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If You Don’t Laugh, You Cry: Die drei von der Tankstelle (1930)

Molly Harrabin — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 16:27:12 GMT

If You Don’t Laugh, You Cry: Die drei von der Tankstelle (1930)

Dr. Ian Roberts (University of Warwick)

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).

Thinking Outside the (Toy)Box: Feminism and Performance in Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Puppe (1919)

Molly Harrabin — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 14:18:25 GMT

Thinking Outside the (Toy)Box: Feminism and Performance in Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Puppe (1919)

Eloise Richardson (University of Cambridge)

Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy Die Puppe (1919) centres around a mix-up between a woman and a doll. The film's male lead, Lancelot (Hermann Thimig), is afraid of women, causing him to choose a doll for a wife. He visits Hilarius (Victor Janson), an eccentric dollmaker who has just made a doll completely identical to his daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda). While Hilarius greets his customer, his apprentice breaks the doll and his daughter volunteers to take its place. However, Lancelot picks her out as the doll he wants to marry, and buys her. During the course of several escapades in which Ossi has fun while pretending to be a doll and Lancelot attempts to convince his family that she is not, Ossi falls in love with Lancelot. At last, when Lancelot finally regrets that she is not actually human, she convinces him that she is, and they walk happily out of the frame hand in hand.

Double Trouble

Sigmund Freud's essay 'Das Unheimliche' was published in the same year as Die Puppe; in it, he uses E. T. A. Hoffmann's novella Der Sandmann to explain uncanniness. Interestingly, both Die Puppe and Der Sandmann involve confusion between doll and human, but while Nathanael falls in love with a doll that he believes is a woman (Olimpia), the opposite is true for Lancelot. A similar opposition is that the doll/woman leads to Nathanael's death while in Die Puppe, the mix-up proves enlightening for Lancelot. Only by purchasing the doll, by attempting to live out his fear of women, does he become aware of his own foolishness. While Freud dismisses the image of the doll in his essay, preferring to focus on the fear of loss of eyes as the main source of uncanniness in Der Sandmann, his idea that uncanniness can be found in something which ought to have remained concealed but emerges or steps forth (‘hervorgetreten ist’) is easily applied to Ossi in Die Puppe. Throughout the film, Ossi is constantly choosing when to conceal her identity and when to reveal it, stepping forth or otherwise animating her supposedly inanimate body.

Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari, also made in 1919, and containing another image of a doll, bears interesting comparison with Die Puppe. Cesare, a somnambulist seemingly under the spell of his master, Caligari, is a sideshow spectacle who, stepping trance-like out of a coffin-like box (very similar to the potentially sinister way in which Hilarius’ dolls step out and hop down from their stage), predicts the deaths of those in his audience and kills them in the night. To avoid detection by the police, Caligari places a dummy of Cesare in the box during the night. Cesare himself sometimes appears more like a puppet than a human, contrasting with Ossi, who refuses to be under anyone’s control. The character of Caligari can be compared to Hilarius in Die Puppe: they have both created dolls of those who are under their authority and seem to be obsessed with controlling another person’s identity and images. Although there are countless similarities between the two films, such as painted cardboard sets, fairground references, framing narratives and dolls being confused with humans, Caligari uses the double theme to evoke dread, death and threat rather than comic effect. The greatest difference between the two films is that Caligari is hailed as one of the canonical Weimar masterpieces, whereas Die Puppe has received little attention. This is most probably in some part due to the fact that Caligari deals with the tragedy of male identity in turmoil, whereas Die Puppe concentrates on an exploration of female identity. Criticism has overlooked Die Puppe and chosen Caligari in the same way that Freud dismissed Hoffmann's doll in favour of the Sandman figure. However, Lubitsch's film merits being taken seriously because it does not merely show threatened masculinity, but parodies it through comedy and fantasy, creating a particularly telling platform for the subversion of gender norms.

Unmasking the Masquerade

Die Puppe opens with Lubitsch taking pieces out of a toybox and assembling them into a miniature world, which then becomes, via a fade-out and fade-in, the diegetic world of the film. Lubitsch thus sets up the film as something completely fabricated and ensures his illusion of reality is always identifiable, often forcing the viewer to look directly at the illusion itself as the most important thing. The viewer's attention is thus drawn not to the doll that Ossi is pretending to be, but the pretence itself. In this light, the act of masquerade is central to the film. Sabine Hake, in her book Passions and Deceptions (1992), to date the only in-depth study of gender in Lubitsch’s early films, writes that Lubitsch's early comedies are able to be subversive only through being situated in the fantastic or farce and are not necessarily anchored to the mimetic, for instance using exaggeration to reassure the viewer that no 'real' boundaries are being crossed. Conversely, she also states that the exaggeration of gender roles in the films leads to 'their critical exposure through the means of parody.'[1] Ultimately, she argues that regardless of whether traditional gender roles are asserted at the end of a film, it is significant enough that boundaries have been transgressed.

In the light of Hake's theory that the doll and the female body are not one and the same and can be told apart, Ossi's first appearance on screen takes on greater significance. She shares the screen with her double: clearly, woman and doll are separable. Yet, because Lubitsch permits the viewer to see neither the 'original' in isolation nor the manufacture of the doll, there is no way of ascertaining completely which is the doll and which is Ossi. Therefore, the viewer can only speculate as to which version is the authentic original, and the existence of a 'real woman' is challenged. Ossi is enjoying herself in her mimetic act. Her delight also indicates a fascination with the possibilities of masquerade, as well as a desire to explore her own identity, which she undeniably does during the narrative. Her fascination with the doll also acts as a reflection of the female spectator: as Ossi looks admiringly at her effigy, the female viewer, looking at Ossi, sees her own image on screen and – through the double – the imaging to which the female body is subject. Therefore, in allowing female spectators to identify with Ossi and the liberation that she achieves through inhabiting and manipulating the role of the doll, the film has a potentially emancipatory quality.

In her book Alice Doesn’t, Teresa de Lauretis dismisses the traditional idea of a division between masculine gaze and feminine image in favour of a dual identification with image and subject which anchors the female spectator to the film and opens up more dynamic possibilities. Ossi represents an example of what de Lauretis has identified as the female spectator’s simultaneous 'double identification with the figure of narrative movement, the mythical subject, and with the figure of narrative closure, the narrative image.'[2]The first trait of Ossi's personality the viewer sees is that of defiance and rebelliousness when she refuses to smile and pulls a face instead. This exaggerated facial expression, the first of many, shows Ossi's inclination towards masquerade and performance. Impersonating the doll is therefore a way for her to exist as pure performance, freed from the constraints of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Ossi’s doll is centred, the lighting is focused on her, and she (rather than Ossi) is the subject of the looks in the shot (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Die Puppe (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)

As the other characters continue to admire the doll, Ossi rises from her chair, leans on the windowsill and looks out and away from the scene. The camera cuts to Lancelot walking down the steps, identifying him as the object of her gaze, then cuts back to Ossi. This time the camera is positioned outside the window, as she looks out, looking intrigued and smiling (Figure 2). The shot provides a wealth of framings: the wall around the window, the window itself and the glazing bars on it all serve to trap Ossi in her place. Due to the clear absence of glass in the windows, the bars resemble more closely a prison cell than a house window, particularly since the background is completely black. Given the viewer's knowledge that a flurry of excitement is happening behind her, this background evokes a sense of absence, whileadditionally depicting Ossi as oppressed and isolated. There is nothing for the viewer to focus on but Ossi’s imprisonment in the mise-en-scène. Arguably, Ossi begins to formulate her plan for emancipation with this shot: she sees the man she wants and later the doll provides her with an escape route out of her house.

Figure 2: Die Puppe (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)

In assuming the doll's identity, Ossi takes control of the masquerade. Her father's loss of control is paralleled by Ossi's disappearance from her father's house. Here it is clear that the masquerade as represented by the doll's image is a visualisation of control; but far from being trapped in the body of a doll, Ossi uses it to free herself from her trapped existence. Moreover, Ossi's exaggeratedly rigid face as the doll allows for the moments in which she is not performing to be identified more easily, and these moments show her almost always laughing, both out of sheer excitement and at having fooled other characters. In the foundational feminist text, Womanliness as a Masquerade, Joan Riviere concludes, after a case study of a woman who was acting overly feminine in a male-dominated field of work, that ‘womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it.’[3] Similar to Joan Riviere's patient, Ossi can be seen to justify her agency and activity by acting in overly feminine and doll-like ways. As well as being a visual marker of masquerade, the form of the mechanical doll can also be seen as representing the constraints of society. In this light, the fact that the doll breaks at such an early point in the film might be taken as evidence that the film means to challenge those boundaries. Furthermore, it could be an example of the sort of destruction of an outdated way of writing (or cinematically portraying) women which Hélène Cixous calls for in her essay The Laugh of the Medusa. In this case, Ossi’s exaggerated and spontaneous ‘human’ performances, compared with the stasis of the man-made doll, can be seen to represent a new, emancipated portrayal of women. Ossi is not adhering to the patriarchal narrative of how a doll ought to act, but is rebelling and writing her own narrative.

The film's self-awareness closes the distance between spectator and object. This closeness has the additional effect of making voyeurism, which always requires a certain distance from its object, harder to achieve. Furthermore, a barrier is placed between the male spectator and his identification with Lancelot, given Lancelot’s apparent aversion to women, which confounds the established model of the male gaze. Additionally, that Lancelot's wish is to seek refuge in a monastery might also indicate a fear of the sexuality of the liberated 'new woman', a fear of female sexual agency which resonates with Freud's reading of Der Sandmann. Lancelot's wish to marry a doll supports Riviere's idea of the necessity of the masquerade as a means to pacify the male because the female has transgressed patriarchal codes of conduct. The element which sets this film apart, however, and allows for it to be read subversively, is its constant parody of patriarchy and femininity, through exaggeration, comedy and carnivalesque laughter. It is also interesting to note that Lancelot begins life as a doll when he is taken out of Lubitsch's box in the opening sequence, whereas Ossi's situation is the opposite because she decides to take on the role of the doll and uses this to control the action of the film. Lancelot, on the other hand, has limited agency and is forced by his uncle to marry, albeit then finding a form of subterfuge to elude this requirement. Through this irony, Lubitsch is able to critique the misogynistic construct of the 'ideal woman,' rather than merely depict it. Lancelot's exaggerated feminisation, in terms of conventional gender roles, might be seen as necessary in order for a woman to be the stronger character, because it still upholds traditional heterosexual gender roles in its subversion of them. However, the film's comedy seems to undermine and ridicule these roles, whilestill acknowledging their stubborn existence.

‘Hilarius’ Patriarchy

Although the film contains misogyny, it is softened, perhaps showing that while it might be futile to live in a society without misogyny, there are ways in which its power can be diminished. In the doll shop, which according to its advertisement appeals directly to misogynists, the only options available for purchase seem to be one from the chorus line of threatening, ever-advancing dolls, or Ossi - none of the options seem to be submissive. Ossi's doll is completely unpredictable and unable to be controlled. For example, after he has brought her home, Lancelot attempts to undress Ossi, but she slaps him away, causing him to marvel at her capability of undressing herself. This example also shows Ossi's insistence on being the sole controller of her image. Similarly, the viewer is shown Ossi taking pride in her appearance and applying make-up, but when her father attempts to paint her lips, she is disgusted and removes it. Furthermore, she kisses Lancelot whenever she wants to: she is not only in control of her image but her sexuality too. She seems indecisive and impulsive, but always in control. When Lancelot tries to use her as a literal object (a stand for his hat and jacket) she demonstrates her activeness by repeatedly throwing away his jacket. Interestingly, she always chooses to keep his hat on, an image which shows traditionally masculine power as having been subverted. Here, the idea of a passive woman seems as far from reality as the film's fairy-tale elements. Yet, although female agency seems to terrify Lancelot, the film shows his potential for change and growth. By the time of his dream sequence at the end of the film, he has clearly changed his mind, and desires her to be a 'real' woman.

The character of Hilarius becomes more intriguing when viewed as a personification of patriarchy. As Ossi’s father and the creator of the doll, Hilarius can logically be seen to symbolise the older generation and an authority figure. Yet in every aspect, his character seems to be the one that is the most roundly mocked. In the first instance, his name is too close to the German word ‘Hilarität’ for his character not to already be viewed as clownlike. The naming clearly has a strategic function here, with the male characters set up as figures to be laughed at; Lancelot’s personality could not be further from that of his heroic namesake. Hilarius also has a comic appearance with a bizarre wig and moustache, and the chequered trousers of a harlequin clown. Further, his apprentice takes every opportunity to undermine the authority of his master. In one scene, he stands behind Hilarius and silently mimics his every expression and gesture.

The constant undermining of the patriarchal older male character by his apprentice could also suggest that there is hope for a future without these outdated values. Furthermore, while sleepwalking, Hilarius is completely powerless, just as he is when attempting to float his way to the monastery at the film’s ending: while Ossi has emancipated herself, Hilarius, and on a symbolic level, patriarchy at large, has become passive. Conversely, women in the film are much more active, as illustrated by the comically sped-up chase sequence, the effect of which, as a dynamic collective, is amplified when juxtaposed with the sedentary group of monks. Painted on the front of Hilarius’ shop are the dolls he sells but, interestingly, alongside them are men dressed as clowns: perhaps this is a comment that anybody wanting to purchase a doll instead of a wife is a fool, and that their needs will be met by a purveyor of dolls who is himself a clown. When Lancelot leaves the shop with Ossi, her father tells him how to look after her and says he will leave her in Lancelot’s hands in an amusing parody of the transfer of power from father to husband in marriage.

Laughter in the Face of Boundaries

Boundaries, and their dismissals, can be seen in abundance in Die Puppe. Significantly, monasteries are as a rule spaces which exclude women. Therefore, because Ossi is (accidentally) allowed to become active in that space, the film shows the ability of an emancipated woman to cross boundaries which she previously could not, and enter spaces previously denied to her. Furthermore, the monastery provides a space in the film in which Ossi’s rejection of being figuratively restrained is depicted literally. As she is being carried over the monk’s shoulder into the room where she is to be kept, she pushes him into the room instead, gleefully slams the door on him and thus redresses the gender imbalance. In the shot, the door is on the far left: with the door shut, the monk is forced out of the frame, and Ossi has the stage to herself once again (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Die Puppe (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)

Comparison with the earlier shot of Ossi at the window demonstrates how, in the course of the film, Ossi has gained freedom. Further, the way in which she bursts into laughter after this scene can be read not only as joyful, but as a more subversive expression of the rebelliousness of femininity. Moreover, her body is positioned towards the camera (and the spectator) so as to share the laugh with other women, crossing the line between actor and audience and uniting them. Ossi uses her entire body in the laugh, clapping her hands together, throwing her head back, crouching down and slapping both her thighs. Such an exaggerated way of laughing means that even without the benefit of sound, Ossi’s outburst seems extraordinarily loud, and as a consequence powerful. As she straightens up, her facial expression changes as she suddenly recalls what she was doing and she turns and runs away: for a moment, then, her laughter stopped the narrative in a spectacle of hilarity as attraction. Additionally, as she uses her whole body for laughter, her body might be seen to become the site of female rebellion – the retributive laugh of the Medusa, in Cixous’ terms, while the body of the doll signifies the suffocating rigidity of the patriarchal order. Ossi is not allowing herself to be repressed: she is overflowing with expressiveness.

Joseph McBride notes how Lubitsch’s association with comedy has led to his films being devalued and dismissed as frivolous, with people having failed 'to understand what his satire is actually saying about sexual relationships or the immaturity of sexist figures […] who tend to receive their comeuppance from strong women along their paths to increased emotional maturation.'[4] In broad terms, Ossi’s laughter, irrepressibility and disruption of the rigidity of a male narrative can be seen to lead to Lancelot’s emotional maturation. In 1981, E. Ann Kaplan wrote that for Lubitsch, roles for women are 'largely comic devices depending on his audience's patriarchal assumptions, rather than part of exploring sex-role stereotypes.'[5] However, it is clear that comedy should not be dismissed as lacking investigative or critical power: the film should better be viewed as a lesson masquerading as a joke. It is of course true that the sexism that is bound up with the spectacle in Die Puppe would have appealed to some spectators, but it is the underlying satire and constant opportunities for multiple contradicting interpretations that arguably ensured its popularity among contemporary audiences. Furthermore, this film in particular seems, in the face of Kaplan’s statement, to highlight the inherent problem with trusting one’s assumptions and fitting characters into stereotypical roles.

Dancing into Liberation

Dance is used repeatedly in the film to show a sense of breaking free. Twice, dolls begin to dance on a stage within the mise-en-scène and then jump from the stage into the ‘real’ floor, indicating something of a transformative quality of this kind of performance. Through dance, the boundary between real and imaginary is traversable, with implications for the security of the cinema screen as ‘fourth wall’ between the architectural space of the film and its spectators in the auditorium. Via choreographic effects, the narrative can not only be suspended, but its direction altered. Ossi constantly expresses herself through dance. Her exaggerated, robotic dance movements when masquerading as the doll make it easier for the viewer to identify the other moments in the narrative where she is dancing as herself. During the wedding, Ossi dances when she thinks she is alone, in other words for herself, rather than for anyone else's pleasure. In deliberately breaking the rules governing the doll's existence, Ossi demonstrates a liberation from the etiquette associated with being a woman. The doll's body serves as a metaphor for the boundaries women can and cannot transgress. However, it should not be ignored that Ossi is always only able to transgress without consequences while people are not aware of her existence as an 'authentic' woman. In the monastery, the monks, instructed not to look at Ossi, furtively turn their heads towards her, but when she sees this, she looks back at them and mouths 'Buh!', scaring them into looking away again. This illustrates the 'ability [...] to acknowledge and return the look',[6] which Thomas Elsaesser has observed is a common trait among Lubitsch's female stars, rendering relations of power and control wholly unstable. The camera then cuts to a full body shot of Ossi, who, having scared away the male gaze, begins to dance in her doll impression again. The monks cannot resist and turn to watch again, and eventually begin dancing along. A subsequent shot then shows the monks dancing behind Ossi as though they are her backing dancers. No longer simply consuming her image, they seem to have been absorbed into the performance: yet again the boundary between reality and (theatrical) performance is blurred. When the abbot returns, the monks run away and out of the shot, but Ossi continues to dance, albeit less boisterously. In a shot-reverse shot, the friar looks down and a close-up iris shot of Ossi’s dancing legs is shown, in a way that might seem to be fragmenting her body for male consumption in classical cinematic style. However, the next shot shows him beginning to copy her dance and looking at her legs, indicating that rather than lewdly staring at her body, he is simply trying to understand and mimic the dance routine. In this way, film shows that multiple subversive interpretations of images and their spectatorial effects are possible.

Conclusion: The Power of Parody

Die Puppe depicts a world in which boundaries are places of transformation and liberation rather than constraint, and a world in which a woman can find ways of controlling her own image and body. The doll, serving as a visualisation of the psychoanalytical concept of masquerade, also functions as a way to explore what it is that makes womanliness artificial, an ambiguity which runs through the film and might cause the viewer to question their previous beliefs. Furthermore, comparison with other literary and cinematic dolls indicates that the film's effectiveness in its subversion is that it is able, through laughter, to parody misogyny rather than to enable, or indeed merely to show it. Ossi's laughter, despite her undeniably restricted situation, shows how it is possible, even in the role of a doll-wife, to be subversive. Finally, the fact that Lubitsch does not appear at the close of the film to complete what appeared to be a frame narrative, showing a final disregard for prioritising plot over image, implies that further subversion is a possibility: it seems that Ossi has broken free of the frame.

Further reading:

Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ in Signs 1, no. 4 (1976), pp. 875–93.

De Lauretis, Teresa, Alice Doesn’t, (London: Macmillan, 1984)

Drux, Rudolf, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann, (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1994)

Elsaesser, Thomas, Weimar Cinema and After, (NY: Routledge: 2009)

Freud, Sigmund, ‘Das Unheimliche,’ in Imago. Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften V (1919), pp. 297-324

Hake, Sabine, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)

McBride, Joseph, How Did Lubitsch Do It?, (NY: Columbia University Press, 2018)

McCormick, Rick, Sex, Politics and Comedy, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2020)

Riviere, Joan, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929), pp. 303-313

[1] Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 98.

[2] Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (London: Macmillan, 1984), 144.

[3] Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929), pp. 303-313, 306.

[4] Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?, (NY: Columbia University Press, 2018), 30.

[5] E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Lubitsch Reconsidered,’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Summer 1981) pp 305-312, 306.

[6] Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, (NY: Routledge: 2009), 209.

Call for Contributions: Gender and Sexuality in the Films of the Weimar Republic

Molly Harrabin — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 14:52:27 GMT

Call for Contributions - Gender and Sexuality in the Films of the Weimar Republic

Please find below the Call for Contributions for the Weimar Film Network’s special series of blog posts and film reviews on the topic of gender and sexuality in the films of the Weimar Republic. The editors are interested in receiving proposals from a wide range of disciplines and look forward to contributions that engage with a broad spectrum of topics, artistic forms, historical perspectives and methodologies. We welcome submissions from postgraduate researchers as well as early-career and more established scholars.

With very best wishes,

Molly Harrabin and Lawrence Alexander

Editors of the Weimar Film Network

2022 Special Collection: Gender and Sexuality in the Films of the Weimar Republic

The Weimar Film Network is coordinating a special series of blog posts and film reviews on the topic of gender and sexuality in the films of the Weimar Republic as part of its celebration of LGBTQ+ History Month and Women’s History Month in February and March 2022 respectively. In particular, the editors are seeking contributions that explore representations of gender and sexuality in German films released 1918-1933 and the extent to which these depictions mirrored and/or shaped societal attitudes and anxieties of the time. We encourage contributions that revisit and reevaluate the perception of the Weimar Republic as a ‘golden era’ in German film history and the canonical status of Weimar film as ‘historical imaginary’. We are particularly keen to see new insights into the field on topics/films that have previously been neglected. Contributions might consider the following topics:

Representations of female and/or queer characters in German film 1918-1933
Typologies and pathologies of sexual deviance and non-conforming gender identities, including but not limited to the work of Magnus Hirschfeld and the influence of ‘Aufklärungsfilme’
Overviews of gender and sexual reforms of the period
Representations of sex work and the figure of the prostitute
‘New women’ and femmes fatales
Cross-dressing, drag and androgynous style on film
Cyborgs, techno-fetishism and trans bodies
The relation of Weimar ‘body culture’ to film and visual culture
Queer parenthood and immaculate conceptions
Intersections of gender and sexuality with minoritarian identities such as race and class; exoticist articulations of erotic fantasy
Feminist/queer readings of films that are not typically associated with aspects of gender and/or sexuality
Spotlight on female/queer directors/actors of the period
Emasculation in Weimar Cinema
The legacy of Weimar in the Nazi era and how this shaped the Third Reich’s depiction of female and/or queer issues

Submission Details

Please submit a 250-350 word abstract and a short biographical statement by 10 January 2022 to weimarfilmnetwork@warwick.ac.uk. Acceptance notices will be sent by 17 January 2022. Contributions may be the work of an individual or a collaboration. Pieces will be published throughout February and March 2022 in celebration of LGBTQ+ and Women’s History months. If you have a preference as to which month your piece is released, please indicate when submitting your proposal.

Ambiguous Displays of Emancipation

Molly Harrabin — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 11:51:32 GMT

Ambiguous Displays of Emancipation

Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert [UCLA]

Lilian Harvey balancing on a tightrope in front of a film crew in an experimental dream sequence from Ein blonder Traum (1932) directed by Paul Martin.

In the late Weimar Republic, depictions of modern women filled the silver screen: switchboard operators, secretaries, women at the wheel, manicurists, or aspiring actresses. Films mirrored social and technological advances of their time but, while there were images of strong independent women among them, these displays of progress were usually qualified by conflicting elements of the plot. A recurring aspect in films of the period was the tendency to challenge conservative gender norms, only to return to a heteronormative advisory stance by the conclusion of the film. This re-established a patriarchal order, retroactively marking initial transgressions of traditional values as a temporary phase, a state of confusion on the way to the so-called natural/normal: women’s function as part of the nuclear family. These films cast aside independence and self-reliance as transitional moments in the progression toward true fulfilment. In retrospect, this narrative strategy for depicting modern women in late Weimar films makes an overall ideological stance toward gender emancipation of women within the culture of Germany’s first democracy difficult to narrow down.

Technological progress in the modern imaginary signified a beacon of hope to some, and a threat to others, as it challenged norms perceived as established or natural. Fritz Lang’s famous science fiction film Metropolis (1927) introduces a machine-woman hybrid as something to be desired, but also to be feared. Maria, portrayed in a dual performance by Brigitte Helm, merged widespread anxiety over new technologies with male fear of the emancipated woman. It portrayed the natural woman as nurturing, the perfect mother and wife, while the artificial robot-hybrid is an evil and seductive vamp, a revolutionary threat to the established order. In two lesser-known films (1928 and 1930) based on Hanns Heinz Ewers’ novel Alraune, Helm once again played this emblematic role of a man-made woman, as the product of artificial insemination of a prostitute by an executed murderer. This product of man’s tinkering with nature through technological means becomes Eros and Thanatos personified, wreaking havoc through her sexual appeal as an uncanny seductress. Maria and Alraune capture a misogynistic view of the continuing emancipation of women in public life and concerns that changing gender norms would lead to an eventual emasculation of the modern male, resulting in a failure of patriarchal power structures at the core of early twentieth-century German society.

Male Fear and Desire

In an analysis of Maria in Metropolis, Andreas Huyssen argues that the relationship between technology and women in Weimar film generates a controversial dynamic:

The film suggests a simple and deeply problematic homology between woman and technology, a homology which results from male projections: Just as man invents and constructs technological artefacts which are to serve him and fulfil his desires, so woman, as she has been socially invented and constructed by man, is expected to reflect man’s needs and to serve her master.^[1]

Richard W. McCormick and Anjeana K. Hans have both pointed to the relationship between female emancipation and technology as a complex issue which involved female spectatorship,^[2] various female character tropes, and the male gaze.^[3] These are all interesting angles that help us understand the layers involved in displaying women and machines in these films. The eroticisation of machine-like movement of female bodies is almost a trope of the Weimar mass entertainment imaginary as Siegfried Kracauer points out in his ‘Mass Ornament’ essay which argued that ‘hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls’,^[4] or as Béla Balázs put it: ‘At first, machines appeared as soulless and unspiritual in their relationship to the arts, but with time, man felt them as part of his body. They became his fingertips’.^[5]

Science fiction establishes an unambiguous medium for the translation of present fears of the near future. Conveniently, caricatures such as Alraune and Maria have allowed us to gloss over more complex female characters, which appealed to the modern woman too, ensuring a film’s ultimate popularity with all sexes. The last years of the Weimar Republic were a time of polarisation on many issues, and chief among them were conflicting views on women’s place in the world. Men largely dominated the film industry as well, which is not to dismiss important behind-the-camera contributions by women that shaped some stories and characters of big-screen Weimar entertainment, such as Luise Fleck, Thea von Harbou, Irma von Cube, Leontine Sagan, or even the likes of Leni Riefenstahl. It is crucial to realise that gender equality for women was far from a reality and, by the end of the Twenties, the women’s rights movement had lost much of its momentum after achieving equal voting rights in 1918.

Screenshot taken from Menschen am Sonntag (1929).

In a scene from Menschen am Sonntag (Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930), a young woman wields her curling iron as a weapon to destroy her boyfriend’s photograph of a famous female movie star. She alters the function of a machine typically used for female gender-coded self-fashioning to destroy an unrealistic role-model, a fetishised and artificially mass-reproduced depiction of a woman. Taken out of context, the scene is one of powerful emancipation: an act of rebellion against her boyfriend and a liberation from the feminine beauty ideals featured in mass media which reduce women to sexualised objects. The image is striking and progressive. However, peeling back the layers, one discovers that the young woman was actually reacting to her boyfriend’s actions. He just smeared shaving cream on a card displaying one of her male idols. A group of men scripted the film (Billy Wilder, Robert, and his brother Curt Siodmak) whose primary intention was the depiction of non-actors in everyday life. It is therefore conceivable that their sole intention was to show ordinary men and women destroying pictures of extraordinary movie stars, creating a visual metaphor for the very concept of rejecting stardom in favour of the realism that their film sought to achieve. But it is equally conceivable that the gendered reading of the scene as a rejection of unrealistic standards imposed by movies on women was always present in the film along with alternative interpretations.

Who’s Gazing at You, Kid?

The predominance of men in Weimar cinema meant that male voices often informed displays of women’s emancipation on the big screen. Under harsh studio lights, Jou-Jou (French for ‘plaything’) walks a tightrope as an American executive dressed like the German Kaiser Wilhelm II points and laughs at her. After waking up from this nightmare, Jou-Jou abandons her ambitions of Hollywood stardom and settles into her happy ending with a modest window cleaner (Willy Fritsch) in the Berlin countryside. The surreal scene at the heart of Paul Martin’s 1932 musical Ein blonder Traum, dreamt up by screenwriters Billy Wilder and Franz Schulz, is something of an omen for its star. Shot in German, French, and English versions starring Lilian Harvey in all three, the film caught the eye of the Fox Film Corporation, who put her under contract. Harvey’s rude awakening came when she hadn’t made as big an impact in the United States as she had in Europe and returned to Germany, now under Nazi rule.

There is an ambivalence in Ein blonder Traum, a fine line between conservative and progressive values, that deserves scrutiny, especially considering its relation to technological advancements: film in particular, but also automobiles, radios, typewriters, and photographs. Nowadays, machines in their relation to concepts of gender can help us move beyond patriarchal structures as sketched out in A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, an essay in which the author challenges the reader to confront complex gender relations, technologies, and the society that embeds them, abandoning the stable ground of gender binaries of the masculine and the feminine.[6] In the Weimar Republic, most dominant groups saw gender binaries as immovable, but this did not prevent some women from finding work that allowed them to live independently without a man’s support. Some late Weimar films display women moving about freely, but their male counterparts often immobilise them by the very end of the story. As Maite Zubiaurre points out, this type of narrative alludes to ‘progression but only recreates the circular plot of seduction and marriage’.^[7] According to Zubiaurre, the act of trapping women to machines such as typewriters is part of the male heterosexual erotic imaginary, because it paralyses the female body with motionless entities, the very function of which it is to make movement possible.

Phantom of the Operator

Switchboard operators, often likened to ‘weavers of speech’, alluding to another profession previously mainly associated with the female gender, implied movement by bridging voices separated by distance. Conceived from the outset as restrictive and binding, the space allocated to each individual woman within switchboard designs prohibited side-to-side elbow movement. Women were facing the machine with their backs to one another. The set-up allowed supervisors to easily reprimand any regulation transgression. Documentaries about switchboard operators stressed that working in this profession taught self-effacing service with a smile, a quality that would later be of benefit to women as good wives and mothers.^[8] As Michele Martin puts it:

[switchboard operators] represented both a necessary element in and an obstacle to the production of instantaneous private interactive communication . . . as ‘human mediators’ whose activities could delay or intrude on the privacy of telephone calls ... The telephone companies attempted to produce operators with particular habits, skills, and attitudes.^[9]

Switchboard operators and close-up on Magda Schneider in Fräulein – falsch verbunden (1932).

One such switchboard operator is the subject of the 1932 comedy of errors: Wrong Number, Miss dir. by E. W. Emo. The German title Fräulein – falsch verbunden is a play on words since both phone connections (telefonische Verbindungen) and romantic unions (Liebesverbindungen) get muddled in this story. Inge (Magda Schneider), the switchboard operator protagonist, gets an unexpected date from a stranger on her phone line. To recognise one another, they agree to hold white handkerchiefs in their right hands to identify each other. Inge’s new boss published an ad in the local paper to find a potential fiancée; both blind dates have settled on the same place and the same sign to recognise each other. Upon meeting up, the two blind dates find themselves swapped around, leading to confusion. But despite it all, Inge and her boss fall in love. His marriage proposal involves two lampshades which are symbolically reunited at the resolution of the film, signifying a happy home life in domesticity after clearing away all remaining misunderstandings.

Happy Endings in Hegemonic Masculinity

In their oxymoronic modes of representation, late Weimar talkies like Fräulein- falsch verbunden hint at freedom of movement and speech for working women. Strapped to a machine as its mechanical wirepuller, Inge enables the connection of voices, bridges distinct spaces in service of others, rather than holding her own private conversations or travelling for her own amusement. While the film features a financially independent woman, she also relies on men for protection throughout the story. The first is a father-like figure, August Sperling, the canteen chef at the telephone company, described in the film program as ‘the father and protector of all the little switchboard operators’. He defends Inge when confusion first arises. Finally, her boss removes her from a temporary self-sufficient state and brings her back to where the film can resolve in a happy ending: in marriage. A foil to this couple of Inge and her employer are a cheating husband and a greedy young woman that were initially supposed to meet Inge and her boss respectively on the blind dates. The film makes a case that these two deserve each other, as they are both morally tainted. It displays Inge as reliant on men’s favour until finally, by the end, she returns to her intended function as a fulfiller of men’s wishes, nurturing and procreating within the sacred institution of marriage.

Screenshot of the final frame of Hallo Hallo! Hier Spricht Berlin (1932)

A young man and a young woman fall in love over the phone in Hallo Hallo! Hier spricht Berlin (Julien Duvivier, 1932), a story about two switchboard operators who work from Berlin and Paris, respectively. Along the same line as Fräulein, falsch verbunden, other plot points involve two side characters, colleagues at the switchboard, who try to come between our heroes by pretending to be someone they are not. Since the two lovebirds never met face-to-face, the male antagonist of the story, impersonating our hero, travels to Paris to win over his girl. However, she turns down his advances. Our hero and heroine lose their jobs for making personal international calls, only to find out that their colleagues had been double-crossing them. Having been hired as the secretary of a Frenchman, our heroine visits Berlin and arrives at the hotel where her love interest now works. Finally, the two find each other and live happily ever after. In the last frame of the film, their hands join over a table on which a phone is lying off the hook. The female characters in the film do not travel unless accompanied by men. The young heroine must work as a secretary for a man in Berlin to physically move there. Women in the movie are confined to a machine and punished when they do not follow the rules imposed upon their bodies, or they must follow a male figure, such as an employer or a husband.

Conclusion

In his edited volume The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy, Christian Rogowski notes that influential Weimar scholars focused primarily on authoritarianism in relation to art cinema, which caused them to overlook critical issues of gender and aesthetic pleasure in popular genre cinema. We know relatively little about only a minority of the movie output produced during the Weimar period, which amounted to around two hundred per year on average. We have paid little attention to box-office successes, supposedly because of their lack of aesthetic relevance. They represent but a fraction within the Weimar scholarship canon. The books From Caligari to Hitler, The Haunted Screen and later Shell Shock Cinema focus to a great extent on the same group of films of either expressionist or realist style. Light entertainment, also known as escapism, remains largely unexplored by most film historians. In 2010, the essays collected in Rogowski’s book began breaking apart the limitations that had kept a vibrant and diverse set of films from receiving proper critical consideration.

In Weimar Germany, more than half of film audiences were women, and the German film industry produced a wide variety of domestic melodramas and romantic comedies to cater to their desires. As a cultural reflection of the past, these films appealed to contemporary audiences and reveal their hopes and dreams, their prejudices, and expectations, all of which make it worth revisiting today. Through the male gaze, filmmakers were attempting to decode perceived needs and desires of the opposite sex. But by returning to the bounds of marriage and the subjugation of women to men, male Weimar film creatives were ultimately, it would seem, creating images according to their own fantasies.

Further Reading

Ganeva, Mila, Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 (Rochester: Camden House, 2008)

Hales, Barbara, Black Magic Woman: Gender and the Occult in Weimar Germany (Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, 2021)

Hans, Anjeana, Gender and the Uncanny: In Films of the Weimar Republic Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014)

McCormick, Richard W., Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and ‘New Objectivity’ (London: Palgrave, 2007)

Petro, Patrice, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)

Rogowski, Christian, The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany's Filmic Legacy (Rochester: Camden House, 2012)

Schlüpmann, Heide, The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema, translated by Inga Pollmann (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010)

Footnotes

[1] Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis’, New German Critique, 24/25 (1981), 221-37 (p. 227).

[2] ‘The excess associated with gender destabilization in Weimar cinema also “exceeds” male paranoia and any misogynistic intentions. To some extent, then, the cinema served a public function in addressing spectators of both genders and of various classes concerned about their roles and status within Weimar society.’ Richard W. McCormick, ‘Private Anxieties/Public Projections: “New Objectivity”, Male Subjectivity, and Weimar Cinema’, Women in German Yearbook 10 (1994), 1-18.

[3] See Anjeana K. Hans, ‘From Dangerous Hybrid to Self-Sacrificing Woman’, in Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic(Detroit, Illinois: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 216-266. Both Hans and McCormick are indebted to previous work by Patrice Petro and Heide Schlüpmann who brought scholarly attention to issues of female spectatorship and the male perspective that has shaped female characters on the German screen. See: Heide Schlüpmann, The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2010). See also: Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989).

[4] Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’. in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75-86 (p. 79).

[5] ‚Auch in der Kunst erschien jede Maschine zuerst als das seelenlose, ungeistige Prinzip. Aber der Mensch assimiliert sich die Maschine allmählich zu seinem Organ. Sie wird zu seinen Fingerspitzen.’ Béla Balázs, Der Geist des Films (Halle (Saale): Wilhelm Knapp, 1930), 132-133.

[6] Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Social Review, 80 (1985), 65-108.

[7] Maite Zubiaurre, ‘Imported Techno-Eros: Bicycles and Typewriters’, in Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898-1939 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), 223-253 (223).

[8] See short documentaries on the subject in the AT&T Archive series, which can be watched on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEy7Zb1Noj8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ1fKFqt7qU

[9] Michele Martin. ‘Hello, Central?’: Gender, Technology and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), p. 50.

Punch and Duty: Class and the School Servants in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931)

Molly Harrabin — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:59:12 GMT

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

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.

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.

A Celebration of Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others)

Molly Harrabin — Fri, 28 May 2021 13:30:23 GMT

A Celebration of Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others)

Molly Harrabin, University of Warwick

Thought to be one of the earliest cinematic pieces in support of homosexuality, Anders als die Andern (Richard Oswald, 1919) has earned its place in history. Co-written by the director and leading Jewish sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, the film was part of a series of Aufklärungsfilme (enlightenment films) aimed at increasing awareness of sex education, covering topics from prostitution and venereal diseases to abortion. The Oswald-Hirschfeld partnership came together again to produce a film intended to criticise Paragraph 175 of Weimar Germany’s constitution, which made homosexuality a criminal offence. As a result, the film was one of the first on the agenda of the newly established censor in Berlin, who promptly banned the film in 1920 and viewing was restricted to those in the medical profession. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the film was one of many works burned on account of its ‘decadence’. Consequently, only fragments survive, but Anders als die Andern lives on, heralded for its ground-breaking portrayal of homosexuality.

Historians often celebrate the Republic for being the first in Europe to guarantee equal rights to men and women, making huge strides in terms of gender relations. By contrast, the Republic’s stance on ‘non-normative’ sexualities was a dent in the Republic’s armour of tolerance. Indeed, the topic was somewhat of a taboo, despite the common perception of cities like Berlin as a hub for the gay and lesbian scene. The presence of Paragraph 175 in Anders als die Andern is established from the get-go via a newspaper headline informing the viewer of a factory owner’s suicide on his wedding day. The newspaper does not provide further details, claiming the motive to be unknown. However, an intertitle reading ‘the sword of Damocles that is §175 made life impossible for these unfortunate individuals’ suggests differently, supporting Hirschfeld’s claims that homosexuals were more likely to commit suicide. The film thus draws attention to the struggle of keeping one’s sexuality a secret and conforming to what society dictates as being ‘acceptable’, something which many a closeted man of 1919 could identify with.

The main focus of Oswald’s film though is on the character of the famous violinist Paul Körner (played by Conrad Veidt, who would rocket to fame a year later for his portrayal of Cesare in Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Caligari). Körner falls in love with one of his students, Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz) and the two start a relationship. Their relationship is not understood by Sivers’ parents who cannot understand why their son is more interested in playing the violin than in settling down and starting a film. Sivers is however eventually able to express his homosexuality more openly after his parents speak to his mentor (Magnus Hirschfeld), who explains that in plain terms that homosexuality is neither a choice nor a crime. Unfortunately, Körner and Sivers are spotted together whilst working in a park by Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel) who recognises Körner and later blackmails him in exchange for not publicising his homosexuality. Sivers finds out though and the fear of being ‘outed’ causes him to run away, which prompts Körner to experience flashbacks to his own struggle with his sexuality and how he sought to change it. He eventually reports Bollek for blackmail, and though the judge expresses sympathy, Körner must still do a jail sentence of the minimum one week. Upon his release, it is clear that the revelation about his sexuality has damaged his career and rejected by everyone around him, he commits suicide. Upon hearing the news, Sivers returns and intends to do the same, but he is convinced otherwise, and the film ends on Paragraph 175 being crossed out from the Constitution.

The film shows the viewer that being homosexual does not stop an individual from achieving greatness. This is emphasised in a scene that takes place in Körner’s mind, where a procession is seen marching forward with Körner himself bringing up the rear. The procession consists of men that are lauded for their greatness, such as Tchaikovsky, Leonardo da Vinci and King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The figure of Körner as the final man to step forward in this line of ‘greats’ implies that all of these men, heralded for their contributions to culture and society, are also homosexual. The inclusion of these men can be interpreted then as an attempt to ‘normalise’ homosexuality, for it has been around for centuries. The film also criticises Germany for lagging behind its European neighbours, who, under the Napoleonic Code, saw the outlawing of homosexuality overturned, as it was seen as a violent of the rights of the individual. Furthermore, homosexuality is also presented as the sexuality of men who are thought to have made valuable additions to the world. This is echoed by the sexologist Körner visited whilst trying to come to terms with his own sexuality, who reassures him that he can still make valuable contributions to society. Anders als die Andern not only tries to convince the viewer to alter their perception of homosexuality, but it also offers a degree of comfort to the homosexual struggling to accept his sexuality.

This procession of noble homosexual men is contrasted with the behaviour of Franz Bollek, the man who blackmails Körner when he catches him in the park with Sivers. Bollek is presented as receiving great satisfaction for exploiting the musician for his own financial gain. Bollek serves as a reminder of the price to be paid if a man’s sexuality was revealed, since homosexuality was perceived as something to be ashamed of. When Körner rebels and decides not to go along with it, Bollek raises the bar and breaks into Körner’s home. It is in this moment that the film really hammers home how Bollek is the abhorrent one, for he physically assaults Sivers. His actions towards Sivers thus contrast starkly with those of love and affection by Körner. The film thus proposes that it is actually the sorts of behaviour exhibited by Bollek that are criminal and should be punished. Moreover, it is Bollek who receives the more severe punishment (he is jailed for 3 years) for his actions. By contrast, Körner, the man society determines to be a great threat, serves one week. Though the judge finds that Körner is an ‘honourable individual who has hurt no one’, he cannot grant Körner acquittal due to Paragraph 175.

The leniency of his sentencing however does not feel like justice, and the implications of Körner’s trial are much greater than those for Bollek. Körtner takes his own life because he cannot cope with immense loss that he feels as a result of Bollek’s actions. Sivers’ sister delivers a damning condemnation of Körner’s family who turn up at his deathbed, blaming them for his death. She also claims society at large has Körner’s death on their conscience, which encourages the contemporaneous audience to reflect upon their own treatment of homosexuals in the present day. The film does not though close on an entirely negative note. It urges Sivers and the audience alike to ‘keep on living to change the prejudices’ of which Körner has fallen victim. The film thus delivers an inspiring message of hope and determination that the fissures in society, generated on modes of difference, will one day be removed.

Anders als die Andern is a revolutionary film that offers a pioneering commentary on the societal situation for homosexuals in the Weimar Republic. It underlines the impact of Paragraph 175 and puts the image of 1920’s Germany as one of great acceptance into question. Yet the film also speaks to societies in the modern era that still punish individuals for their sexuality. In as much as the German audience in 1919 could learn from the film, its sentiment is just as relevant now as it was then. It is for this reason that we should indeed continue to celebrate Anders als die Andern, but also take on board its message and consider what more can be done in today’s world to eliminate discourses of hatred and prejudice.

Further Reading

Böni Oliver, and Japhet Johnstone, ‘Anders als die Andern’, in Crimes of Passion: Repräsentationen der Sexualpathologie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin; Boston, Massachussetts: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 5-34

Dyer, Richard, ‘Less and More than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar Germany’, New German Critique 51 (1990), 5-60

Linge, Ina, ‘Sexology, Popular Science and Queer History in Anders als die Andern’, Gender and History, 30.3 (2018), 595-610

Malakaj, Ervin, ‘Richard Oswald, Magnus Hirschfeld, and the Possible Impossibility of Hygienic Melodrama’, Studies in European Cinema, 14.3 (2017), 216-230

Smith, Jill Suzanne, ‘Richard Oswald and the Social Hygiene Film: Promoting Public Health or Promiscuity?’, in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy, ed. by Christian Rogowski (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2010), pp. 13-30

Steakley, James D., ‘Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als die Andern’, Film History, 11.2 (1999), 181-203

A Killer(‘s) Melody: Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” in Fritz Lang’s M

Molly Harrabin — Fri, 07 May 2021 11:08:18 GMT

A Killer(‘s) Melody: Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” in Fritz Lang’s M

Hugo Fagandini, King’s College London

While Fritz Lang is best known for the influential imagery and ground-breaking visual set-pieces of his science-fiction epic Metropolis (1927), it is for his later M: Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931) that he and his film art remain perhaps most celebrated. Evocative even in its single-letter title of its moody aesthetic, gripping plot and emergence in the febrile atmosphere of the late Weimar Republic, M is widely considered Lang’s masterpiece, and was the director’s favourite of his own films. Certainly the visual shadow-play and moral murkiness of film noir, indeed as Lang would later advance in his own films in American exile, are inconceivable without it. Equally distinctive, however, is M’s deservedly fêted use of sound, not only reflecting the depiction in Lang and Thea von Harbou’s scenario of a Berlin that, for all its hyper-organisation and regimentation along every conceivable line, nonetheless teeters on the brink of total disorder and chaos, but furthermore taking such disjuncture as its entire approach.

The idea that Lang’s first sound film would be no ordinary one, nor merely the continuation of his silent films with the crudely added novelty of sound, is noticeable for one in M’s very different use of music compared to the director’s previous work. Indeed, gone are the stirring musical scores of Gottfried Huppertz (Metropolis, Die Nibelungen) and others that graced his previous films, furthermore bearing sole responsibility for carrying their dramatic weight on an aural level. Instead, the only “music” heard in M comes from strictly diegetic sources, i.e. within the film world seen on-screen: a barrel-organ, a children’s rhyme, a tune that the wry Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) cheekily whistles at a suspect being frisked. Most important of all, however, is the melody, similarly whistled (and famously by Lang himself), that becomes the musical calling card – heard in five separate sequences – of Peter Lorre’s child-killer Hans Beckert. This fateful theme, as this article will discuss, is from Edvard Greig’s incidental music (Op. 23, 1875) to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, namely the cue “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (“I Dovregubbens hall”) in which Gynt, seeking to woo the titular king’s daughter for his bride, is menaced upon his arrival by the king’s “troll courtiers” who openly contemplate carving him up and “boil[ing him] into broth and bree”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nMUr8Rt2AI

The continuous reappearance of Grieg’s melody within Lang’s film has been frequently celebrated as a Leitmotiv, and this does indeed form part of its function. As the “Leit-” prefix implies, it accordingly “leads” the viewer not only forwards through the film – namely as a recurring musical theme that comes to be associated with Beckert – but also backwards to join the associational dots between the current iteration and its predecessors. This “leading” function, however, arises not merely through repetition alone, but through melodic, harmonic or other similar transformations that reflect similar developments within the surrounding musical narrative. Beckert’s incessant whistling, by contrast, stubbornly resists this process, instead cycling continuously back to its own starting point and rarely progressing beyond the first four-bar phrase of Grieg’s melody. In this sense, it carries far more the properties of an idée fixe as devised by Hector Berlioz for his earlier Symphonie fantastique (1830), a similarly recurrent theme yet whose continual, insistent re-entry and obstinate indifference to its surrounding context provide both an appropriate and effective musical parallel for fixation, obsession and mania: fitting indeed for Beckert and the “compulsive urges” to which his whistling, as Lang remarks, “gives mute expression”.

The Leitmotiv function behind Beckert’s idée fixe is not entirely lost in M, however, in that a development can nonetheless be seen in terms of the dramaturgical purpose it serves within the narrative. Its first entry, after roughly five minutes, comes as a further instance of the status conferred upon Beckert by a terrified populace and hysterical mass media of a spectre rather than a flesh-and-blood human being: incorporeal, omnipresent and seemingly glimpsable only in snatches or fragments. While this is illustrated visually in the shadow he casts over his own wanted poster or in the view of him from behind as he buys a balloon for the ill-fated Elsie Beckmann, it is present too on an aural level in his fractured, indeed dismembered whistling of the “Mountain King” theme, its intonation intemperate and off-key and its musical phrases uneven and disjointed (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: © M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

This theme’s subsequent second appearance shortly afterwards similarly emphasises not only Beckert’s continued elusiveness, but the sense of unassailability this appears to encourage within him, as we see him (again from the back) hunched over a windowsill and scribbling a note to the city’s press, whistling while he works. Able to hide in plain sight and evade detection owing to his utterly normal, outwardly unassuming bourgeois appearance and demeanour, his use as an outlet of the democratising platform afforded by the mass print media allows him similarly to assert his voice above those of millions of others, yet be rendered instantly invisible in a great wash of mass opinion and information.

It is in this scene, barely ten minutes in, that the broader connotations and significance of Grieg’s “Mountain King” theme begin to make themselves known. For one, besides its appearance here connecting Beckert – at this stage, still nameless and unseen from the front – with the individual of Fig. 1 who purchases Elsie’s balloon, it positions similarly his bourgeois sensibilities (as well as outer appearances) as a means simultaneously of concealing and provocatively exposing himself. Kristi A. Brown writes that Ibsen’s Peer Gyntwas a perennially popular choice among contemporary German theatregoers, making for the more than reasonable assumption that this tune would not only have been instantly recognisable to a large portion of the film’s audience, but would have served to place Beckert more unambiguously within their own milieu. Displaying a casual disregard for the broader framework of Grieg’s music in favour of repeating a memorable and accessible “Ohrwurm”, his constant whistling of Grieg’s tune implies that he – presumably, much like the film’s audience – has either seen Ibsen’s play, heard the music separately (“Mountain King” forms the finale of the first of two equally successful concert suites) or, given the widespread popularity of both, simply come into contact with it through more second-hand means.

Yet the implications of this extend far beyond Beckert’s middle-class artistic tastes, revealing key insights as to how he is to be perceived in the film to come, and furthermore as to how he perceives himself. In a trademark example of Lang’s use of sound throughout the film to connect juxtaposing scenes thematically as well as structurally, the police graphologist’s comments shortly afterwards that Beckert’s handwriting reveals “ein[en] schwer erweisbaren aber intensiv fühlbaren Zug von Wahnsinn” are heard precisely as Beckert, regarding himself in the mirror, pulls grotesque faces to transform himself into the “Triebmensch” of the accompanying voice-over description. In this sense, as well as assuming with some relish the bogeyman persona assigned to him by a fearful public imagination, Beckert also assumes the role more explicitly of Ibsen’s “Mountain King” (“Dovregubben”), who lures the human Gynt into the troll world with the promise of reward and prestige before attempting to induct him by force into his people’s way of life.

As Tom Gunning writes, however, this scene presents a further, decidedly sinister turn in the internal “private drama” that rages within Beckert throughout the film as both the outer and inner manifestations of his madness threaten increasingly to break free of his conscious control, something the subsequent iterations of Grieg’s “Mountain King” melody do much to reflect. Its third entry indeed comes during another of M’s key scenes over half-an-hour later, as Beckert, gazing magpie-like at the glittering array of silverware in a shop window, catches sight of another potential victim, fatefully framed within a perfect square arrangement of dinner knives (as is Beckert himself in its reflection) that point inwards to unequivocally direct his vision (and ours). Before our eyes, no longer in the “private theatre” (Gunning, p. 179) of his mirror but in the very public arena of the open street, Beckert’s hideous transformation begins again, his face contorting and eyes bulging this time seemingly of their own accord. These same dark urges, however, also summon up from within him the strains of Grieg’s theme as he sets off in pursuit, the troll king once more with his head stooped and his sights firmly set on his target.

The next, fourth entry both provides further clues and raises further questions as to the true nature of Beckert’s unstable, unquestionably conflicted identity, with Lang’s use of sound providing a uniquely disturbing edge. Foiled in his abduction attempt as his intended victim unexpectedly reunites with her mother, Beckert heads instead for a nearby café. Here, he attempts seemingly to calm or sedate the impulsive id-being inside him with a cigarette and a brace of cognacs, yet seemingly cannot keep the melody from once again forming on his lips. This instance, at least at first, is fairly unambiguous, with the whistling heard on the soundtrack corresponding suitably with Beckert’s visibly puckered lips (Fig. 2). Its continuation, however, exploits to great effect what Michel Chion dubs “acousmatic sound”, namely sound whose source, in contrast, is not visible or otherwise identifiable on screen. Tossing the cigarette aside, Beckert clamps his hands over his ears and braces himself physically against the coffee table, his mouth now obscured by his clenched fists (Fig. 3). Yet not only does the viewer hear his whistling continue regardless, but Beckert furthermore appears to react to the sound with similar horror and dread himself. Is what we hear the sound of his whistling continuing against his conscious will? Or, more insidiously still, is it the sound in musical form of his compulsive urges clamouring or echoing inside his head?

Figure 2: © M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Figure 3: © M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

In removing this distinction and thus toying with our expectations, M gears up for the final conclusive stage in the development of Beckert’s Leitmotiv as it completes its transformation from the conscious means through which he simultaneously asserts and conceals his individual identity into the petard with which he is ultimately hoist. Indeed, not only does his whistling, having now fully escaped his control, now inadvertently give him away in its final appearance, but furthermore, in a city where he is otherwise able to blend in undetected, gives him away to the one person whose other senses can compensate enough to truly “see” him, namely the blind pedlar who previously sold him Elsie’s balloon. The combination of image, dialogue and music as Beckert’s shadow drifts fleetingly across the wall behind the pedlar (Fig. 4), recalling and ironising his Mephistophelian first appearance, makes this new development unavoidably clear. His spell, as represented partly by his talismanic tune, is now broken, and the imposing menace he once represented now reduced to the mere shadow not only of a man, but rather – as Gustav Gründgens’s gangster ringleader Schränker would have it – to a “Bestie” that remains solely to be hunted, captured and exterminated.

Figure 4: © M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Numerous commentators have interpreted to varying degrees and conclusions the significance behind the inclusion specifically of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” as a commentative intertext on Beckert’s conflicted dual nature, occupying a liminal space between man and beast. For Maria Tatar, for example, it is an expression of the pathological sexual desire that, as with Ibsen’s titular protagonist, drives Beckert to effect his transformation into a monster; for Gunning, it parallels the horror that Beckert himself experiences at confronting the monster both that dwells within him and that he in turn becomes. It is Brown, however, who teases out perhaps most extensively the connotations within the film of Grieg’s piece as a reference to the “pointedly ambiguous space” that Ibsen’s trolls – and, by extension, Lorre’s Beckert – occupy “between the human and the monstrous, the rational and the perverse”.[1] For one, as much as Beckert’s whistling of Grieg’s tune may serve both his Selbstinszenierung (conscious or otherwise) as Ibsen’s troll king and his incarnation as such by surrounding society, he is just as much the titular Gynt, who ventures confidently into the trolls’ dank underworld and dabbles with their “me-first” philosophy, only to be ultimately driven out for his unwillingness to convert fully to their cause.

Ultimately, however, this further “jumbl[ing of] the categories of monsters and men” serves above all to highlight the true poignancy, if not tragedy of Beckert’s position. Far from being merely a monster, “Triebmensch” or “Bestie” among humans (this, as witnessed in the mirror scene, is rather what he desires to become), he is instead caught between two worlds, impelled by dark urges towards his terrible crimes while remaining sufficiently socialised to be tormented equally by his guilt and remorse. Moreover, this liminality – unlike the gangsters’ in their life of crime, and furthermore unlike Gynt’s in opportunistically turning his back on the mores of the human world only to fall afoul of the trolls’ – is the result not of his own conscious actions or choices, but instead of a cruel quirk of fate. His constant whistling of Grieg’s tune is thus in one sense bitterly ironic; whether it is Gynt or the Mountain King that he imagines himself becoming when doing so, it is inevitably towards the other that he ends up being drawn.

As much sympathy or understanding as may thus be curried for Beckert’s predicament, both von Harbou’s dialogue and commentaries particularly such as Tatar’s remind us that his actions nonetheless carry far-reaching, horrific and irreparable consequences. Brown’s observations, however, shed greater light on the role of Grieg’s melody alongside other filmic elements in placing Beckert’s mania within a broader context rather than merely isolating it as an outlying or anomalous individual case study, and one furthermore with lessons as important for a latter-day audience as for one first watching it ninety years previously. For one, although the “Beckert case” unites Berlin’s law-abiding citizenry, law enforcement officials and criminal underworld in a coordinated effort to stop him, their desire to eliminate him as the disruptive outsider and thus restore order brings to the surface “the beast [similarly] latent within themselves” as these efforts assume increasingly extreme forms. While this suppressed bestiality surfaces in the frenzy into which large crowds are frequently driven, most forcefully of all in the closing kangaroo court sequence, the shop window scene mentioned above reveals how this is sewn into the very fabric of present-day capitalist society, the array of knives and reflective surfaces providing Beckert with both the incitement and means to continue his killing spree.

The choice, however, for Beckert’s “theme song” of a melody both easily recognisable to and indicative of the bourgeois milieu in which (notwithstanding his unspeakable deeds and psychological imbalance) he is nonetheless unmistakably embedded performs a double function in its distinct appeal to the popularity outlined above both of Ibsen’s and of Grieg’s Peer Gynt among contemporary audiences. Like the “M” (for “Mörder”) that Lang asserts can be found in the intersecting lines on every human palm, the constant return within the film of Grieg’s widely-known, indeed highly popular tune represents the shared capacity for evil, mania and murder that Lang’s film implies lies dormant within its audience as much as within its tortured protagonist, equally capable of surfacing at any time and differing only in the extent to which it is ultimately expressed. The various other subtitles appended to M at various points in its release history, after all – alongside the official “Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder”, the working title “Mörder unter uns” and the later “Dein Mörder sieht dich an” –play on the notion of the titular murderer, far from being safely contained within the film’s diegesis, in fact being much more within the viewer’s immediate vicinity. Indeed, as Lorre’s earlier face-pulling scene demonstrates, the murderer could even be staring out at them from their bedroom mirror.

Filmography

M, dir. by Fritz Lang (Nero-Film A.G., 1931)

Works consulted

Brown, Kristi A., “The Troll Among Us”, in Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film, ed. by Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 74-87

Kaes, Anton, M (London: British Film Institute, 2000)

Gandert, Gero, “Fritz Lang on M: An Interview”, in Fritz Lang: Interviews, ed. by Barry Keith Grant (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), pp. 33-37

Gunning, Tom, 'M: The City Haunted by Demonic Desire', in The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000), pp. 163 - 199

Tatar, Maria, 'The Killer as Victim in Fritz Lang's M', in Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 153 - 172

Clowns and Cabaret: Expressions of Surface Culture in Weimar Film

Molly Harrabin — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 12:14:10 GMT

Clowns and Cabaret: Expressions of Surface Culture in Weimar Film
Mara Arts, Independent Scholar

During the Weimar period (1919-1933), German society modernised rapidly, exemplified by its rapid urbanisation. Weimar Berlin was the third largest city in the world, after New York and London, and by 1929 more than a quarter of Germans lived in cities.[1] The rise of mass-consumerism and an increase in free time meant that new leisure-time activities and spaces emerged. Among these new developments were both the rising popularity of nightclubs and the development of a large film industry. This blog post explores the representation of the nightclub space in three film texts of this period: Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (Fritz Lang, 1922); Spione (Fritz Lang, 1928) and Der Blaue Engel (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1930). It interrogates how Weimar’s surface culture influenced the portrayal of nightclubs in film, and which ideas and values were attached to these images. Surface culture here is taken to mean a ‘moment in modernity when surface values first ascended to become determinants of taste, activity and occupation’.[2]

In the context of this blog post, Siegfried Kracauer’s work on surface culture is particularly fertile. Kracauer’s notion that ‘surface-level expressions (…), by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things’.[3] Cultural historian Janet Ward has extended Kracauer’s theory in her study Weimar Surfaces, which considers surface as a means of penetrating the project of modernity . In Weimar Germany, surface played a meaningful role in mass cultural formation. In this historical moment, aesthetics and surface values became important determinants of taste.

As one of the new media of this modern society, film made people get used to a high speed of visual imagery through the use of montage which allowed filmmakers to juxtapose images in quick succession. Another form of mass entertainment which traded in a similar speed and variety of changing images, though its inception predates the emergence of cinema, was cabaret. Cabaret became popular in Germany from the turn of the twentieth century. Cabaret was a form of live performance in which short acts alternated to fill an evening’s worth of entertainment. However, unlike similar performance forms such as vaudeville which catered to the working classes, cabaret was aimed at a middle-class audience.[4]

Contemporaneous discourses attempted to understand the popularity of variety shows and cinema. On the one hand it was argued that the modern, urbanised citizen could not be expected to follow a high-brow ‘difficult’ play after a day’s work, but instead was only able to manage the constant distraction and diversion of a series of short sketches. On the other hand, it was speculated that in order to deal with the big and constant ‘assaults’ of fast-paced urban life on the psyche, people deliberately sought out smaller ‘assaults’ like cabaret performances to be better able to cope with the high intensity of modern life.

Kracauer argues that the cinema industry was inherently political. In his essay ‘The Little Shopgirls go to the Movies’ he states that films subvert any chance of a social uprising. Films, according to Kracauer, give the audience the illusion of an opportunity for social critique contained within the dominant system of capitalism. The content of a film can be critical of those in power, but ultimately the capitalist studio owners will benefit from any film’s success. Kracauer follows this statement with a number of examples as to how films can serve to maintain the status quo desired by the dominant classes: films eschew any mention of structural social inequality; any misfortune experienced by a film’s characters are presented as personal and not political.[5]

Given their different target audiences, a consideration of class is important when discussing both film and cabaret in Weimar Germany. Ward points out that the big movie-palaces were designed to provide an experience of luxury for the masses. Extending Kracauer’s argument on the anti-revolutionary tactics of film, Ward argues that by providing the lower classes with temporary luxury, they were less inclined to demand a more lasting change to the distribution of capital. A similar point can be made about cabaret: its largely apolitical content served to distract the urban audience from the political reality that served only a small proportion of society.

Taking into consideration the surface-driven consumerist culture of Weimar Germany, this post now closely examines the nightclub scenes in the three films in order to determine how the surfaces of these nightclub spaces support or undercut dominant social narratives. The films - Dr Mabuse, der Spieler, Spione and Der Blaue Engel were made and released several years apart and reflect the progression not only of Weimar society but also of the film industry, as it moved from silent to sound film. All three texts remain widely available and discussed, but the cabaret scenes in these films are not usually closely considered.

Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler

The first film under consideration is Fritz Lang’s 1922 classic Dr Mabuse, der Spieler. The film’s plot includes the character of the nightclub dancer Cara Carozza, who is in love with the criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse. The scene that introduces Carozza shows her performing in a nightclub, the Folies Bergères. Although the club is based in Berlin its name is clearly meant to evoke Parisian glamour. The entrance of the building is sparsely decorated, except for two big lamps and a number of posters on either side of the doors advertising Carozza’s act. On this poster Carozza is shown coyly looking over her shoulder to the spectator. This is in accordance with Ward’s observation that advertisements usually attempted to be sensual, presenting their products as objects of desire. Carozza is on these posters presented as a desirable commodity, her surface replicated identically at will. Of course, Carozza’s role as nightclub performer exemplifies the routine objectification of women in a patriarchal society.

Carozza’s performance includes a large number of high kicks and two large ethnic-looking heads, which roll on stage and are equipped with overtly phallic noses. For the finale of the number Carozza stands on the noses while her dress is lifted off her from above, leaving her undergarments momentarily exposed. The overtly sexual nature of this act points to the idea of woman as sexually available commodity, whereas the ethnic props tie in with equating non-Western cultures with notions of the exotic, animalistic and sexual.

Carozza is therefore only shown as surface, first by the numerous posters and then by her performance. Significantly, the performance includes a medium length shot of Carozza looking coyly over her shoulder, in a very similar way as to how she is depicted on the poster. During her act she does not transcend her surface image, and indeed she barely does so at any later point in the film even when she is not engaging in stage performance. She appears to have little motivation other than her blind devotion to Mabuse, which even leads her to commit suicide at his command. Carozza is left as a flat, underdeveloped façade who is mainly used by Mabuse for the value of her good looks, for example when he asks her to seduce a rich man so that Mabuse can steal his money.

The nightclub clientele in Dr Mabuse is shown as mindlessly consuming overtly sexual performances or engaging in deviant behaviour such as adultery. The audience are shown to need bigger ‘shocks’ in order to still be titillated, numbed as they are in a modern, consumerist society. The positive response to Carozza’s performance indicates that a bona fide strip act is the only thing that will raise an interest with this bourgeois audience. Carozza herself, as previously indicated, problematizes identification due to her presentation as pure surface. The lack of motivation for her character’s actions inhibits spectators in their attempts to sympathise with her character.

The presentation of the nightclub space - which takes up only a small amount of the total running time of the film - positions the nightclub as just one in many spaces of leisure and entertainment available to Berliners. By making the setting in the nightclub space seem insignificant and incidental, Dr. Mabuse implies that these spaces, in which criminal activities could happen, are a part of modernity that is so ordinary it does not need to be commented on.

Spione

Spione, like Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, also centres around a male character who spends his time spying and setting up intricate criminal traps. For the majority of the film this character is known only as Haghi, a wheelchair-bound bank director who uses the bank as a cover for an extensive underground spy-network. Haghi has another persona, the clown Nemo. Haghi’s multiple identities are already a reflection of the multiple ‘surfaces’ one could inhabit in Weimar Berlin. In a culture largely defined by surface expressions, it is easy to hide your identity behind one or multiple façades.

There are two scenes in the film which involve Haghi as clown Nemo performing in a cabaret. In the first, where he is shown applying his make-up backstage, both the audience and the Secret Service are unaware of his ‘true’ identity as Haghi. In the second scene both the audience and the Secret Service know that Nemo is in fact Haghi; Nemo’s stage performance ends when he realises that he is surrounded by Servicemen from all sides. Faced with his inevitable arrest Nemo instead opts to commit suicide on the stage.

Like in Mabuse the nightclub scene is introduced by a display of posters advertising the act. In this case the audience is shown three drawings of Clown Nemo filling the cinema screen, bordered at the top and bottom of the frame with the repeated word ‘Scala’. This is the name of a famous Berlin nightclub; contemporary audiences would have easily made the connection that the drawings that are shown are posters on the outer wall of a club. This shot dissolves into one of a man sitting in front of a mirror, applying his clown’s make-up. The spectator sees the clown from behind and is thus drawn to his reflection in the mirror, another surface representation that underscores Haghi’s multiple identities. The props surrounding the desk such as the clown’s wig, hat and make-up are all surface embellishments which Haghi uses to obscure his identity. Throughout the whole scene the audience only sees Nemo’s face in the reflection of the mirror, fragmentising his body and equating it with the surface expression shown on the posters. Nemo, too, is a commodity people can ‘buy’ by buying a ticket to see his performance.

During the final performance the agents of the Secret Service arrive and take up positions in the wings and orchestra pit, aiming their guns at Nemo. Up until this point the stage has been presented as a unified space, but the shots of the other performers standing in the wings ruin the illusion of unity. Suddenly the film audience’s attention is drawn away from Haghi’s performance and asked to consider the artificiality of his act. Performers dressed as Indigenous Americans (or at least, the Western understanding of what Indigenous Americans looked like) and ballet dancers function as signifiers of other possible worlds that can exist on the stage. The audience is reminded that the stage is an empty surface on which any world can be projected, in the same way that can be done on the film screen. Bin this way, both the stage and the film screen are surfaces that allow audiences to be drawn into the illusion of a different world.

The climax of Nemo’s performance starts when he sees that he is surrounded by Secret Service agents. Nemo, who has used a small handgun as a prop earlier in his performance, now fires into the wings in an attempt to escape arrest. When he realises that this attempt is doomed, Nemo turns to face the camera and starts laughing manically, before shooting himself through the head. The final shots of the film show the audience cheering and giving Nemo a standing ovation. By ending the film with this image, the film provides a clear commentary about the mindless consumerism of the audience. They are unable to distinguish between act and reality and applaud Nemo’s desperate action. In line with Kracauer’s argument that films can provide a safe space for non-disruptive social critique, it can be imagined that Spione allowed film audiences to be outraged about the theatre audience’s response in the final scene, without extending this to their own situation. The film allows spectators to laugh at mindless consumerism, without asking of them to consider their own role as consumers of the film in question.

By making the main character of the film a spy who uses a nightclub persona in order to hide his true identity, Spione draws attention to the surface appearance of nightclub performers. The fact that the Secret Service characters, too, for a large part of the film are unable to see behind Nemo’s surface to his real identity, implies that in modernity everyone is obsessed with surface appearance, even those who are trained to do investigatory work. The popularity of both cabaret performances and films in Weimar society would seem underwrite that implication, as audiences flocked to see forms of entertainment that foregrounded surface. Although Spione presents this obsession with surface culture as problematic, it does so in the shape of a film which, in itself, is a surface expression.

Der Blaue Engel

Der Blaue Engel is one of the better-known depictions of Weimar nightclub spaces in film today. It was the first collaboration between Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, and it launched Dietrich’s international career. The 1930 film tells the story of college professor Emmanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), who falls in love with cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich). She is performing in the local inn called Der Blaue Engel, where Rath’s students go and see her. Rath visits the inn in order to catch his students out but falls for Lola instead. She is the undisputed star of the show and approaches Rath with frank confidence. When Lola agrees to marry Rath, he quits his teaching job and joins the travelling performance troupe to assist Lola in her performances. Eventually, Lola strikes up a relationship with another performer, which makes Rath increasingly depressed and results in his death.

As in Dr. Mabuse and Spione, the performer is first introduced via a surface expression. The opening shots of the film show a poster advertising Lola Lola on a window in the village. From the outset she is presented as a surface commodity. Rath notices that his students are swapping postcards during class which he confiscates. They are pictures of Lola, one of which has a fabric skirt attached to itself that the spectator can blow up in order to reveal her suspenders. Like Carozza, Lola’s image is reduced to a surface to be mass-produced and mass consumed. This clear objectification and fragmentation of Lola continues throughout the film. The poster seen in the opening shots is also shown on the walls of the inn and the backstage area where a large amount of the action takes place. This way the audience is constantly reminded of Lola’s reduction to a surface commodity, even when the ‘real’ Lola is also present in the frame. Her image is available for viewers to consume and project their fantasies on without having to regard her as a human being.

The stage area is not presented as elevated or separate from the auditorium, as is the case in the other two films discussed. It is not a blank canvas on which a unified fantasy world can be created. Instead, the stage is almost level with the rest of the space, and a number of female performers sit on the stage awaiting their turn to perform. There is also a constant interaction between the backstage area and the stage, which further undercuts the idea of the stage as a separate sphere. When Rath goes to meet her in her room, she continues to wear costumes and acts in the same way as her stage character. Lola’s persona on stage is also her persona off-stage. Where Haghi was allowed a transformation from person to persona in his dressing room, Lola is constantly only surface. This echoes the treatment of Carozza; female performers were obliged to remain objects for the consumption of others.

The constant equation of the performer with surface expressions of herself is also followed through in the frequent positioning of Lola in front of mirrors. During the many sequences set backstage she is often seen applying make-up or adjusting her clothes. Lola cultivates her surface appearance as she is acutely aware that this is what is providing her income. Unlike Rath, she does not look down on the audience members who do not want to see beyond surface appearances. This allows her to thrive in the nightclub atmosphere. Rath’s intellectual background on the other hand makes him frustrated and depressed and eventually drives him insane.

Lola is portrayed as a ‘vamp’ in the final section of the film, when she unscrupulously starts up a relationship with another man. This makes the final value judgement of the film decidedly against the appreciation of surface culture. Lola is portrayed as vapid and opportunistic, trading Rath in for a man who she believes will help her further her career. This moral stance that rejects Lola’s world of appearances, is difficult to harmonize with the fact that film itself is a medium of display. Der Blaue Engel attempts to negotiate this tension by presenting the performance space as the antithesis of Weimar modernity. The inn is dirty, full of vice and stuffed with ornaments and accessories. In this way the space becomes a signifier of stagnated values that can be criticized by those who have adopted the cleaner and clearer style of Weimar society; the judgement is not against surface culture per se but rather against a space that does not chime with modernist ideals.

At the end of the film Rath is forced to participate as an assistant in the magician’s act of the troupe’s leader, a role which requires him to dress up as a clown. Unwilling to perform but unable to refuse the overbearing boss, Rath allows the boss to transform him into a jester. In the rowdy audience people from all classes have gathered to see Rath’s decline from professor to performer. Whereas Lola is admired and seen as a major attraction, Rath’s previous profession leads to him being seen as a source of ridicule. The film on the one hand has a clear message that portrays cabaret and surface appreciation as insipid, yet on the other hand exploits surface culture by presenting Lola Lola as desirable. The film’s audience is asked to sympathise with Rath, while at the same time the woman who is the source of his downfall in the film is glamourized as a source of specular pleasure. The dirt and crowdedness of the nightclub space is used to elicit negative associations with Lola, that undercut her glamorized portrayal and allow for the moral message of the film to come through.

Conclusion

After exploring the depiction of nightclub spaces in three Weimar films, it is clear that there is no singular approach to the nightclub in these films. In both Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler and Spione the audience of the nightclub is criticised, which can be read as an attempt to diffuse film audiences’ uneasiness with surface culture. By making cabaret audiences the subject of ridicule, film audiences could justify feeling a sense of superiority. Der Blaue Engel takes this moral judgement even further, by portraying the world of cabaret as shallow and obsessed with appearances rather than intellectual development. Yet, the cultivation of Dietrich’s own screen persona undercuts this moral message by encouraging audiences to focus on surface once more. Der Blaue Engel is remembered best today, precisely because of Dietrich’s subsequent fame. In that respect the reduction of the nightclub performer to a surface signifier is what has led to lasting success of the film. These films highlighted the potential dangers of a society invested in surfaces but used a medium of display to do so.

Footnotes

[1] Siegfried Kracauer, 'The Mass Ornament', in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 75 - 86 (p. 75).

[2] Siegfried Kracauer, 'The Little Shopgirls Go To The Movies', in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 291-304 (p. 295).

[3] Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2001), p. 158.

[4] Peter Jelavic, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 104.

[5] Kracauer, 'The Little Shopgirls', p. 295.

Works consulted

Gunning, Tom, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI, 2000)

Guttsman, Wilhelm Leo, Workers’ Culture in Weimar Germany: Between Tradition and Commitment (New York: Berg, 1990)

Jelavich, Peter, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996)

Kracauer, Siegfried, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995)

McCormick, Richard W., Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature and “New Objectivity” (New York: Palgrave, 2001)

Sutton, Katie, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011)

Ward, Janet, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2001)

Opening the Cabinet: Composing a Score for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

Molly Harrabin — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 14:36:02 GMT

Opening the Cabinet: Composing a Score for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

Reece Goodall, University of Warwick

By day, I’m a PhD student studying European horror cinema. By night, I write new scores for silent films for performance. I’ve now scored ten films, two of which saw my interests meet in slices of iconic Weimar Expressionist horror cinema. I provided a new score for F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), but my most interesting score to date – in terms of the writing process and in music produced – was for Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). In this post, I want to talk a little about the writing process, and how you produce music that suits and enhances such a complex film.

In a framing narrative, Caligari sees a young man called Francis (Friedrich Fehér) recount an ordeal he and his ‘fiancée’ Jane (Lil Dagover) suffered in the town of Holstenwall. A mysterious man named Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss) seeks a permit to present a spectacle at the local fair: a somnambulist called Cesare (Conrad Veidt). Cesare and Caligari are connected to a number of murders in the town. Cesare dies after attempting to kidnap Jane, and Francis follows Caligari to an insane asylum. Francis learns Caligari is the asylum’s director, and has become obsessed with a monk called Caligari who also committed murders with a somnambulist – working with the asylum staff, Caligari is subdued and confined as an inmate. In a twist ending, it is revealed that Francis, Jane and Cesare are actually the patients in the insane asylum, and the events we’ve witnessed are the products of Francis’ fractured mind. The man Francis believes to be Caligari is the asylum director seeking to cure him of his mental illness, a task he believes to be possible now he understands the delusion.

Music is a vital component of horror cinema – the soundtrack goes a long way to creating those feelings of unease, revulsion, tension and, of course, fear because the listener reacts instinctively to it. We know if something sounds happy or sad, and we know if something sounds scary, so even a short musical phrase can tell us a lot about the type of film we’re watching and how we should feel about what we’re seeing on screen. For this reason, one approach to scoring horror films is simply to play dissonant and discordant music, notes that don’t sit too well together to convey that primal feeling of something being not quite right – in the genre, some of the most famous examples of this include the shower scene in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and the main theme to Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). Although this is a technique I used to a certain extent, I felt that there was so much more that could be done with this most unusual of films.

Although the film is now 100 years old, it remains so visually distinct, and so narratively interesting (in terms of both its twist and the considerable ground it covers in 70 minutes), and a traditional horror score would have done the film a disservice. Like so many Expressionist films of the period, Caligari features landscapes and buildings that twist in unusual angles and help convey a feeling of unease to the viewer. There is a sense throughout the film that this world is unreal – that the characters, to paraphrase John Barlow, are existing within a ‘nightmare’ – and that does turn out to be the case after the end twist. The question, then, as a composer is how to convey this musically. How do I write a score that matches the twisted emotional and physical landscape of the film, and that reflects both the events we witness and the later revelation that they are in fact unreal? How do I also reflect some of the underlying ideological messages in the film?

Figure 2: Cesare kidnaps Jane - the image also highlights the twisted aesthetic of the film © Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)

I began with character themes, and the most important was Caligari’s. I wrote a five-note musical phrase that is either played in 5/4 or as a quintuplet (five notes performed in the time of four), both of which sound unnatural to the listener. It has a vague sense of a march, alluding to Caligari’s power and authority, and it’s circular by design, starting and finishing on the same note as if it could move in perpetuity – it seems to indicate that Caligari is forever. The music implies that everything leads back to Caligari, and his theme continues to infiltrate the soundscape, evolving from a carnival-esque melody in ‘The Holstenwall Fair’ to an authoritative statement outside the asylum in ‘The Pursuit of Dr. Caligari’. The score begins and ends with this theme because, in Francis’ diseased mind, everything is linked to the doctor – his obsession drives the film, and so it had to drive my score.

In relation to this theme, I also employed another five-note piece – a heavy march movement – to connote institutions in the film. It first appears when Caligari is belittled at the town clerk’s office (‘Caligari Seeks a Permit’), but it reappears in relation to the town’s police, and the orderlies at the asylum (it comes back in full force in ‘We Queens Are Not Free’ as an institutionalised Francis attacks Caligari and is restrained). This way, I imply the threat and the power of authority and, by employing a similar structure to Caligari’s theme, subtly define him in this way too. Much of the scholarship on this film reads it in relation to authority – in his famous discussion of Caligari, Siegfried Kracauer states that the character of Caligari ‘stands for an unlimited authority’ and he is symptomatic of a subconscious need in German society for a tyrant, making him in effect a premonition of Adolf Hitler. Kracauer then argues that Cesare is representative of the common man, lacking in individuality and conditioned to follow orders. The spectre of authority, then, permeates The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and I knew that my score had to reflect some of these subconscious desires.

As Francis sees himself as the hero of this story, it made sense that his theme should be vaguely heroic, but I also had to reflect the fact that something was wrong with what we were seeing. Thus, his theme builds heroically but finishes on what sounds like the wrong note, a half-step below the note our ears expect. This was a conscious choice to hint at the eventual end of the film, and the fact that Francis’ hero’s journey cannot resolve as he imagines because it is not real. Jane’s theme is a romantic one, reflecting how Francis sees her, but it flits between a waltz movement in 6/8 and a few chords in 4/4, implying there is something more complex to their romance. As the film progresses, the theme is heard and tails off into other notes (this happens a lot in ‘Cesare Attacks Jane’), suggesting an unhappy or unexpected end to their relationship, as indeed turns out to be the case. Jane too is insane, believing she is a queen, and she doesn’t share Francis’ affections at all. The final significant character piece was for Cesare. I use the motif of a half-step upwards – to me, it symbolises the in-between states of awake and asleep, alive and dead (and, as we learn later, sane and insane), unhappy dichotomies in between which the somnambulist sits. The deliberate choice of half-steps again was designed to link Cesare with Francis, signifying certain commonalities between the two of them – they both exist in a liminal state, and they are both unknowingly subject to the control of Caligari.

With this basic framework in place, I approached the score. In order to reflect the exaggerated, unusual and striking mise-en-scène, I realised that the music would have to exaggerate itself – it would have to be a character in its own right. I leap about a lot, shifting between time signatures fairly regularly and turning to irregular signatures – my use of 7/4 in ‘The Pursuit of Dr. Caligari’ is a good example, which also reflects the distress Francis feels as he first encounters the asylum in the narrative. I packed the melodies with unexpected tuplets and notes, and bounce around the piano – there’s a lot of recourse to high and low notes here. This approach, I decided, really captured the spirit of the film in two ways: as a horror film, such inherent unpredictably inevitably unsettles the viewer, depriving them of formal structures to hold onto, and employing dissonant and unexpected notes has the same effect. But then, that same lack of formal structure – the kind of looseness that coming with shifting tempos and melodic structures is, in my mind, evocative of a dream. My score, then, invites the listener and the viewer to share the nightmare with Francis, subtly encouraging them to be unsettled as it eventually transpires our lead character is.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is such a fascinating film, and I hope this post explains just a few of the musical considerations in my mind as I attempted to write a new score for it. As I see it, good modern silent scores reflect what is happening on the screen, but they also channel the sub-text, carefully and subtly suggesting it to the listener – in the absence of sound, music can do so much to complement the silent image. In a film as dense and as stylised as Caligari, there’s so much to work with that the composer is essentially forced to write character-filled music just to match. It was a challenging task to undertake, but being able to get under the skin of Caligari has increased my appreciation of this film significantly – it has lived on in the cultural imagination for more than a century for a very good reason.

You can listen to the score here:

https://open.spotify.com/album/4GqCVZB1bEc80BJAH0AYtt?si=2WfkrT_DSFuhzAIJozSk4g

Works Consulted

Barlow, John D., German Expressionist Film (Indianapolis: Twayne Publishers, 1982)

Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, New Jersey/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004)

From Caligari to RuPaul’s Drag Race: The Maschinenmensch in Pop Culture

Molly Harrabin — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 17:28:14 GMT

From Caligari to RuPaul’s Drag Race: The Maschinenmensch in Pop Culture

Molly Harrabin, University of Warwick

When Siegfried Kracauer wrote his seminal work, From Caligari to Hitler in 1947, I don’t think he would have expected, 74 years later, the Maschinenmensch from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to appear on the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. Yet that is what has happened. In the ‘Surprise, Surprise’ runway theme on the second episode of the latest UK series, Rochdale queen Veronica Green stunned the judges with her outfit Ru-veal. Her 1950’s housewife ensemble was dramatically pulled away to showcase a golden robot look that clearly has its inspiration in Lang’s science-fiction classic. This isn’t the first time that we have seen a Metropolis-esque mainstage presentation. Across the Atlantic, fan-favourites Raja (winner of Season 3), Detox (Season 5; All Stars Season 2) and Miz Cracker (Season 10; All Stars 5) have all werked robot Maria designs. This blog post will journey through pop culture, exploring its fascination with Metropolis, focusing on the recurring image of the Maschinenmensch. So, start your engines, and may the best Maschinenmensch win!

Our journey begins in 1927, the year in which Metropolis was seen by cinema audiences for the first time. Lang’s most-expensive cinematic production of the period (more than 5 million Reichsmarks) sees the master of the eponymous city, Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), turn to his arch-nemesis, the mad scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), for help in preventing a workers’ rebellion that would see his capitalist enterprise collapse. The workers’ rebellion is encouraged by Maria (Brigitte Helm), a young woman characterised by her innocence and maternal nature, who assures the workers that a mediator will come to create unity between the working and ruling classes. The catalyst for the uprising comes in the form of Joh’s own son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), who, having fallen in love with Maria, believes that he could fulfil the role of the mediator. To thwart the rebellion, Rotwang kidnaps Maria and gives his robotic creation her likeness, using the robot to undo the reputation that the real Maria has created for herself. In doing so, the aim is that the uprising would be prevented. Rotwang, however, does not stick to the plan and instead instructs the robot to cause chaos, an act of revenge against Joh who stole the love of his life from him. The result is total carnage across the whole city, sowing discord amongst the workers which leads to the flooding of the city. Ultimately, the robot is burnt at the stake and the film resolves with hope for the future of Metropolis in its message about the head, hands and heart.

Academics have been virtually unanimous on their interpretations of the function of Maria in Metropolis. It is well-acknowledged that the two versions of Maria represent the tensions in Weimar society regarding the position of women. This is a topic that has attracted attention from scholars of Weimar cinema such as Patrice Petro (1989) and Richard W. McCormick (2001). It is then quite extraordinary that the Maschinenmensch has attracted so much attention in culture produced in contemporary society, for we would like to think that we live in a world where gender stereotypes and expectations are no longer as dominant as they were in the Weimar period. However, Andreas Huyssen (1981) has noted the significance of the intertwining of the female with technology in Metropolis, and it is for this reason, I believe, that the Maschinenmensch continues to be depicted in pop culture moments today. We are simultaneously in awe of the new technologies that are developing, whilst also being somewhat fearful of its implications, and the Maschinenmensch allows directors, musicians and fashion designers to explore that theme in their creations. The Maschinenmensch in Metropolis may have ultimately burnt at the stake as punishment for her crimes, but the legacy of the Maschinenmensch has lived on in pop culture ever since.

The influence of Metropolis on the science-fiction genre has been far-reaching, and the Star Wars franchise is no exception. Lang’s film can be seen in the set design, in addition to the overarching storyline of the Rebel Alliance fighting against The Empire. Moreover, the similarity between Lang’s robot and C3PO (Anthony Daniels) of the Star Wars franchise is unmistakeable. C3PO’s metallic gold exterior is highly reminiscent of Rotwang’s creation, and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) confirmed the influence of Metropolis’s Maschinenmensch in response to a fan’s tweet in March 2016. It is then rather poignant that the giant of modern science-fiction cinema pays tribute to the film that is seen as one of the first pioneering pieces of that genre. The similarity in the physical appearance between C3PO and the robot Maria is not however where the influence of Fritz Lang’s cinematic masterpiece on the popular droid ends. We must also note the connection made between their on-screen creators, Rotwang and Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen). The former loses his hand in the process of creating his Maschinenmensch, whilst Skywalker’s arm is severed in battle against Count Dooku (Christopher Lee). Both characters replace their lost body parts with mechanical prosthetics covered by a black glove. Therefore, both creator and creation in Lucas’s films bear the indisputable mark of the Weimar cinematic classic.

The fashion industry has also taken notes from Metropolis, with celebrities such as Beyoncé, Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga all donning the Maschinenmensch guise. In 1995, fashion designer Manfred Thierry Mugler presented his Autumn-Winter collection to the world in Paris. The designer, no stranger to including images of the future in his pieces, looked to the future with reference to the past, showcasing many designs that were reminiscent of the Metropolis Maschinenmensch. To highlight the connection with Lang’s 1927 film further, it was German supermodel, Nadja Auermann, who strutted down the runway dressed in a golden bodysuit. Multiple designers, such as Alexander McQueen, have since followed suit, with the importance of Metropolis and the robot Maria in the fashion community being celebrated by Karl Lagerfeld on the 2010 cover of German Vogue magazine. Though the Metropolis-inspired designs are not necessarily what you might wear when popping to the shops, they demonstrate the fashion industry’s continued homage to Fritz Lang’s classic.

Where the Maschinenmensch has truly taken the world by storm however is in music, with acts such as Madonna taking creative influence from the 1927 film. Madge’s ‘Express Yourself’ (1989) video evokes images from Metropolis, with the closing remark of the video bearing great resemblance to the message preached by Maria which comes to fruition at the end of Lang’s film. Madonna’s character, though not physically evocative of the Maschinenmensch, carries similar themes to the robot, as the video explores the connection between the machines in the factory and female sexuality. In 1984, Queen achieved worldwide success with their chart-topping song ‘Radio Ga Ga’. The music video includes scenes from Metropolis with the band flying over the city in a flying car and Freddie Mercury working the industrial machines, fulfilling the role of Freder. The video directly references the scene in which Rotwang’s Maschinenmensch comes to life, but instead of the robot being branded with Maria’s face as is the case in the 1927 film, Queen’s cyborg has the face of Freddie Mercury. The imposition of Mercury’s face on the Maschinenmensch contributes to the film’s original discussions on sexuality, by replacing a sexualised woman with a homosexual, the cause of much societal anxiety and paranoia in 1980’s.

More recently, the Metropolis cyborg theme has been adopted by American singer-songwriter, Janelle Monáe. Monáe has released four concept albums based around Metropolis: Metropolis: Suite 1 (The Chase) in 2007, The ArchAndroid: Suites II and III in 2009 and The Electric Lady (2013). These albums follow the story of Monáe’s alter-ego Cindi Mayweather, an android who falls in love with a human, an act for which she is punished by the robotic equivalent of death: disassembly. The second and third suites sees Cindi return to Metropolis via time travel, in an attempt to liberate its citizens from the suppressive organisation in control. Monáe has taken Fritz Lang’s story of an underground rebellion and transposed it onto her own life, telling the tale of rebellion and the fight for freedom and casting light on the experience of ‘others’ in our own society. Janelle Monáe’s Metropolis suite can then be understood as using the Maschinenmensch to present a reflection of what it means to be female, queer and black in 21^st century America.

The impact that Fritz Lang’s Maschinenmensch has had on popular culture is undeniable. From influencing one of the greatest science-fiction cinematic outputs of all time, to providing a medium through which notions of sexuality, gender and race can be explored, Metropolis has certainly made its mark. Perhaps what makes the image of the Maschinenmensch so powerful is that it consistently is used to represent the epitome of societal anxieties. For this reason, pop culture continues to incorporate the Maschinenmensch, embracing her like you would an old friend, and I’m positive that it won’t be long before we are reunited once more.

Works Consulted

Beckerman, Jim, ‘Game Changers: ‘Metropolis’, how 1927’s ‘world of tomorrow’ changed pop culture today’, <https://eu.northjersey.com/story/entertainment/2017/03/10/game-changers-metropolis-how-1927s-world-tomorrow-changed-pop-culture-today/98702994/> [accessed 11 February 2021]

Elsaesser, Thomas, Metropolis (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2000)

Gunning, Tom, ‘Metropolis: The Dance of Death: The Allegory of the Machine’. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000), pp. 52-83

Huyssen, Andreas, ‘The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis’, New German Critique, 24/25 (1981-2) 221-237

Jones, Cassandra L., ‘"Tryna Free Kansas City”: The Revolution of Janelle Monáe as Digital Griot’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 39 (2018), 42 - 72

Klimenti, Edena, ‘Re-Vamp: ‘Metropolis 1927’ continues to influence popular culture, https://centmagazine.co.uk/re-vamp-metropolis-1927-continues-to-influence-popular-culture/ [accessed 11 February 2021}

Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, ed. and trans. by Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton, New Jersey/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004)

McCormick, Richard W., Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature and ‘New Objectivity’(New York: Palgrave, 2001).

Petro, Patrice, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)

Pulliam-Moore, Charles, ‘From Metropolis to Dirty Computer: A Guide to Janelle Monáe’s Time-Traveling Musical Odyssey’, https://io9.gizmodo.com/from-metropolis-to-dirty-computer-a-guide-to-janelle-m-1825580195 [accessed 11 February 2021]

Sandifer, Elizabeth, ‘A Short Guide to Janelle Monáe and the Metropolis Saga’, < http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/a-short-guide-to-janelle-monáe-and-the-metropolis-saga/> [accessed 11 February 2021)

Seamer, Connie, ‘A Look at the World Of… Janelle Monae’s Metropolis Series’, https://www.theedgesusu.co.uk/records/2020/10/25/a-look-at-the-world-of-janelle-monaes-metropolis-series/[accessed 11 February 2021)

Szaniawska, Alexsandra, ‘Gestural Refusals, Embodied Flights: Monáe’s Vision of Black Queer Futurity’, Black Scholar, 49 (2019), 35 – 50

Young, Bryan, ‘The Cinema Behind Star Wars: Metropolis’, < https://www.starwars.com/news/the-cinema-behind-star-wars-metropolis> [accessed 11 February 2021)