Germany and Nazi Control
The seizure of power in 1933 by the Nazi Party effectively
extinguished the creative excellence of Germany ’s cinema. The national film
industry had initially adapted very successfully to the introduction of sound,
benefiting financially from ownership of the Tobis-Klangfilm patent.
Sternberg’s ‘The Blue Angel’ (1930), Pabst’s ‘Westfront 1918’ (1930) and Lang’s
‘M’ (1931) are amongst the last of the great films from the Ufa studios and
show a technical control of the new sound medium way beyond most Hollywood
‘talkies’. The dark atmosphere of these films: the sadism of the schoolboys in
‘The Blue Angel’; the senseless destruction of war in ‘Westfront 1918’; the
paranoia and madness of the child murderer in ‘M’ are symptomatic of the sense
of foreboding that gripped the studios most talented artists towards the end of
the Weimar Republic.
Many of these artists had already fled Germany by 1933 and even before the Nazi’s anti-Semitic decrees had been issued Ufa sacked, without notice, all of its staff with Jewish origins. As Elsaesser (1998) notes in his study ‘Weimar Cinema and After’ this was the signal for an unprecedented exodus of producers, directors, actors, writers and technicians who left Germany by the hundreds, seriously damaging Ufa’s ‘human resources’ in the process. Most of the staff who fled Germany ended up in Hollywood where they joined an earlier generation of film immigrants to bring their talents and artistry to the screen.
The Nazis, under the leadership of Adolph Hitler, set out to reconstruct German society by gaining complete control over the populace. The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda exercised strict censorship and control over virtually every form of expression: cinema, radio, theatre, the fine arts, the press, schools and churches. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels is said to have admired Eisenstein’s ‘Potemkin’ and called for the German studios to produce Nazi films that would be as effective. The studios obliged by making ‘Hans Westmar’ (1934) a film so deliriously propagandist that it had to be sent back for extensive revision before Goebbels could allow its release. ‘Hitler Jung Quex’ (1933) (The Quicksilver Hitler Youth) and ‘S.A. Man Brand’ (1934) were equally unsubtle attempts to win support for the Nazi party and contained attacks on Jews, Communists and ‘decadent’ youth.
Goebbels, who personally approved every feature film and documentary produced in the Third Reich, quickly realised that an overt propaganda drive in feature films could prove counterproductive. He switched tack and between 1934-38 generally avoided overt propaganda in features, hammering the Nazi message home in a series of, frequently hysterical, newsreel and documentary films. Of the most carefully crafted of these are ‘Triumph of the Will’ (1935) and ‘ Olympia ’ (1938), personally commissioned by Hitler and directed by Leni Riefenstahl (see chapter Documentary).
Documentaries and newsreels were screened alongside entertainment features that were not unlike those made in Great Britain and Hollywood . According to Bordwell (1996) of the feature films made during the Nazi era about one-sixth were banned by postwar Allied censors for containing Nazi propaganda. Those that were banned included state sponsored historical and biographical films that glorified the Nazi party or Germany ’s militarist history. Until the eve of the war, however, the studios generally produced escapist, populist mainstream stars-and-genre entertainment, particularly musicals and comedies. These were often shot in multi-language versions (French, English, Spanish, Czech) for export, particularly to East European and Latin American markets as international hostilities grew. As Elsaesser (1997) remarks:
‘According to Goebbels, the best propaganda was entertainment which expressed the regimes populist ideology as an attainable ideal without hinting at the totalitarian reality.’
Many of these entertainment films, such as ‘Viktor and Viktoria’ (1933), ‘Gluckskinder’/Lucky Kids (1936), ‘Der Grosse Liebe’/The Great Love (1942) and ‘Munchhausen’ (1943) had enormous box-office success and are still popular in Germany today.
From 1939 the film industry was put on a war footing and by 1942 Nazi financial and ideological control, which had been steadily increasing, became total as the studios were nationalised. Pre-war films celebrating ‘the good life’, foregrounding conspicuous consumption, and full of witty, sexual banter of the ‘screw-ball’ variety gave way to melodramas and stories of romantic sacrifice. Women were more often portrayed as dutiful wives and mothers rather than independent and carefree young ‘flirts’. Overt propaganda returned in various forms, but most notoriously in the savage anti-Semitism of ‘Jud Süss’/Jew Suss (1940) and ‘Der Ewige Jude’/The Eternal Jew (1940) commissioned by Goebbels after Hitler’s public discussion of the ‘Final Solution’. ‘Jüd Suss’ was seen by 20 million Germans and was reportedly shown to SS personnel as a prelude to the pogroms and rounding up of Jews for the death camps.
According to Knight (1957) the German people were frequently reminded by Goebbels in the war years that ‘pictures don’t lie’ and they were constantly being shown newsreels, documentaries and information films in which their final victory was made to seem inevitable. Following the German defeat on the Russian front however, faith in these newsreels rapidly declined.
At the end of the war several directors, including Leni Riefenstahl and Viet Harlan (the director of ‘Jud Süss’) were investigated on suspicion of Nazi collaboration but, astonishingly, were never convicted. In the Soviet occupied East Germany amnesties were given to the best German filmmakers in return for their work on anti-Nazi and pro-Communist films such as ‘Murderers Amongst Us’ (1946) and ‘Mother Courage’ (1955). In West Germany denazification proceeded more slowly as those studios still standing continued to produce escapist musicals, military romances and historical pageants. German cinema remained at least as moribund under Allied and Soviet ‘control’ in the 1940s and 1950s as it had done under the Nazis.