If You Don’t Laugh, You Cry: Die drei von der Tankstelle (1930)
Dr. Ian Roberts (University of Warwick)
© Die Drei von der Tankstelle (Wilhelm Thiele, 1930)
When Wilhelm Thiele’s Die drei von der Tankstelle (Three Good Friends or Three from the Filling Station) premiered in Berlin on 15 September 1930, the Weimar Republic, barely a decade old, was facing a critical moment in its troubled existence: electoral gains for the resurgent Nazi party meant that parliamentary democracy (long under fire from the nationalist right) was teetering on the verge of collapse. When parliament reconvened, newly-elected Nazi MPs appeared in the Reichstag for the first time in their brownshirt uniforms, a sign of things to come. [1] Yet nothing of this growing crisis can be discerned in this whimsical comedy, a carefully constructed operetta which tells the tale of three happy-go-lucky friends tripping through life, facing financial ruin before dusting themselves off and rising to success and fortune, with a sprinkling of competitive rivalry, comedic misunderstanding and romance along the way. A film which was a huge success at the time of release, capitalising on the still-fresh public interest in talkies, Die drei von der Tankstelle showcased songs that were instant hits (the German term is Ohrwürmer or ‘ear worms’) in 1930s Germany and remain popular even today.[2]
In the opening scene we see the three friends Willy (Willy Fritsch), Kurt (Oskar Karlweiss) and Hans (Heinz Rühmann)[3] cruising along in their smart convertible. They have been on holiday, touring Europe’s great cities for three months enjoying a lifestyle which, as the opening song ‘Ein Freund, ein guter Freund’ (a friend, a good friend) suggests, is a carefree “Taumel zu dritt” or a giddy whirl in their close-knit threesome. Combined with the initial montage of spinning wheels, shiny chrome auto parts, and countryside rushing past, there is a sense of a life which is certainly thrilling, but possibly a touch out of control (surely the modern Zeitgeist to a tee?). Confirming the breathlessness of their lifestyle, however, the lads arrive home to discover that their luck has changed. To their amazement they have been declared bankrupt, the cause of their misfortune never revealed (although we may well assume that this refers to the previous year’s Wall St Crash) and are summarily evicted from their home. Yet this disaster is received with a surprising degree of equanimity, the friends launching into the jolly ‘Kuckuck’ (cuckoo) song as their furniture levitates out of the house: they tease the official overseeing the repossession, singing jauntily “They’ve only left the walls standing, | And we’ll have to sign on at the dole”, before fleeing the location through the windows to prevent even their car being seized.
At this point, however, we see how serendipity will play a role in the fate of the trio. As they acknowledge their lack of suitability for a world of work their car runs out of fuel on a lonely country road. Willy, clearly the brightest of the three, immediately spots an opportunity: “Children, our future is secured! We’ll just sell the car and open a filling station here!” And, as the Germans say: ‘so gesagt, getan’; eliding any of the time and effort which must have been required to found such a venture, the film cuts to an establishing shot of the newly-opened ‘Kuckuck’ establishment with the boys working hard (at least, as hard as they can) to secure a steady customer-base. Despite some initial setbacks as cars hurry past their establishment without stopping, and some drivers want little more than a top-up of (free) water or a drop of fuel for their lighters, it does not take long before another moment of serendipity is signalled by the arrival of the vivacious Lilian (Lilian Harvey) in her smart Mercedes coupe. All three men fall in love with the young girl, attracted to her feisty and independent spirit – not least signalled by her passion for driving (in ‘Hallo, du süβe Frau’ (hello, you sweet girl) Lilian declares that “every girl dreams of a driving license nowadays”) – but it is Willy whose love is requited. Although this rivalry briefly threatens to end the friends’ amity, a series of comic misunderstandings and manoeuvrings sees harmony restored with the young men, once again inseparable, elevated to well-paid employment as directors of a new company running a chain of petrol stations, and Willy and Lilian preparing to marry.
On the surface, then, Die drei von der Tankstelle can be viewed as a prime example of a genre largely pioneered and perfected by Ufa in the 1930s which was hugely influential on the shape and tone of Hollywood’s great musicals of the 1950s.[4] The fact that the plot stretches credulity is largely irrelevant: the film was designed to showcase the talents of leading pair Willy Fritsch and Lilian Harvey (a heavily-feted couple in real life, at a time when film companies had begun to grasp the box-office potential of their stars). Thus the storyline acts as a vehicle for a series of specially written songs in a tale which seeks to divert the audience for a short while from the worries of day to day life. Regardless of the tribulations folk face in the real world, in Ufa’s dream factory the complexities and pratfalls of the friends’ lives are merely the prelude to a reassuringly simple ‘happily ever after’ resolution. Indeed, it is still a perfectly pleasurable diversion to watch this film on a rainy Sunday afternoon, allowing the characters’ antics and the catchy tunes simply to wash over one’s head.
But it doesn’t take long to recognise that there is a certain tragedy beneath the film’s glossy exterior. Quite apart from the political developments mentioned previously, 1930 is a year when the very act of filmmaking came under significant duress in Germany. This was a time when politics increasingly impinged on film production and film going alike – earlier that same year nationalist thugs-for-hire had paraded outside the first screenings of Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel protesting over its depiction of the downfall of a decent middle-class German professor, while the nationalist Alfred Hugenberg had all-but completed his plan to restructure Ufa into what was effectively a right-wing propaganda machine.[5] But in an approach which would be perfected by Joseph Goebbels in his later role as Hitler’s Minister for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, films such as Die drei von der Tankstelle which become something of a staple of Ufa’s output in this period espouse what Thomas Elsaesser terms ‘lifestyle propaganda’,[6] and Kracauer dubbed the ‘calico world’ of Weimar film, producing images of a carefree, glossy existence, all surface appeal and frivolous consumerism.[7] We have to wonder, then, whether we should elect to convict this film of deliberate deception, as a latter-day nod to the notion of panem et circenses, where malign forces seek to deflect public attention from their nefarious plans, or whether we instead accept that a number of disparate tensions combine in a film which rather hopes to reassure the audience that, for a while at least, all will be well at the end of the day. As Eric Rentschler points out:
At first blush, most German sound features from the late twenties and early thirties seem to be decidedly out of sync with the harsh and harried Zeitgeist, a time of mass unemployment, economic instability, political unrest, and existential disquiet. Indeed, the vast majority of genre films from the Weimar Republic’s last years, especially the many musical comedies, would seem best characterized as ungleichzeitig, or out of keeping with the times. In them, we behold performers who move with grace and ease, language that is perky and insouciant, and lavish set designs that bear few traces of grim realities. There is an intrepid vitality and an abundance of good cheer, even in the midst of crisis; despite imposing odds, the denizens of these fantasy lands remain chipper and unflappable. Produced in a country that was dancing on a volcano, these films provide light fare for hard times. The situation may be hopeless, they suggest, but it is not desperate.[8]
Not all will see malice aforethought in this or other Ufa offerings in this period. It is easy to accept the images on view in Die drei von der Tankstelle as innocent distraction, while the friends’ refusal to allow life to get them down – and the film’s reward for their blind optimism – is touching as well as uplifting. The main theme song’s dogged assertion that true friendship can and should transcend earthly woes proves surprisingly attractive, even viewing the film nearly a century after its release. Yet the decision, as understandable as it may be, to deny the quotidian tribulations of a Republic which is clearly in its death throes by 1930, is all the more tragic given the wisdom of hindsight, most particularly when we recognise the role of Jewish filmmakers in this and other light entertainment films of this era.
Even before 1933 Ufa was beginning to bend to the nationalists’ twisted dream of a Volksgemeinschaft, a racially-pure, revitalised Germanic state where the historical troubles of the country could be safely projected onto those who would become personae non grata. Behind the camera producer Erich Pommer, director Thiele and songwriter Heymann (to name but a few) went into exile after the Nazis’ Machtergreifung in 1933, either because of their own Jewish heritage or their association with Jewish spouses; on screen, Oskar Karlweis (who plays Kurt) likewise escaped the Nazis, ending his career in Hollywood, while Kurt Gerron (the Jewish lawyer) was arrested by the Gestapo in the Netherlands and was later murdered in a concentration camp, but only after being forced to direct a propaganda film about how happy the life of inmates of that terrible place was.[9] Furthermore, it can be seen that some filmmakers did try to turn their craft to oppositional practices, warning their audiences of the rising threat of nationalism: Die drei von der Tankstelle premiered in the same year that Pabst released his stridently anti-war film Westfront 1918,[10] and just two years before Slatan Dudow’s provactively left-wing work Kuhle Wampe oder wem gehört Deutschland (1932) so it cannot be said that some filmmakers were not aware of the need for films which make a political point. Indeed, at a time when film had been recruited in the increasingly bitter cultural war over the definition of identity and societal belonging in Germany, Josef von Sternberg cast a critical eye over issues of society and hypocrisy in German society in Der blaue Engel (1930) and included songs which became popular in wider society.
If one cares to examine the film more closely, however, Die drei von der Tankstelle does seem to smuggle in a warning of kinds, a foreshadowing of darker days ahead. When first advised of their troubles, the friends try to determine the nature of the calamity which has apparently befallen them. ‘Is it an earthquake?’ asks Hans. ‘Maybe a change of government in Lippe-Detmold’, suggests Willy? In a sense the answer could easily be yes to both questions, as it was the constituency of Lippe-Detmold which first saw a Nazi majority returned in local elections. More telling, perhaps, is Kurt’s impertinent enquiry, asking their clearly Jewish lawyer whether his wife has given birth to a blond child, as if the Nazis’ subsequent politics of eugenics are already seeking to eradicate the Jewish presence in Germany. And of course the answer which they eventually receive, informing them of financial ruin and hinting at a collapse in personal fortunes just a few months after the real-life crashes of Wall St and Black Monday, results in their own penury, eviction and unemployment, briefly provoking a worried question ‘What will we do now – we haven’t done a day’s work in our lives!’ which only obliquely acknowledges the misery of the three million-plus Germans seeking work in Germany in 1930.
But of course the new genre of the musical is predicated on optimism and a happy end, targeting perhaps Kracauer’s famous shopgirls.[11] Nothing in the film shakes the characters’ fervent – one might say blind – belief in the maxim that all’s well that ends well. Upon receiving the bad news of their ruin, the friends sit down on their soon-to-be repossessed furniture and sing the Cuckoo song, continuing right through the scene where their possessions are carried off, and some actually fly through the windows, with the three men following. But even their optimism cannot completely shake off an undertone of impending disaster which, I suggest, persists even after things seem to be on the up again. The film’s motif of making the most of opportunities when they come along (at times with the help of friends or family manipulating events in the background) is especially bittersweet given the events occurring in Germany at this time: as Willy and Lilian, brought together it should be noted by a particularly sudden and vicious thunderstorm, openly declare their love for each other they sing „Lass nicht die Tage verflieβen, bald ist der Frühling dahin“ (Don’t let the days slip away, spring will be soon past). Thus, Stiasny suggests, Die drei von der Tankstelle‘appears as an ideal of Weimar cinema as a whole [where] commercial and artistic ambitions, genre cinema, and avant-garde aesthetics do not contradict each other, but rather merge into a popular form’,[12] which might be viewed both as light-hearted distraction and rather more sinister manipulation simultaneously. The film ‘stage[s] its own utopia in a lighthearted way, as a sort of message in the bottle’,[13] where some characters’ Jewish identity, or the hint that more stormy days lie ahead, is of peripheral importance when compared to a light-hearted tale of fortunes lost and won, and friendly rivalry for the love of a good woman.
In the end, then, we may recognise the well-intentioned impetus to deceive, to distract. Even Willy is aware of how easily lives can be manipulated when he asserts ‘Can’t you see that it’s all a plot?’, albeit he is referring to the chicanery which sees love triumph and fortunes restored, with little or no thought to the forces at play in the background, let alone the consequences of these actions. We may applaud Ufa’s aspiration to make a commercially successful film which briefly lifts the audience away from the realities of a society sliding inexorably towards demagoguery: ‘A friend, a good friend, that’s the greatest treasure in the whole world’, state our heroes as they sing, dance and joke their way through life, oblivious to the wider issues at stake in the society beyond the screen. Even today we desperately want to agree with them. At the film’s conclusion Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch accidentally find themselves on the wrong side of a curtain pulled across the final scene. Momentarily taken aback they peer into camera, penetrating the supposed gloom of the cinema, spy the audience, and wonder what ‘all these strangers’ are still doing in the auditorium when the film has ended. Willy (now clearly speaking for himself, not his filmic character) is about to ask the audience this very question when Lilian (Harvey, not Cossmann) suggests that such an operetta needs to end with a suitably large-scale musical finale, itself an odd proposal given that there has just been a song and dance number to close. At this suggestion, the curtain is pulled back again, and we are treated to a final, gloriously upbeat burst of singing and dancing, one last hurrah of laughter and escapism. Right at the close, it seems, the film is at pains to point out that we shouldn’t get too carried away by the escapism at the heart of the storyline, soon we shall be pulling on our coats and making our way home through streets plagued by the same problems as earlier. Crucially, as the curtain falls for one last time we as an audience happily go along with the conceit, grateful perhaps for ninety minutes of distraction. After all, if you don’t laugh, you’ll surely cry…
Notes
[1] Elections held on 14 September 1930 returned 107 seats for the National Socialist party. See Kitchen (2006), 247-48; Kreimeier (1996), 186.
[2] The era of the talkie was ushered in by the Warner Brothers’ film The Jazz Singer (dir. Alan Crossland, 1927) which saw European release in 1928. Ufa’s first feature-length talkie Melodie des Herzens (Melody of the Heart, dir. Hanns Schwarz), which also starred Willy Fritsch, had premiered in December 1929.
[3] This was Rühmann’s comedic debut and set him on course for stardom over the next several decades.
[4] See Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa-Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 290-91.
[5] Hugenberg, who had already acquired significant newspaper holdings as part of his strategy to transform the role of media in the struggle against the Republic, had acquired Ufa in 1927 and became party leader of the Deutsch Nationale Volkspartei in 1928). See Kreimeier (1996), 158-72.
[6] Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 407.
[7] See here Janet Ward’s analysis of Weimar surface culture in Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2001).
[8] Eric Rentschler, ‘Too Lovely to be True’, in The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar era to the Present (New York: Columbia UP, 2015), p. 114.
[9] Kreimeier, p. 328.
[10] Premiered 23 May 1930.
[11] Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Little Shopgirls go to the Movies’, in German Essays on Film ed. by Richard W. McCormick & Alison Guenther-Pal I(New York; London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 99-110.
[12] Philipp Stiasny (2021) ‘Two Worlds, Three Friends, and the Mysterious Seven-Branched Candelabrum: Jewish filmmaking in Weimar Germany’ in Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema ed. by Barbara Hales & Valerie Weinstein (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2021), pp. 131-51 (p. 143).
[13] Ibid, p. 143.
Bibliography
Elsaesser, Thomas, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000).
Kitchen, Martin, A History of Modern Germany 1800-2000 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Kracauer, Siegfried, ‘The Little Shopgirls go to the Movies’ in German Essays on Film ed. by Richard W. McCormick & Alison Guenther-Pal. (New York; London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 99-110.
Kreimeier, Klaus (1996) The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Rentschler, Eric (2015) ‘Too Lovely to be True’ in The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German legacies from the Weimar era to the present (New YorkL Columbia UP, 2015), pp. 113-30.
Stiasny, Philipp, (2021) ‘Two Worlds, Three Friends, and the Mysterious Seven-Branched Candelabrum: Jewish filmmaking in Weimar Germany’ in Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema ed. by Barbara Hales & Valerie Weinstein (New York; Oxford Berghahn, 2021), pp. 131-51.
Ward, Janet (2001) Weimar Surfaces. Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).