Punch and Duty: Class and the School Servants in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931)
Paul Colbeck, University of the Arts London and Independent Blogger
© Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931)
The school servants in Mädchen in Uniform might be overlooked as merely diegetically necessary character types who flesh out the vivid depiction of the school and provide moments of light relief. But it’s worth noting them as a group that, while having rigidly defined class roles in the school’s hierarchy, in practice have a somewhat elastic status that enables them to enjoy a degree of agency and even subversion.
The famous kiss placed on the lips of the motherless schoolgirl Manuela (Hertha Thiele) by her charismatic teacher Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck) indicates to viewers of Mädchen in Uniform that this is the moment that triggers the drama which follows. At least as significant to the development of the plot (if cinematically less arresting) is another key development in the erotic dimension of the relationship, von Bernburg’s gift of one of her own undergarments - a chemise - to Manuela. B. Ruby Rich (1993) identifies this gift as a turning point, we might say the point of no return, in the relationship. And this presentation of a talismanic love object comes about only because of a timid intervention by the kindly servant Johanna, whose laundry duties and caring nature have alerted her to Manuela’s threadbare underwear and miserable emotional condition.
Although the gifting of the chemise is shown, perhaps disingenuously, to be simply a utilitarian act of charity on von Bernburg’s side, when Manuela finally and very publicly reveals it as evidence of mutual love, the gift is condemned by the Headmistress (Emilie Unda) as a scandalous infraction of protocol and a profligate abuse of resources. In the earlier scene, Johanna is sorting laundry in von Bernburg’s rooms. The teacher glances at her very briefly but does not acknowledge her nor does she greet her, demonstrating her supposed insignificance within the school’s hierarchy. Having been shown Manuela’s worn-out chemise and told that she habitually cries herself to sleep, von Bernburg is disdainful and bluntly dismissive of the servant’s concerns but takes the chemise over her arm. Johanna shakes her head despairingly and mutters at the teacher behind her back as she leaves the room. We have learned that von Bernburg’s courtesy and humanitarianism does not extend to the young working-class woman who collects her dirty laundry.
This is the only time we see von Bernburg, or indeed any of the teachers, interacting with someone of a status lower than the rigid milieu of the teachers and the girls. We hear von Bernburg’s comparatively liberal views expressed in the staff meeting scene and during her final confrontation with the Headmistress and she clearly demonstrates her humanitarianism in, for example, the confiscated love-note scene. But for some viewers, both now and in 1931, her attitude here to Johanna will not have passed unremarked.
It is, however, precisely this quasi-invisibility of the servants that allows Johanna to trigger another plot development. Johanna agrees to smuggle out a letter home from Manuela’s friend Ilse (Ellen Schwanneke) complaining about the inadequate diet, once again indicating the servant’s sympathy and allegiance with the pupils of the school. Here, Johanna is not in her usual maid’s uniform, but proudly parading in her Sunday dress and hat and cheerfully swinging her reticule. Though modest, her costuming is scarcely less outdated than that of Manuela’s rigidly old-fashioned aunt. She presents an upright and respectable figure in comparison to the slovenliness seen in depictions of some working-class characters in films such as Brecht and Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe (1932) and Joe May’s Asphalt (1928). Within seconds of accepting Ilse’s forbidden letter, Johanna saunters past the headmistress’ deputy Fräulein von Kesten (Hedwig Schlichter) who is scurrying along the corridor. The deputy is focused only on her mission of discovering mischief among the girls and apparently does not notice the servant’s presence. When Ilse’s letter subsequently falls into the hands of the headmistress, the dialogue makes clear that this was because the postal service has returned it and therefore Johanna did not break Ilse’s trust.
Critical evaluation of the film usually focuses on the principal characters and the political and gender dynamics of the plot but, as Richard McCormick (2008) points out, the school servants are portrayed positively and ‘like the girls, are shown to be irreverent about the attitudes of the people who run the school.’[1]
Since video formats and streaming have transformed films into artefacts which can be in the control of the viewer, they are open to almost infinite receptive possibilities. It would be disproportionate to claim that screening Mädchen in Uniform against the grain of the main plot and focussing on the servants (whose presence constitutes a very small portion of the running time) makes it into a revolutionary film, but such a reading surely makes it a less sentimentally reformist one.
While the cast of Mädchen in Uniform is well known to be entirely female, the film is not without male images. In some cuts of the film a very brief shot of male cadets features in the opening montage which also shows heroic sculptures, symbolising the values of the Prussian military families who finance the school and whose values drive its disciplinary regime, embodied in the masculinised figure of the stern Headmistress. We could also note the character of the physically and temperamentally formidable teacher Fräulein von Gärschner(Lene Berdolt) who makes very brisk and militaristic work of curtailing the girl’s sensory pleasures in the washroom scene and drills them in marching. Concealed within Ilse’s locker, we briefly see her pin-ups of the male film star Hans Albers. Busts of various illustrious men adorn the school interiors and, of course, there is the unintentionally subversive and enabling cross-dressing of the school play.
Easily overlooked in the background of the film’s introductory shots of the girls marching into the school grounds, is a male gardener watering the lawns. It is not possible to know whether he was merely there at the request of the cinematographers to provide a sparkling background arc of water, or whether director Leontine Sagan made a deliberate decision to include this male figure. Intentional or not, once noticed, his fleeting and singular presence augments the small cast of working-class women whose daily toil serves both teachers and pupils within the school walls and provide a vivid proletarian presence that would otherwise be missing from the hierarchy described in the film. Viewers who wish to amuse themselves by extending the imaginary world of the film will conclude that the building will likely be serviced by a boilerman, a caretaker, and so on, and that Manuela and her Aunt have been delivered to the school by a male driver. But in the gardener, we have a bridge between the absence of these unseen working class men and the presence of the film’s world.
Although the school is exclusively for the daughters of titled military officers, following the abdication of the Kaiser, the German Constitution of 1919 had abolished the titles and social privileges of the aristocracy. While it is self-evident that class distinctions cannot be obliterated by decree, the egalitarian aims of the Republic,together with the Allies’ enforced reduction of the German army and the consequent financial burden of reparations, had significantly eroded, but by no means extinguished, the wealth and influence of titled military families. We can imagine the families of the girls in Mädchen in Uniform as ghost aristocrats, wandering their decaying and understaffed mansions, elevated only by whatever wealth and property they had managed to cling to through the First World War and the 1920s. This sense of decline and crisis runs through the film, most evidently as some of the girls openly discuss the constrained situation of their families. We learn that the parents of good-natured little Marichen (Dora Thalmer) still own a farm and it bewilders her generous instincts that they are not permitted to send her a whole ham that could be shared by all her classmates. Such anecdotal moments, as well as rounding out minor characters such as Marichen, serve to underpin our sympathy for the girls. Neither the handful of young women cast as girls in the main speaking roles nor the extras recruited from schools look particularly malnourished, so it was important for the film to emphasise the meagre diet through dialogue.
Hunger is part of the Headmistress’s regime to raise the daughters of Prussian soldiers to become the mothers of Prussian soldiers. She not only sees no need to adequately feed her charges, but she also regards not doing so as her patriotic duty, enunciating that poverty is at the root of Prussian greatness. Unusually for a boarding school film, we never see the girls sitting down to a meal until, that is, the catastrophic after-show party when the main attractions are in any case the liberally spiked punch and the uninhibited pair dancing, with little food in evidence.
Just a few moments from the start of the film, we learn that there are nuances of status affecting the school’s treatment of its pupils’ relatives. Manuela is deposited at the school by an aunt with whom she had been living since her mother’s death. The aunt clearly feels disrespected in that not only is she kept waiting in a sparse anteroom, but she is eventually received not, as she expected, by the Headmistress but by her pinched and anxious deputy.
Such petty distinctions do not seem to significantly infect relations between the girls though, among whom the dominant culture appears to be one of resigned solidarity in the face of the harsh regime. This is evident, for example, in their reaction to Ilse’s impersonations of the Headmistress and in their interactions throughout the Sunday scene. It consolidates into passive resistance as the girls get changed for the Princess’ assembly after Manuela’s punishment, then eventually erupts in rebellion. As in any school story there is naturally some of the usual bickering and teasing, for example the officious prefect Marga (who seems to be a less than effective agent of the regime) is subjected to occasional derision.
The girl with the highest aristocratic title is Edelgard (Annemarie von Rochhausen), one of Manuela’s closest friends. That she is ‘Edelgard Comptesse von Mengsberg’ may be learned by attentive viewers solely from the close-up of the Don Carlos playbill. The film’s lack of focus on this emphasises that it is not a film that intends to offer conspicuous support to notions of a social hierarchy based upon class distinctions between the pupils. A loyal friend to Manuela, Edelgard exhibits no overt manifestations of privilege and has a number of interactions with other girls without any inflection of rank. There are, however, more embedded indications that give her some distinction among the girls. In the locker-room scene that introduces us to the whole class group, Edelgard enters the room some moments after everyone else, the filmmakers thereby privileging her screen identity. That Annemarie von Rochhausen is relatively tall is evident in a number of medium shots, suggesting some elevation, which may have impacted the casting decision.
In the later classroom scene Edelgard is the exemplary pupil who faultlessly recites lines from a Lutheran hymn. Although not identical, the text recalls a passage from the Song of Solomon (unlikely homework in this school) and as declaimed by Edelgard supplies a sensuously charged aural accompaniment to cross-dissolve close-ups highlighting von Bernburg and Manuela’s mutual desire, an erotic and powerful use of film form in the early sound era. We later see Edelgard in a less than exemplary moment when she is rehearsed for the play by the teacher von Attems (Erica Mann) and expresses frustration that a cue has repeatedly eluded her.
At the climax of the film, when Manuela has been banished to strict isolation, it is Edelgard who unhesitatingly breaks the prohibition and goes to comfort her. The ubiquitous enforcer von Kesten inevitably materialises on the scene to discover this appalling infraction, but it is significant that she does not escalate the situation and impose a severe punishment. Instead, she takes Edelgard aside and appeals to her not to let her family down, a moment suggestive that it is actually she, von Kesten, who is wary of second-guessing the response of influential and high-ranking parents. Her action here is in notable contrast to the instant and psychologically cruel punishment given to Ilse for her letter (exclusion from exercising her defining talent and creative enthusiasm by performing in the play).
By the time the final crisis erupts with Manuela’s disappearance from the sick bay and her suicidal ascent of the staircase with the school in open rebellion, Edelgard has transformed from model pupil to a ringleader of the uprising. After the rescue of Manuela and the humiliation of the Headmistress, we may note that it is Edelgard the Comptesse von Mengsberg and not Ilse the born rebel who first steps to the side of the isolated figure of Fräulein von Bernburg as the girls move towards her in solidarity.
The first of the school servants encountered by Manuela in the film is Elise, a cheerful middle-aged soul who oversees issuing and maintaining the striped ‘convict dress’[2] uniforms. Elise’s workroom has the expected tools of her trade, a treadle sewing machine and a huge pincushion, but it is clearly her personal domain, and she is free to surround herself with domestic comforts. Indeed, her room is the only space seen in the film which has such homely touches of cosiness (although von Bergburg’s study has a few potted plants, suggestive of the nurturing instincts of its occupant).
Elise pins Manuela’s hair painfully into the severe regulation style while humming, with unintentional prescience, Carmen’s aria ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’ (Love is a rebellious bird that cannot be tamed). Issued with a striped uniform dress, Manuela discovers hidden in it an embroidered heart and the initials ‘EvB’.Elise cheerfully explains that the previous wearer of the dress must have had a crush on von Bernburg, and as such the servant apparently feels no inhibition about airing this topic with a new pupil. Kneeling together on the floor, the two women momentarily appear like equals sharing a joke, perhaps a reminder for the lonely Manuela of happier times in her family home chattering with a friendly nanny or housekeeper.
Similarly in the prison-like sickroom scene following Manuela’s disgrace and isolation, we find the nurse Hanni listening tenderly to Manuela’s confused grief while sitting on her bed like a mother or a friend. Hearing the Headmistress bellowing with rage as she approaches the door, Hanni quickly stands and flees to an adjoining room, a further apparent abandonment of Manuela by a nurturing figure and a visual cue that simultaneously signals anxiety and isolation in the face of danger.
The servants in Mädchen in Uniform are seen together as a group in the school’s basement kitchen in a few scenes, in all of which there is a strong sense of their camaraderie and their solidarity with the girls and scorn for the school regime.
Shortly following the Headmistress’s first appearance, enthroned in her gloomy study where von Kesten is hopelessly petitioning her to improve the girls’ diet, we see the servants in the basement kitchen implementing the especially stingy rationing of butter. They comment sympathetically that the girls are too timid to complain and disparagingly quote the Headmistress’ dictum that they must be raised on hunger, evidently a familiar refrain downstairs as well as upstairs.
Later in the film, as the performance of Don Carlos in the hall comes to its triumphant conclusion, we cut to the kitchen where a servant is emptying the contents of a bottle, possibly the last of several, into a huge bowl of steaming punch being prepared for the after-show party. Johanna samples the mixture from a ladle and spits it out, evidently astonished by its potency.
As developments at the girls’ party move inexorably to their scandalous dénouement we twice cut again to the kitchen. A cheerfully inebriated Elise is found congratulating the servant who concocted the punch in a brief two-shot, and later we see all the servants in merry celebration — literally dancing to the same tune as the girls in the hall above. Richard McCormick points to the cross-cutting of this sequence which aligns the girls’and the servants’ exuberant celebrations against the ‘staid tea party’[3] taking place in a private room for the small group of upper-class ladies who are the Headmistress’ guests. The set-up of the tea party room is geometrically formal but cramped and, together with the old-fashioned and confining costumes of both teachers and guests, conveys a strong sense of claustrophobia. A narrow, elongated mirror at the rear of the shot reflects the gathering and subliminally suggests the existence beyond the school walls of infinite copies of the privileged class represented in the room.
The day following the party and Manuela’s histrionic declaration of love for von Bernburg and consequent isolation, von Kesten informs the Headmistress of the last thing she wants to hear: the Princess benefactor of the school is to visit that very afternoon. With this, someone of superior status to the Headmistress has entered the narrative and the audience discover, perhaps with some gratification, that the Headmistress too has someone to be frightened of. On seeing from her window that the Princess has arrived, the Headmistress races nimbly downstairs, carrying the cane that until now we had assumed was a means of support as well a symbol of authority.
In the ensuing assembly the girls appear in full-length white dresses instead of their convict stripes. Even though we have already seen some of the girls changing costume, this is one of the most arresting visual coups of the film. As we see their shimmering figures moving softly into the hall and melding into formal lines to honour their patron, we might, recalling their own awareness of their families’ uncertain prospects, wonder if they are brides or ghosts.
The Princess, revealing that she knew Manuela’s mother, identifies Manuela as one of two girls about whose wellbeing she wishes to be satisfied. This causes further discomfort to the Headmistress, who is now obliged to produce a visibly distressed Manuela for inspection. This expression of concern for Manuela by the school’s powerful benefactor flies in the face of the Headmistress’s earlier snubbing of Manuela’s aunt, contributing to the sense that her judgement is unsound, and her authority is crumbling. We then see the Headmistress and her royal guest start to slowly retreat up the formal staircase to their private realm, a symbolic withdrawal from their responsibility for the wellbeing of the girls and an ironic prefiguring of Manuela’s imminent slow ascent of the other, brighter, staircase on which she first met von Bernberg.
In a final brief cut to the domain of the servants, Johanna and her colleague are seen wearily tackling a mountain of washing up. Johanna, evidently an admirer of royalty on account of its attendant spectacle, wants to go upstairs and watch the parade. We might reflect that her occupation and station in life are unlikely to have granted Johanna any but the most limited exposure to the social, educational, and technological advances achieved during the turbulent Republic, even in comparison to the modest engagement with consumerism and modernity enjoyed by those such as the young and aspirational female Berliners in Siodmak and Ulmer’s People on Sunday (1929).
Siegfried Kracauer[4], an enthusiastic admirer of Mädchen in Uniform’s aesthetic qualities and of Thiele and Wieck’s acting, believes that the class politics of the film are too timid and that it implies that if only the Princess knew what was going on she would have intervened to reform the harsh regime. It is true that a group of the girls believe this to be the case, but they are characters in the film and not the film’s authors. Arguably, the function of the Princess here is principally to highlight the erosion of the Headmistress’ authority rather than to supply a straw for timid reformists to clutch at.
We first see the Princess not from anyone’s point of view but through the omniscient camera eye and from a more elevated eyeline position than her own. She then assumes the Headmistress’ usual dominating position on the grand staircase, displacing her from her habitual perch of power with this spatial representation of her increasingly precarious grip on events. Re-watching the Princess’ scene with sound and subtitles off, it appears as an archaic spectral ceremony — a dark Wilhelmine revenant inspecting a parade of pale young souls, their choreographed deep curtsies creating an ornamental ripple, a dismal somnambulist parody of a sparkling Berlin revue routine.
As with all great films, every admirer of Mädchen in Uniform has their own film, their own version of what it says about love, or about nurture, or about Germany, that can dispute anybody else’s version. One of the versions to be discovered is one where a small group of briefly glimpsed minor players, the servants, represent an optimistic challenge to disciplinarianism by offering small acts of subversion, solidarity, and escape through the enjoyment of companionship and simple pleasures.
Issues of status in Mädchen in Uniform seem to have inflected the surviving record of its creation as well as the film itself. Elise is credited as Else Ehser in most accounts, I have searched both literature and the internet in vain trying to identify the women who play Johanna and the other uncredited servants. If this apparent absence from the generally available record can be remedied, it will represent a service to this great film and the memory of the women who made it.
© Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931)
Works consulted
Bookbinder, Paul, Weimar Germany: The Republic of the Reasonable (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)
Bridenthal, Renate, ‘Class Struggle around the Hearth: Women and Domestic Service in the Weimar Republic’,in Towards the Holocaust: The Social and Economic Collapse of the Weimar Republic, ed. by Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983) https://surface.syr.edu/books/17/ [Accessed 24 May 2021]
Dyer, Richard., and J. Pidduck, Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film (Oxford: Routledge, 2003)
Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. by Roger Grieves. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 325-326
Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1997)
Kardish, Laurence, Weimar Cinema, 1919-1933: Daydreams and Nightmares. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010) pp. 190-191
Keun, Irmgard, The Artificial Silk Girl, trans. by von Kathie von Ankum (New York: Other Press, NY, 2011) pp.167-169
Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, ed. and trans. by Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) pp. 223-23McCormick, Richard W., ‘Coming Out of the Uniform: Political and Sexual Emancipation in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform’, in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. by Noah Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) pp. 271-283
Rich, B Ruby. ‘From Repressive Tolerance to Erotic liberation: Girls in Uniform’. in Gender and German Cinema, Vol 2, ed. by Sandra Frieden et al. (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993)
Schlüpmann, Heide, and Karola Gramman, Mädchen in Uniform (1981)
http://archive.li/AHlAQ [Accessed 26 May 2018]
Wollenberg, H.H., Fifty Years of German Film, (London: The Falcon Press, 1948), p. 28
[1] McCormick, Richard W., ‘Coming Out of the Uniform: Political and Sexual Emancipation in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform’ in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Noah Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press. 2008) pp. 271-287.
[2] Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. by Roger Grieves (Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 1994), p. 325.
[3] McCormick, Richard W., ‘Coming Out of the Uniform: Political and Sexual Emancipation in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform’, in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. by Noah Isenberg, (New York: Columbia University Press. 2008) p. 281.
[4] Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: a Psychological History of the German Film, ed. and trans. by Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) pp. 226-229.