Kaes further suggests, " ... the more dissonant the everyday became [in the late Weimar years], the more harmonious the world of the cinema. Babelsberg [home of Ufa studios] had caught up to Hollywood and was now entirely in the service of distraction and diversion."so In respect to its two protagonists, Harvey and Fritsch, the film did even more than celebrate the charm of bygone days by performing a nostalgic restaging of the monarchist past made possible through modem technology. "The comedy in the thirties," as Vossen proposes, "frequently realized in its German rendition as fihnic operetta, was the innate battleground of this dream couple [Harvey /Fritsch]."81 The Congress Dances once again presented Harvey in a role that fused her hyperbolized girlhood with the waggishness of a tomboy, combining the vulnerable charm of a fairy with the cheeky drollness of a pixie. "An important characteristic of the women played by Harvey," Vossen points out, "is their independence and capricious stubbornness, which contrasts with her physical appearance in exciting ways."82 The tension that emerged in Harvey's foot-stomping desire for independence, on the one hand, and the striking physical inequality between her and her male partners on the other, thus points to an interesting thematization of gender conflicts. Moreover, the pairing of Harvey and Fritsch often suggested the supposed reconcilia-

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tion of class differences, albeit in a manner that remained much more ambiguous and far less radical than in American screwball comedies of the 1930s: Willy's company makes money even without Lilian in The Trio from the Gas Station, the Czar and the salesgirl do not marry in The Congress Dances, Harvey is not really an heiress in Gliickskinder (Lucky Kids 1936). Without taking recourse to narrative strategies of the social drama, the transformation of Harvey and Fritsch into the German Traumpaar addressed a set of problems that were fundamentally contemporary. Akin to what in Hollywood emerged as the screwball comedy-or its subgenre, the comedy of remarriage-the motor behind this German couple's comedic screen predicaments was the difficulty of gender. As David Shumway has suggested, the ideological function of the screwball comedy, and the comedy of remarriage, can be seen to ultimately affirm the patriarchal status quo through its narrative address and subsequent displacement of gender problems in service of perpetuating the ideology of romance and the mystification of marriage in the larger social sphere. B3 At the same time, however, the screwball comedy's model of couple formation must be seen as revisionist because of the autonomy and agency the genre gave to women. Similarly, despite the fact that it was the inevitable goal of the dream-couple construct to unite both players romantically at the end of the film, the narrative obstacles the Harvey-Fritsch pair encountered earlier depended on playing out the complications of the battle of the sexes which foregrounded Harvey's resistance and independence. The lack of sexual chemistry between Harvey and Fritsch was prominent in most of their films. It often serves as a point of entry for critics seeking to discuss the couple in terms of the Nazis' attempt to deeroticize the German cultural sphere-replacing erotic allure, perceived as dangerous and degenerate, with a supposedly healthy and responsible attitude toward reproduction and comradeship in marriage. However, the state of parity and playful companionship that frequently existed between the two is often ignored. While Harvey's infantilizing pouts set her apart from many of the wise-cracking stars who followed-ranging from Mae West to Rosalind Russell, or even Grete Weiser's Berliner Schnauze (Berlin loudmouth)-Harvey's simultaneous projection of stubborn self-assurance (female emancipation) and immature emotionalism (traditional femininity) spoke to the conflicting ideals of womanhood that had been in circulation since the suffrage

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movement and the subsequent conceptualization of the "new woman." The notion that a more (rather than fully) equal partnership was desirable, which had been suggested in the much-discussed 1928 nonfiction book Die Kameradschaftsehe (Marriage as Friendship and Companionship) and was taken up by Harvey-Fritsch as a bantering film couple, also related to a shift in power relations between the sexes. 64 Thus, in enacting a scenario that negotiated gender relations in a modem context, Harvey's German films described a generic pattern that also constituted an emerging Hollywood paradigm and therefore effected an additional link with the cultural movements of modernity. We must recall here the films starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or the relationship between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, which was virtually remade by Ufa in Lucky Kids after Harvey's return to Germany. In addition, Harvey's Hollywood roles took on the characteristics of her Weimar performances. I Am Suzanne! (Fox, 1934), for instance, literalized Harvey's status as pubescent child and/or a living doll by structuring the plot around Harvey as an immobilized stage performer who becomes competitive with a marionette made in her likeness. Harvey plays the performer Suzanne, the star of a Paris stage show, which is more of an acrobatic circus act featuring an agile child (she builds a snowman at the end of one number) than a glamorous number foregrounding a seductive chanteuse. When her fiance Tony is looking to find a specialist who can mend her legs after a stage accident, he turns to a pediatrician. "A girl?" asks the doctor. "Yes," replies Tony, ''but she is just a child too, really." Harvey in fact never sheds her infantile behavior throughout the film; moreover, it is her physical fragility that is seen to constitute her charm. The continuing narrative appropriately circles around the question of whether or not Harvey /Suzanne has an independent identity of her own. Throughout the film, various men who take control of her life and career exclaim"I am Suzanne!" -simultaneously expressing"queer" notions of cross-gender identification and the patriarchal Pygmalion fantasy that centers on man creating "woman." Only toward the end of the film does she utter the line herself when she breaks free from her controlling fiance. ''You are afraid of everything you can't tie strings on, and pull around any way it pleases you," she accuses Tony, a puppeteer, temporarily ending the relationship by shooting the puppet of herself. The lovers' conflicts are

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finally resolved when I Am Suzanne! concludes with a joint perfonnance of the marionettes, manipulated by Tony, and the real Suzanne. It is the successful combination of both partners' careers that enables the happy ending. Harvey's role in I Am Suzanne! confirms that Hollywood's treatment of the star continued a pattern that Ufa had contrived years earlier. Lilian Harvey's positioning at the juncture of two conflicting discoursesan idealized notion of female helplessness as the source of romantic attraction and the progressive notion of women's independent agencymust therefore be seen as a constant in her screen representations. It is in this context, in particular, that the dialectics played out between Harvey and Fritsch became problematic in the Third Reich. Neither fonns of female subjectivity-physical and emotional immaturity nor gender equality--