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The Nazi Factory of Illusions

2023-01-21T09:55:16.838Z


From the UFA, a state mega-producer, Hitler and Goebbels filmed a thousand films to entertain and indoctrinate. The dynamics of that time, in this interview with the French historian Isabelle Mity.


The epitome of

Nazi cinema

is the film

The Jew Süß

, shot by director Veit Harlan in 1940 at the request of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

It is a call to murder, no more, no less

.

It premiered on September 8, 1940, was presented fifteen days later at the Venice Festival and was awarded the Golden Lion. The message is vile”, explains the French historian and Germanologist

Isabelle Mity

, author of the research

Les actrices du IIIe Reich: Splendeurs et misères des icons du Hollywood Nazi

(Perrin), an

x-ray of the

star system

created by Adolf Hitler and Goebbels

to persuade the population.

Isabelle Mity is a historian and professor at the University of Paris-Dauphine.

However, since the UFA mega-studios,

Nazi cinema has generally not been this crude or racist

.

“Entertainment constituted the essence of cinema under that regime”, points out the researcher, who is a professor at the Paris Dauphine University.

In the 1930s, the

Third Reich launched a gigantic industry that sought to emulate American Hollywood

from the heart of Europe: romantic comedies, melodramas, musicals, and even police films made up an abundant plot, estimated at 1,094 films between 1933 and 1945.

Isabelle Mity adds this fact:

only 10% of those films were openly propaganda

.

"The rest were aimed at entertainment," she completes by email to

Ñ

from Carcassonne, where she spends her vacations in the south of France, almost on the Spanish border.

Zarah Leander, Swedish actress and singer, was the biggest star of the Third Reich.

She was chosen to take the place of two other divas, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

–Hitler and Goebbels were great movie lovers.

What was the profile of each one?

–Both Hitler and Goebbels

were steeped in Hollywood cinema

, although they constantly criticized the studios.

It was against this system that the cinema of the Third Reich was built, with the ambition of raising it to the level of the Hollywood system and surpassing it.

A culture war doomed to fail from the start.

Hitler cultivated an eclectic view of American cinema

, but he was especially fond of Laurel and Hardy comedies, films featuring beautiful young women with bare legs, and Mickey Mouse films.

Until the war,

Hitler binge-watched movies

at the Chancellery or at the Berghof, his residence in the Bavarian Alps, watching up to five titles a night.

For his part,

Goebbels was fascinated by the power that American cinema and its stars had over the masses.

In his first programmatic speech to the world of cinema, on March 28, 1933, he cited the example of

Anna Karenina

, starring Greta Garbo.

He was looking for the same type of impact in his films

, and he built a

star system

to turn stars into catalysts of dreams, but also into figures of identification or exemplarity through which to transmit messages.

It was an impossible dream, because the cinema of the

Third Reich resorted too much to pathos

, while the American cinema managed to electrify the masses without going too far.

– What was the particular objective of the Third Reich in relation to cinema?

–The cinema of the Third Reich was built in such a way that the German public

was entertained and edified mainly through entertainment films

.

It was mainly the less propaganda films that were shown abroad, to attract the masses (thanks above all to the stars) and bring Nazi Germany foreign currency.

Beyond the obvious economic dimension,

the cinema of the Third Reich was the instrument of what we now call “soft power”

.

However, the brutal prohibition of American cinema was necessary for German cinema to prevail, since before the war German cinema did not achieve a significant market share among its neighbors, who preferred local or Hollywood productions...

–Goebbels was very involved in the production of this cinematographic system.

What aspects did he personally control and why?

–By taking over the Ministry of Propaganda, Goebbels took control of the Reich's cultural policy, and the cinema was truly his private preserve.

For several reasons: Goebbels was a movie buff, a lover of actresses (especially for his own personal pleasure), he was fond of literature and liked to modify scripts, since he considered cinema to be the most effective vehicle for unseen propaganda.

From the beginning, he tried to put the entire production chain under his control.

He established a system of script censorship, banned film criticism

, which was superseded by the Ministry of Propaganda's report, and

nationalized production

companies (in 1937 and again in 1942) to better control them.

In addition,

he supervised the casting

(and he took the opportunity to seduce the stars and grant them roles in exchange for favors), and

he did not hesitate to rewrite the scenes

, to rotate the plans if he considered that an actress's dress was too daring, or if he judged that a sequence was wrong. against the doxa.

Often it was he, and not the director, who had the last word.

He changed

The Jew Süß

(1940) many times and did not let Veit Harlan, the director, leave until the film became a real call to hate.

He also made him change the ending of

The Golden City .

(1942), so that the heroine Anna, played by Kristina Söderbaum, the director's wife, died because Anna was pregnant by a Slav and therefore had committed a racial crime.

In order to guide the public towards the most edifying or propaganda films, he established labels: “film of the Nation”, “film especially recommended for its political or cultural value” and others.

Despite his desire to control everything, he was rarely satisfied and sometimes had to ban films about to be released.

Marika Rökk became the answer to Ginger Rogers and Eleanor Powell.

Her film Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten was the first German color film.

–Who were the actresses of this universe?

Zarah Leander

, Swedish actress and singer,

was the biggest star of the Third Reich

.

She was chosen by the UFA, the largest German film production company, in 1936 to replace Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich (definitely lost to German cinema) and play the seductress.

She did not have an Aryan profile at all and, in this sense, she is quite representative of the strategy of recruiting foreign stars from all over Europe (and even the world) to offer the public a series of classic archetypes.

Let's not forget that the public, like Hitler and Goebbels, was heavily influenced by Hollywood and its stars, which they continued to see in movies and magazines until 1940.

Marika Rökk, the Hungarian queen of pirouettes and tap dancing

, became the answer to Ginger Rogers and Eleanor Powell.

Marianne Hoppe, the Emancipated

, can be considered a Katharine Hepburn equivalent.

British-born Lilian Harvey

was something of a Carole Lombard, and there's something of Joan Crawford in Brigitte Horney.

Magda Schneider, the mother of Romy Schneider, was the “süßes Mädel”, the charming girl

, vivacious and prickly, and she appeared in love films or operettas of little interest, which appealed to German or Austrian taste, not Hollywood.

The only big star with a truly Aryan profile was Kristina Söderbaum,

that she was not German, but Swedish, and whose characters offered a moral code to the public, because her appearance was more similar to Aryan racial ideals, but also because she was the wife and muse of the Third Reich's greatest propagandist director, Veit Harlan.

The UFA

star system

was even enriched with South American stars

, such as the Argentine-born actress and singer Imperio Argentina in 1938, or

Rosita Serrano, the “Chilean nightingale”

, who had a successful career between 1937 and 1943 in Nazi Germany.

It's quite funny to see the very high proportion of foreign stars in a regime so obsessed with racial purity that it never stopped getting rid of its Jews and stigmatizing racial mixing!

–How were these directors, producers and actors/actresses controlled?

–As the actors, actresses, directors or technicians had to be members of the Cinematographic Chamber, present a certificate of Aryanness, not be hostile to the regime and act in an environment strongly controlled from above, the notion of freedom did not exist.

Everything was reviewed: scripts, sequences, editing, costumes, songs, and what could sometimes pass for artistic license in a film or song was not.

Goebbels deliberately left out certain dialogues or songs, if he thought they did not contradict the

doxa

too much and that they served the film

.

As soon as you went too far, the knife would fall, in the form of a ban on the film, or exclusion from the Film Chamber, which was equivalent de facto to a ban on working.

The actress Camilla Horn, for example, was expelled from the Film Chamber for a year in 1935 for smuggling German money into Czechoslovakia, where she had gone to be cured.

During the war,

actors were hounded by self-defeating or ironic statements

.

Director Herbert Selpin committed suicide in prison

in 1942 after being arrested for criticizing the Wehrmacht (Nazi Germany's armed forces) on the filming of Titanic, and

actor Robert Dorsay was executed in 1943 .

for making fun of the Führer.

You had to be an irreplaceable star, like Hans Albers, Zarah Leander or Jenny Jugo, to escape punishment.

Marianne Hoppe can be considered a Katharine Hepburn equivalent.

Hoppe was the ideal model for the Nazis.

– What happened to these films and especially to this industry and its workers after 1945, with the fall of Nazism?

–The Allies put in place a list of prohibited films as early as 1945, and some of these films still have to be officially requested to be screened in public.

This is the case of

The Jew Süß

, for example.

After a stint in the wilderness due to denazification, work bans and the doom of the film industry, various stars and directors tried to make a comeback

in the 1950s, with varying degrees of success.

In general, television made it possible for these stars to endure, either through series or through the airing of Third Reich films, which had second careers on the small screen from the 1950s to the early 2000s.

The public who had lived through the war and loved these stars

who provided dreams and comfort were delighted to find the idols of their youth in the cinema in the 1950s, and later on television, which allowed a younger audience to discover this cinematographic heritage is not at all demonized, at least as far as the non-propagandist part is concerned.

ESSENTIAL

Isabelle Mity


​Historian.



She studied German and history at the ENS in Lyon and at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.

She has a degree in German and a doctorate in German studies, she is a professor of German language and civilization at the University of Paris-Dauphine.

A regular columnist for Historia magazine, she also chairs the Historia Award for Historical Black Novels.


Les actrices du IIIe Reich, by the French Isabelle Mity.

The actresses of the IIIe Reich


Isabelle Mity


Perrin


​358 pages.

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Source: clarin

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