6

THE DEVELOPING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND COMMERCIAL FILM AESTHETICS

The economic pressures imposed by competition with Hollywood concerned leaders in the German film industry as much as the potential ideological influence of Soviet films. In September 1927, for example, Ufa’s Consul Marx spoke to representatives of the Hungarian film industry in Budapest and publicly declared his desire to organize a Pan-European coalition to combat Hollywood’s “invasion” of European film markets.¹ Ufa’s general director reprimanded him. At the next meeting of Ufa’s executive committee, Ludwig Klitzsch asked its members to resolve not to discuss Ufa’s business policies publicly, referring specifically to receptions attended by Ufa delegates as potentially dangerous situations (R109, 1026a, 16 September 1927).

Ufa and other companies nurtured their partnerships with Hollywood companies publicly, although they privately contemplated strategies to overcome the burdens associated with Dawes Plan prosperity. The industry’s preferred strategy, as outlined above, was to tolerate the influence of U.S. companies and exploit the Soviet market. If successful, the industry would serve simultaneously the ideological and economic needs of its most conservative members. It would use partnerships with Hollywood companies to remain competitive and limit Soviet access to the German market while increasing German access to the Soviet market. In the process, it would increase its profits and ideological impact while decreasing those of the Soviet industry. As Consul Marx’s comments indicated, ideally Ufa would achieve similar goals in its competition with American companies.

In addition to his desire to maintain favorable relations with foreign companies, it seems likely that concern about Ufa’s image at home motivated Klitzsch’s resolution against publicly discussing policy. It is unlikely that conservative interest groups and their representatives in the film industry could have influenced public opinion as they wished, if they had blatantly opposed Hollywood credit that many German producers needed to survive. Such opposition also might annoy those Germans who uncritically accepted Dawes Plan assistance and those who were fascinated with American society, especially with Hollywood images of it. On the other hand, to openly criticize the Soviet film industry might annoy a growing number of Germans who, almost regardless of their political orientation, praised the achievements of young Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. It would certainly annoy those German workers who found attractive what they read, heard, or saw regarding the new Soviet society. It is also unlikely that conservative and reactionary filmmakers could have persuaded most Germans to accept a national dictatorship or the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy if they had proclaimed their intention to do so, and thereby benefit a small minority of the wealthy at the expense of most Germans.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FILM AND POLITICS

The assertion that film and politics should remain separate effectively masked the political intentions of men such as Ludwig Klitzsch. In this vein, some film company executives and their allies in the print media condemned most, if not all, Soviet films, characterizing them as Hetzfilme (film that agitate politically), while defending their own films or films they wished to promote as artistically valuable. Ufa executives employed the strategy frequently to legitimize their rejection of Soviet films. For example, when a theater owner appealed to the SPIO to act against blatantly political Soviet films in April 1928, executive committee members discussed the issue and formulated the following response: “It is resolved that we refer to the decision of the SPIO which has opposed the screening of all political films” (R109, 1027, 10 April 1928). The SPIO consisted of nine members in 1928. Three, including the chairman, also served as Ufa executives. In this case, Ufa was able to cite the decision of an allegedly higher authority, suggesting that all theater owners and distributors follow the established policy. By referring indirectly to a concept of autonomous art, it could reject Soviet films and imply that its own films were apolitical and therefore above reproach.

The German government, too, often opposed Soviet and other ideologically undesirable films through censorship and contingency laws, but also under the pretext of aesthetic judgments. The Lampe Committee, organized by the ministry of the interior and named after its chairman Felix Lampe, worked with national censorship boards and decided whether films were künstlerisch (artistic), volksbildend (generally contributing to public edification), or Lehrfilm (educational film).² Films that qualified were granted partial exemption from the Lustbarkeitssteuer, the entertainment tax levied on box-office receipts.³ During the years of relative stability, the Lampe Committee increased its preference for Fridericus and World War I films, characterizing them as artistic and educational, while withholding its approval and any tax privileges from those who made, distributed, and screened Soviet and other “leftist” films.⁴ Although the committee used aesthetic and intellectual labels, its decisions belied ideological preferences. The newspapers and journals of the German left protested the government’s decisions but with little success.

A majority of leading German film journals joined the opposition to “political” films. Scherl’s Kinematograph was the most conservative in its assessment. Early in 1926, for example, the Kinematograph explained its lack of attention to Battleship Potemkin, noting that the film certainly functioned as an ideological tool of the Soviet government and that film and politics should have nothing in common (“Potemkin him, Potemkin her”—“Potemkin, Back and Forth,” 5 November 1926).

Such explanations appeared to explain why the journal criticized Soviet films, but they demonstrated something entirely different in light of the close association between the Kinematograph and Ufa, especially after Hugenberg’s acquisition of Ufa in 1927. The Kinematograph only pretended to support the separation of film and politics. In reality it followed the strategy of Ufa and others in condemning films it perceived as threatening while praising ideologically acceptable films, particularly Ufa films, from a supposedly nonideological position.

The Film-Kurier also opposed the political use of cinema, but at least acknowledged that groups from every point on the political spectrum engaged actively in cinematic propaganda. According to a cartoon (Film-Kurier, 11 August 1926), all major political parties competed for influence in cinema, while cunning theater owners offered a wide variety of films to please an ideologically heterogeneous audience. More often than not, though, theater owners accepted the guidelines of the SPIO, preferred to screen films with a partial tax exemption, and generally limited access for distributors of Soviet films and the films of the German left.

Beginning in 1926, and coinciding roughly with a controversy surrounding the censorship of Battleship Potemkin, the L.B.B. periodically called for the separation of film and politics. Like the Film-Kurier, the L.B.B. noted that the political right as well as the political left had used the film media for political purposes. “Hetzfilme” (“Agitational Films,” L.B.B., 22 February 1926) reported that the DNVP had challenged the government to modify censorship laws to forbid “political propaganda” films such as Freies Volk (Liberated People), an SPD-affiliated film, and Sein Mahnruf (His Warning), a Soviet film. According to the DNVP, these films threatened social stability by promoting class struggle and encouraging German workers to join the world revolution. The article asserted: “It is somewhat curious that such ‘protective measures’ are being proposed today precisely by the parties of the right, who have employed film propaganda themselves, and who only call for police assistance when left-orientated films begin to make them uncomfortable.” The L.B.B. worked diligently to expose the political right’s attempt to conceal the ideological nature of conservative and reactionary films and to condemn as propaganda the films of the German left and the Soviet Union. The journal took the same position in the debate about the censorship of Battleship Potemkin, arguing that the political right had no reservations about the monarchical Fridericus Rex in 1922 and should therefore have none about Battleship Potemkin.

Although the L.B.B. rejected any combination of film and politics, it did advocate social functions for cinema. The author of “Agitational Films” exclaimed: “Ban political films from the movie theater!… They poison cinema’s atmosphere of pure entertainment.” For him and many others cinema’s function was entertainment. The distinction between political and entertainment films surfaced frequently in L.B.B. articles. Dr. Hans Wollenberg, the editor of the L.B.B. during much of the Weimar Era, emphasized the same distinction in his article “Grundgedanken zu dem Referat ‘Film und öffentliche Meinung’” (“Fundamental Consideration Concerning the Lecture ‘Film and Public Opinion,’” 26 June 1926).

According to Wollenberg, cinema should establish a direct connection to the everyday world in the realm of education and science. There, “objective” forms of discourse and perception made it impossible for any one interest group to gain political advantage over another. Educators and scientists could employ film to influence public opinion, i.e., aid in the effort to acquire and communicate a better understanding of natural and historical processes so that humanity could master them and construct a better world.

However, Wollenberg asserted, in the movie theater there should be no connection between film and the everyday world, no connection between film and politics. Wollenberg’s comments indicate that he had abandoned the project of philosophical idealists who promoted autonomous art to mediate between the world of superficial appearances and metaphysical essences. Similar to some of the SPD journalists cited in Chapter 3, Wollenberg hoped that autonomous films would entertain audiences. The only constructive influence film should have on public opinion—and in this regard Wollenberg does invoke an idealist notion of autonomous art—should be aesthetic.

Instead of highlighting the contradictions, struggles, and injustices of the everyday world to stimulate critical perceptions and motivate change, films should portray the world in all its “beauty and adventurousness,” entertaining audiences in a form that “unconsciously cultivates” their aesthetic taste. For what purpose? Wollenberg’s cinema would diffuse the potentially revolutionary energy created by dissatisfaction in the everyday world. It would help spectators regain the strength necessary to cope with unsatisfactory conditions by focusing their attention on abstract notions of beauty. Wollenberg’s cinema would function as a socially stabilizing medium, not as a medium for social change. Wollenberg’s comments are significant because they represented the views of the L.B.B., but even more so because they reflected and reinforced mainstream perceptions of cinema’s function in German society in the 1920s. A majority of German film journalists and citizens, positioned at various points between the antirepublican right and Communist left, opposed what they perceived as blatantly political films. They separated acceptable cinema into two categories: educational cinema and cinematic entertainment. From their perspective, documentary, educational, and scientific films offered empirically accurate, apolitical reflections of natural and social phenomena and contributed to public education. Commercial theaters that included documentaries, primarily newsreels, were contributing to this end. The commercial theater’s perceived primary function, though, was to entertain.

Nevertheless, as the reference to documentaries and newsreels suggests, the public’s perception of what the commercial theater should provide was slowly changing. While public opinion generally insisted on the separation of film and politics, film and everyday life, it accepted documentaries and newsreels and began to accept a connection between film and the “real” world in features. The Lampe Committee nurtured the change by asserting that entertainment films could teach moviegoers something about the world in which they lived. Many German educators acknowledged the possibility and began organizing field trips to film theaters that, according to the Lampe Committee, screened educational films.⁵ Good candidates for the distinction were historical films, including World War I films, films about contemporary social problems, and those that introduced audiences to exotic cultures. In all of the cited categories, antirepublicans in the film industry took advantage of the new possibilities to present a clearer ideological standpoint on controversial issues.

THE POLITICS OF UNIVERSAL APPEAL

As mentioned above, both ideological and economic concerns influenced commercial film production in Weimar Germany. As competition increased and production costs steadily rose, producers redoubled their efforts to minimize risks. For smaller producers, who depended to a large extent on the income from one film to produce the next, a single commercially weak film could mean financial ruin. Producers could calculate the cost of film production but experienced difficulty in calculating in advance the commercial value of their films. As a result, they concentrated more intensely on devising techniques to ensure the appeal of their products.

The risk of failure on the one hand and the potential for profit on the other motivated producers to attempt to make films with universal appeal. To approximate the ideal, they calculated the basic elements of the dominant intellectual and emotional needs of the German public and worked to address those needs with their products. Between 1924 and 1929 such calculations required close attention to the needs of a growing lower-middle class. Its ranks were filled with people who looked back with feelings of insecurity to the political unrest and threat of proletarianization in the early Weimar years. They also looked forward to the possibility of moving upward in the social hierarchy, enjoying greater material wealth, and increasing leisure time under the Dawes Plan economy. Although commercial cinema could offer no real guarantee to individuals who had lost their sense of social stability and hoped to work less but earn more, it could provide inexpensive fictional alternatives.

The basic formula for commercial success in German film continued to shift more and more away from the formulas of earlier phases in German film history. Whereas filmmakers could appeal to the public’s fascination with novelty between 1896 and 1906 and strove to demonstrate the artistic quality of cinema to attract skeptical middle- and upper-class audiences between 1906 and 1914, they now increased their emphasis on cinematic entertainment. Producers did make a small number of films with the intention of focusing on the needs of marginal social groups. For example, they produced expensive “prestige” films to address the interests of an intellectual and economic elite, but primarily to legitimize their concentration on film production that appealed to what that elite condemned as low or trivial art.

To maximize the accuracy of calculations about the appeal of films and to control production costs, companies continued efforts to standardize film production. To control production costs they developed libraries of standard sequences. Footage of mountain blizzards, waves crashing on the rocks, and congested urban traffic functioned as transition material, or as the visual signifiers of a protagonist’s emotional condition, or as some expression of the narrative standpoint. Filmmakers also created filmed backgrounds that could be inserted repeatedly when characters drove through a city, soldiers rode through the countryside, etc. These and numerous other techniques minimized production costs. But they also minimized the possibilities for directors, camera crews, and other technicians to participate creatively in film production. Standardization in the form of productive efficiency privileged the administrator’s and bookkeeper’s position in the decision-making process.

Filmmakers refined other techniques of standardization to increase the use value of the final product for potential audiences. As mentioned in Chapter 1, even before World War I, producers began to develop attractive stars and to identify film types that had been commercially successful in the past. Film marketing, too, became a significant factor in the early years of the republic, beginning with Erich Pommer’s sensational promotion of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

During the middle years of the Weimar Republic, film companies practiced such techniques in established as well as innovative ways. Ufa, for example, required its stars to make public appearances at film premieres and generally to participate more actively in the company’s marketing program (R109, 1026b, 24 February 1928). By making appearances at provincial and at large urban theaters, film stars did more than increase box-office receipts. When film celebrities appeared in public, they demonstrated that real individuals could move to higher positions in the social hierarchy, just as the fictional characters they portrayed in films often did.⁶

In addition to expanding the star system, the largest producers also exerted pressure on the press to ensure favorable publicity for their films. Ufa’s activity demonstrates this clearly. Beginning in the summer of 1927 the executive committee waged a battle with the L.B.B. as well as other trade journals and newspapers that, in its opinion, had attacked Ufa with their reports. The L.B.B. had expressed reservations about the Hugenberg Concern’s takeover of Ufa as early as February 1927, warning that Ufa might become an instrument in the service of the DNVP (“Scherl soll die Ufa finanzieren!”—“Scherl to Finance Ufa!” L.B.B., 21 February 1927). It followed ensuing developments with caution, reporting on incidents such as director Karl Grune’s complaint that Ufa had altered the ideological and aesthetic components of his Am Rande der Welt (On the Edge of the World, see “Fabrikant und Regisseur”—“Producer and Director,” L.B.B., 24 September 1927). It also published a review of Ludwig Bernhard’s brochure, revealing Ufa’s desire to limit communist influence in the German film industry and criticizing the Hugenberg Concern with a note of sarcasm for exaggerating the communist threat (“Hugenberg und Ufa,” L.B.B., 2 June 1928).

While the L.B.B. filed these and other reports, Ufa’s executives contemplated methods to control the publication of potentially damaging information about its policies. In July 1927 the executive committee decided to temporarily cease advertising in the L.B.B. (R109, 1026a, 20 July 1927). By August 1928 it resolved to permanently withhold advertising contracts from the journal, to cancel its subscription, and to forbid Ufa executives to establish contact with L.B.B. employees (R109, 1027a, 3 July 1928, 9 July 1928, 26 July 1928, and 27 August 1928). Ufa acted similarly to punish the Mosse publishing house’s 8-Uhr Abendblatt and ultimately decided to use advertising contracts generally as a lever to influence what newspapers and trade journals printed about the company and its films (R109, 1027a, 18 April 1929).

Ufa also created positive publicity in newspapers and journals belonging to the Hugenberg Concern. It could rely on positive reviews and reports from Scherl’s Kinematograph and major newspapers such as the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, but Ufa moved to increase its influence by publishing the Ufa-Wochenmagazin. In the weekly trade journal, which was filled with “objective” accounts of recent developments in the film industry, ample space was available for Ufa film advertisements and flattering reports about the conglomerate’s activities. Like its Hollywood competitors, Ufa also operated a news service, supplying both foreign and domestic newspapers and trade journals with articles about film production and its most popular stars. In Germany alone, approximately fifteen hundred newspapers provided Ufa with what amounted to free publicity.⁷ The Hugenberg Concern created images of critical acclaim for Ufa’s films and friendly attitudes toward the conglomerate, though acclaim and friendship were in fact bound to ideological and economic interests (R109, 1026a, 12 October 1927; and R109, 1027a, 18 April 1929).

While improving their marketing techniques, producers also paid special attention to film types that entertained profitably. Film companies searched even more intensely for potentially popular film subjects in literature and drama, including Faust (1926), Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, 1927),⁸ and Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening, 1929). They varied the plots of commercially successful films such as Die Straße (The Street, 1923), Dirnentragödie (Tragedy of a Prostitute, 1927), and Asphalt (1928). They developed film series like Der alte Fritz (Old Fritz, 1927, in two parts). And they began to remake successful films from the past: The Student of Prague (1913, 1926), Bismarck (1913, 1925 – 26), and Königin Luise (Queen Luise, 1912, 1927).

Creativity decreased as producers concentrated on entertainment. Weimar film historians suggest that the aesthetic quality of films declined markedly during the period of relative stability. To explain the decline, Siegfried Kracauer invoked his theory of the collective mind and its reflection in film. He claimed that the masses were authoritarian-minded when they entered the stabilized period and that the republican regime prevented those tendencies from finding an outlet. Allegedly too persistent to yield, authoritarian dispositions fell into a state of paralysis, and the decline of the German screen was a reflection of the paralysis (Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 54).

Certainly the German people struggled to adjust after the hardships they experienced between 1919 (or even 1914) and 1923. There also can be no doubt that support for the republic diminished in favor of authoritarian models based on recollections of the past. However, as political events such as the presidential election in 1925 and the plebiscite about the aristocracy in 1926 indicated, the German public was, to follow the metaphor, schizophrenically split between republican and antirepublican, democratic and authoritarian, ideologies. The film industry responded to the desires of investors as well as to economic pressures and it privileged an antirepublican, authoritarian orientation. Cinema reflected mass desires only insofar as its ideological orientation addressed the fears and hopes of Germany’s lower-middle class. Many films of mainstream cinema recommended submission to authority and the myth of upward social mobility as solutions to social insecurity and the fear of proletarianization. As the German left’s critique of such films demonstrated, that was only one of the potential ideological responses to the social reality of Weimar Germany.