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Introduction: Early Sound Cinema in the Late Weimar Republic JOHN E. DAVIDSON/ THEODORE F. RIPPEY T HE O HIO S TATE U NIVERSITY / B OWLING G REEN S TATE U NIVERSITY The adjective «early» generates associations with rudimentary and simple, but the articles in this special issue of Colloquia Germanica consistently reveal how refined and complex the production and reception of German sound film had already become during its first two years of existence. Building on the work of Thomas Koebner, Corinna Müller, Jörg Schweinitz, and others who have focused on the silent-to-sound transition, the volume’s contributors analyze a sample of works that ranges from light to heavy, canonical to obscure, always with an eye - and ear - toward the intricacies of the film texts themselves and their multi-layered technical, social, and cultural contexts. Their common intent is to make faded dimensions visible and audible again, dimensions of a medial world that came into being as the Republic came to an end. Beyond the insights that the contributors provide into individual films and artists, their papers are connected by three overarching concerns. First, there are the shifts in the technical and social experience of aurality that preceded, coincided with, and proceeded from sound film and that had an increasing impact throughout late Weimar culture. Rippey opens the volume with an exploration of the sophisticated nature of the early sound-film debate, using Alfred Zeisler’s locked-door whodunit Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier (The Shot on the Soundstage, 1930) to describe a moment of transition not just in the way screenwriters worked with and against the audience’s knowledge of sound technique, but also in the role sound technology plays in situating us in time and space. The Tonfilm not only expands the spatial construction of cinema for the viewer, Rippey argues; Zeisler’s film shows that the increasing penetration of the world by recording devices changes one’s sense of placement in time as well, for moments that had been thought lost can now be heard again. Rippey concludes by exploring Siegfried Kracauer’s dismissal of Der Schuss in light of his overall attention to experience in modernity, showing why the Weimar theoretician missed the significance of this film as a document of «technically augmented aurality» at the turn of the 1930s. 234 John E. Davidson/ Theodore F. Rippey Sound film production required not only new studio designs to accommodate technical developments such as «blimped» cameras and sound booths; it also brought with it a need for new techniques in acting and voice. In her contribution, Kata Gellen analyzes how the vocal training thematized in Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930) reflects specifically l modern aspects of the physical and social regimentation of the voice. Beginning with a discussion of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Gellen argues that technical developments and social realignments made possible - even demanded - a conception of voice training as part of a physiological education tied to social advancement. Der blaue Engel continues a trajectory of works l exploring modernity’s «nexus of vocal refinement, social ascendancy, and professional success in the context of theater and pedagogy.» Professor Rath and Lola-Lola illuminate the professional and personal tragedy of such vocal training that was already latent in Eliza Doolittle’s fate, and Gellen’s article uncovers the sonic registers that mark its staging in this iconic sound film. Where Gellen’s contribution shows the hidden double edge of vocal training in ordering society, Nancy Nenno’s discussion of Victor Trivas’s Niemandsland (No-Man’s Land, 1931) shows a more utopian project, an d «esperantist approach to sound cinema,» which according to Trivas seeks a «gemeinsame Sprache […], jene Sprache der einfachen menschlichen Gefühle.» This drama of forced cohabitation, involving soldiers from the enemy nations of World War I, moves through stages toward such a common language by first allowing Europeans to free themselves from the role of mediums for bellicose nationalism. The different uses of language in this film, as well as the language of film itself, become the means by which the soldiers who are able to speak each slowly develop voices of their own. When they finally learn to do without the divisions of national speech, the film’s mute character comes to share in a common, cinematically rendered language of feelings. Yet, Trivas’s cinematic esperantism faces challenges that it cannot overcome: the meld of aural and visual means he deploys to erase national divisions relies on racialized visual markers that etch non-European others more starkly. The complex balance of sound, sight, and silence (and, in this case, silencing) that Nenno maps in this film is explored in other contributions as well. The necessity of consistent attention to the interwoven nature of the aural and the visual in the early Tonfilm is the second recurring focus of this volume, because the emergence of sound in the cinema is not simply an addition to a visual medium. The contributors trace and extend the thinking of those Weimar-era observers who saw sound as returning the medium of film to a point of technical origin, and their scholarly investigation of the aural experience of a public increasingly familiar with the new medium opens Early Sound Cinema in the Late Weimar Republic 235 new avenues for understanding Weimar’s multifaceted cinematic world. The contributions show the truly integrated status that sound and image achieved already very soon after sound’s introduction, and their most telling interpretative turns arise from a nuanced understanding of the mutually reinforcing nature of the aural and the visual in the formal fabric of the film text. In order to give a sense of the manner in which two canonical films might have spoken differently to contemporary audiences, Katherine Roper develops the notion of «sounds of the city.» Used to describe the filmic tone given the experience of the modern metropolis, this idea refers to the blend of sounds, sights, and silences that «narrates» this world, in Roper’s term; a blend that corresponds to the multiplicity of social moods of late Weimar. But as telling as this harmony of different registers can be, the tensions between aural and visual tracks are often just as important. This productive tension is also illustrated by Christian Rogowski’s elucidation of the «politics of sound» in Ludwig Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht (I by Day, You by Night, 1932). Carefully placing this boy-meets-girl story in the political and economic context of the day, the former hidden and the latter foregrounded by Berger, Rogowski teases out a subtext inclined toward «enlightened liberal pragmatism» from the film’s recurrent misdirection of viewers’ habituated reactions to sounds and sights. This rests on a twofold self-reflection: the first involving the film’s narrative and the film-withinthe-film structure; the second arising from deliberately staged out-of-synch moments between the image and sonic registers at key points. In particular, he argues, the play with diegetic and non-diegetic sound elements serves an important function, for the film’s repeated «unmasking of seemingly nondiegetic music as part of the diegesis […] trains its audience to be enlightened viewers.» Again, as is highlighted by the other contributors in this volume, sound film of the period is shown to involve an inherently pedagogical element, and in this case it is no less politically engaged for not having been taken up by the audience outside the theater. The third consistently honed point in this volume is that the culture of the late Weimar era, if studied seriously on its own terms, remains fertile ground for innovative work that creates connections amongst films and between fields of life that seem at first remote from one another. Rogowski emphasizes that the political subtext of Berger’s film cannot be dismissed simply because it did not single-handedly halt the rise of Nazism. He thus maintains that our understanding of Weimar sound film must be freed from overly limiting frameworks provided by the proximity to the Nazi period, without forgetting about it. Roper avers with good cause that the same is true for the power exerted on scholars by the image of the Republic’s final years as per- 236 John E. Davidson/ Theodore F. Rippey meated by crisis: such a word gives us too seamless an image of the world, as Béla Balázs insisted at the time. Starting from Michael Wedel’s evocation of films as markers of «futures past» in a multitude of «crisis histories,» John Davidson’s contribution wrestles with the inescapable fact that crisis distributes itself unevenly across populations and time periods, as well as with the equally inescapable convergence of a proto-Volksgemeinschaft with the resolution of Wilhelm Thiele’s «Tonfilmoperette,» Die Drei von der Tankstelle (The Three from the Gas Station, 1930). Davidson finds a useful heuristic in the vertically integrated corporate structures that helped the biggest players in the oil industries to flourish during both Weimar crises that wiped so many out financially. The sublation of the related discourse of automobility into the soundscape and musical staging of Thiele’s film leads Davidson to propose a renewed symptomatic reading of cynical films, an approach that Slavoj Žižek dismisses because such films were not meant to be taken seriously in the first place. The contribution shows that it is precisely because of popular cinema’s seriously non-serious nature that such a reading lets so much ring through these early sound films as they drive us along the very different highways and byways of «the crisis years.» This volume originated with two panels organized by Christian Rogowski for the annual conference of the German Studies Association in autumn 2012. The sessions included several participants of the German Film Institute seminar «The Cinema of Crisis: German Film, 1928-1936» organized by Johannes von Moltke at the University of Michigan that spring. The GSA panels drew the attention of Harald Höbusch, who approached the participants on behalf of Colloquia Germanica about publishing a special issue. Co-editors John Davidson and Ted Rippey had invaluable assistance from Jaclyn Kurash, and the editorial team could not be happier with the growth toward cohesion in the essays presented here. We close with a word of thanks to everyone who played a part in this truly collaborative process: our colleagues just mentioned, all those who offered critique and encouragement from the conference panels through final manuscript revision, and our fellow contributors, who responded to every query, no matter how small. The Hokuspokus Debate, Technological Aurality, and Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier THEODORE F. RIPPEY B OWLING G REEN S TATE U NIVERSITY The international proliferation of sound cinema in 1929 and 1930 brought the analog multimedia age to its interwar apex, and the experience of the new medium constituted an expansion of the experience of sound. What sound film could do, and how talking pictures were made, became topics not only for the film press but for the movies themselves: as Jörg Schweinitz observes, the fascination with the technical and cultural aspects of the new form sparked an «autothematic wave» in early German sound film. In the following analysis of Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier (The Shot on the Soundstage, dir. Alfred r Zeisler, 1930) I will outline and discuss two initial critical responses to the film, both of which buttressed contending positions established only a short period earlier in connection with the Ufa courtroom comedy Hokuspokus (Hocus-Pocus, dir. Gustav Ucicky, 1930). The majority position (in the trade press) lauded the narrative economy and technical achievement of these dialog-driven films, hailing them as proof that sound cinema had emancipated itself from the theater and established itself as a new art form. The dissenting criticism (represented here by Siegfried Kracauer) argued that exactly those achievements had rapidly extinguished the new medium’s potential for aesthetic innovation. For Kracauer, Hokuspokus and Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier proved once again how the German industry had simply thrust the stage r onto the screen (Kracauer, «Hokuspokus» 383). A survey of the trade press and Kracauer’s film critical work in the 1920s and early 1930s shows that affirmative critics and dissenters alike were aware to varying degrees of the conceptual and experiential problems triggered by the modernization of listening in interwar urban soundscapes. But they did not connect discussion of those problems with their respective discussions of Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier. I would like to make up for this lost opportunity by demonstrating how the film itself thematizes aspects of an audio modernization that included the talkie revolution but extended beyond the cinema as well. After initially reconstructing the conflict between Kracauer and the trade press on the matter of sound film’s relationship to theater, I will examine how Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier documents a range of funcr tions and malfunctions of a precisely engineered sonic environment. One 238 Theodore F. Rippey strand of my analysis focuses on how recording infrastructure and acoustical engineering of space generate a precisely controlled soundscape that can nonetheless explode into tumult. A second, related strand examines how a recording medium, once present in the space of everyday life, changes aurality by capturing sonic traces of human actions in new ways and thus allows listeners to re-experience moments presumed lost. As a concept, aurality encompasses the mosaic of stimuli, sensations, and perceptions that make up the experience of hearing. Strictly defined, aural phenomena are physical, and aural experience is physiological and psychological. With the microphone, however, technology enters the aural domain, and Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier offers a fictional yet pertinent illustration of the ramifications of this new technological presence. Given his intense interest in the changing nature of sensation and perception in the interwar era, such an illustration would have warranted Kracauer’s attention. But surprisingly he saw nothing new in Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier, and I will therefore analyze how the film’s adherence to nascent narrative convention distracted Kracauer from perceiving its value as a key document in the history of sound film. It is customary to assume that German sound cinema needed at least a few years to find itself, that the infancy of the new medium stretched beyond the death of the Weimar Republic that had witnessed the talking picture’s birth. But Corinna Müller’s compelling study of the silent-to-sound transition frames it differently, as did the trade press of the era. 1 In June 1930, that press featured retrospective commentaries on the year that had elapsed since the earth-shattering premiere of The Singing Fool (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1928) at Berlin’s Gloria-Palast on 3 June 1929. In a paradigmatic piece published in Der Film, critic H. Ryk. 2 lauded the many accomplishments that those 365 days had seen: hot on the heels of Jolson, there was the first German foray into sound film, Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women, dir. Carmine Gallone, 1929), followed in quick succession by such films as E.A. Dupont’s international sensation Atlantic (1929) and the Ufa action-romance c Die Nacht gehört uns (The Night Belongs to Us, dir. Carl Froelich, 1929), which convinced Ryk that the young German sound film had matched, if not exceeded, the American technical standard (Ryk). 3 German film art and the American technical advance experienced a matrimony of sorts when Josef von Sternberg arrived in Berlin to direct Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), about which the critic and theorist Hans Wollenberg wrote, «Wir glauben hier zum ersten Mal einer neuartigen und originären Gesetzen unterworfenen Verwendung von Sprache und Laut in einem Kunstwerk begegnet zu sein. Das ist richtunggebend! » («Der blaue Engel»). The Hokuspokus Debate 239 If, as Ryk argued, sound film’s principal remaining difficulties in 1930 were dramaturgical, not technical, then Wollenberg’s assessment of Der blaue Engel suggested that even those dramaturgical problems were solvable not in the far but rather in the near term. To note these enthusiastic responses to the young medium’s innovations is not to exchange one narrow view for another. Compared with the audiovisual experience that awaits the spectator in the best-equipped cinemas of the 2010s, the cinema of 1929 and 1930 was without doubt primitive. And opposing views on the merit of the films so praised in the trade press were not hard to find: Kracauer’s thrashing of Der blaue Engel is but one example. At l the same time, the public discourse and the films themselves demonstrate a legitimate history of accomplishment in those 365 days, as well as recognition of that progress. The German sound film had not only shown, it had also realized significant potential. But what exactly had it achieved, and what possibilities had those achievements foreclosed? The drive to match or even better Hollywood standards was exactly what put off critics who had held out hope for an aesthetically radical impulse to flourish, even if only briefly, as the sound era dawned. In their minds, to view sound as an addition - even a transformative addition - was to miss the point. The emergence of sound-on-film, they held, took the medium back to a point of origin. As Müller puts it, sound was an intervention into the medium, not its completion (16). It was a chance to start anew, which, if we follow Kracauer, the industry promptly and predictably missed. Kracauer had experienced and theorized the silent era’s defining achievement, a discourse of images (Bilderrede) that required no verbal recourse to convey the attitudes embodied by the likes of Jannings and Chaplin, narrate à la Griffith or argue like Eisenstein. Having witnessed how filmic discourse could break the bounds of the word, the advent of cinematic speech struck him as paltry, the result of a stunning technical marvel exploited for a parlor trick. This trick pushed the cinema back into the vicinity of theater, Kracauer found, and the gravity of the word was already pulling the sound film back down to pedestrian ground, before it had a chance to take wing. Kracauer established his position on sound film’s strengths and weaknesses very quickly. He gave credit for technical achievement where due, but he was rarely satisfied that a given film constituted an aesthetic stride forward for the medium. In an October 1928 review of the early sound film Ein Tag Film (A Day in the Movies, dir. Max Mack, 1928), for example, Kracauer noted, «Obwohl die Tonwiedergaben noch vielfach mangelhaft sind, bestätigt der Einakter doch die Durchführbarkeit des neuen Prinzips» («Tonbildfilm» 123). At the same 240 Theodore F. Rippey time, the Mack film compared unfavorably to Walther Ruttmann’s experimental radio film Die tönende Welle, which led the sound film double-bill under review: «In ästhetischer Hinsicht freilich ist Ein Tag Film fragwürdiger als das Mosaik des ersten Films, weil er zum Unterschied von diesem nicht vorwiegend unwillkürliche Geräusche nachbildet, sondern Figuren, die auch stumm agieren könnten, zum Sprechen zwingt» (Kracauer, «Tonbildfilm» 123). These two remarks encapsulate core elements of Kracauer’s critique of sound film that remain stable throughout his life: recognition of technical advance and aversion to the talkies’ compulsive talking. Kracauer observed further that the Mack film endeavored to lend its action a physical presence that can only be achieved in the three dimensions of live performance. The cinema appeared a strange hybrid in this regard, since the achievement of sound technology endowed it with aural three-dimensionality while its human figures, settings and objects remained compressed into the two dimensions of the screen. 4 Given this fact, Kracauer questioned the desire to recreate on the screen the embodied voice familiar from the stage. The genuinely new representational power of sound film, he argued, lay in the «Darstellung und Formung der durch keine früheren Mittel noch vernommenen Wirklichkeit, jener Wirklichkeit, die auf der Bühne bisher nicht mitgesprochen hat» and thus in its capacity to discover anew «das Tönen und Lärmen um uns, das mit den Bildeindrücken noch niemals kommunizierte und stets den Sinnen entging» («Tonbildfilm» 124). This Tönen und Lärmen was and is frequently the sound that human auditors endeavor (consciously or not) to suppress or edit out of their everyday sound mix. It was the background noise that interested Kracauer the most. This stress on the nonverbal sets Kracauer apart from the majority position on both Hokuspokus and Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier. If we follow his basic logic, the more dialog proliferates, the more the medium loses its capacity to apprehend and represent realities never before experienced. Kracauer maintained that dialog crowded out the inarticulate sonic mess that was far more intriguing than speech. In his view, it was not that sound film perforce constituted a regression, but the likelihood of regression was high, given that the new medium emerged in a culture which, though awash in images, was still dominated by words. Kracauer’s prime criterion sets up a dichotomy: on the one side, there is conventional sound film, which is little more than theater in front of a running camera; on the other, there is audiovisual experiment, which tests not just narrative convention but at times the very logic of spoken language, in order to present the audience with a totally new aesthetic experience. This dichotomy was a productive challenge to the affirmative position that the The Hokuspokus Debate 241 introduction of sound automatically made film better, that is, that technical innovation equaled medial and artistic progress. But Kracauer’s dichotomy was also restrictive, as criticism of a film that just preceded Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier showed. That film, r Hokuspokus, moved trade press critics to declare that the designation filmed theater no longer applied. One finds in r their descriptions a greater emphasis on technical processes than one finds in Kracauer, and it is this focus that makes their analyses worth examining more closely. Hokuspokus is an especially well-suited example here because it is a film based on a play. As a courtroom comedy that turned on rapidly exchanged dialog and featured only four principal settings, the basic story was a recipe for filmed theater. But reviews suggest that the film’s achievement lay in its fidelity to its source and its ability to become something altogether different. The critic for Der Film lauded from the outset: Vermißt man im Fluss der Dialoge die befeuernde Unmittelbarkeit von Rede und Gegenrede, die die Bühne bislang dem tönenden Bilde voraus hatte? Das Theaterstück von Curt Goetz ist fast ohne jede wesentliche Änderung verfilmt worden. Die Dialoge wurden zum weitaus größten Teil wortgetreu übernommen. Und dennoch: welche unerhörten Unterschiede trotz der engen inhaltlichen Verwandtschaft! […] Aus dem blendenden Theaterstück ist eine intensivere Zeitschau geworden. (Betz, «Hokuspokus») These remarks leave no doubt about the centrality of the word in Hokuspokus, becoming almost painstakingly quantitative in the assessment of how much speech makes it from the drama, untouched, into the film. At the same time, the reviewer is unabashed in his claim that the film becomes something more intense and contemporary than the play. By «more intense,» the critic means that the film makes sensory impressions that are too disproportionate for the realities of the stage and everyday life but logical for cinematic reality. The power of the image makes the comedy «eindruckswuchtiger, aufrührerischer und elementarer, als sie es je auf der Bühne hätte sein können» (Betz, «Hokuspokus»). The recollection of the intensification and resolution of these effects spurred Betz to frame the ultra-modern text in ancient terms: Hokuspokus was «eine Komödie im aristotelischen Sinne» (Betz, «Hokuspokus»). Writing in Film-Kurier, reviewer Hans Feld also addressed the film-theater relationship directly, noting that Hokuspokus screenwriters Karl Hartl and Walter Reisch did not shy away from using speech alone to narrate story events that, in silent film - «unter Sprengung der Theatergesetze» - would require a series of images (Feld, «Hokuspokus»). In speaking of the laws of theater and making explicit reference to Aristotle, the critics reinforced exactly what Kracauer saw as the problem: the 242 Theodore F. Rippey proximity of theater and film. But Feld and Betz also argue that even a film like Hokuspokus, which incorporates a majority of the theatrical forerunner’s dialogue, is something definitively new. The Aristotle reference is especially intriguing since the chapter of the Poetics that deals with comedy has never been found. It is announced by Aristotle in the introduction, but it remains a mystery. For Betz, the intensity of the impressions and their comic resolution is reminiscent of the Aristotelian model of emotional cleansing - an ancient dramatic objective realized by modern cinematic means. The remark is partly tongue-in-cheek, but the central point remains that the cinema has made of the play a new, more sensorily, physiologically, emotionally affecting experience. Feld echoes this sentiment in his brief remarks on cinematographer Carl Hoffmann: «Jenseits der dem Theater gezogenen Grenzen bringt er Menschen, Figuren, Gesichter an den Zuschauer heran» (Feld, «Hokuspokus»). In his opening paragraph, he is careful to identify Hokuspokus as «ein Theaterstück, zum optisch-akustischen Werk gestaltet.» Echoing Wollenberg’s position on Der blaue Engel, Feld saw Hokuspokus as «ein merklicher Ruck nach Vorwärts: Der Sprechfilm beginnt eigene Gesetze des Ausgleichs zwischen Bild und Ton zu finden» (Feld, «Hokuspokus»). Further remarks establish in greater detail what this balance looks like. «Der Ton wird primär, das Wort ist Träger des Handlungsfortschritts,» Feld observes. The advance of the word to bearer of the narrative action is marked here as a significant innovation, but it does not mean the end of cinematic visuality: «Der Film, auch der gesprochene, bleibt dem Optischen verhaftet, eine selbstverständliche Forderung. Weshalb nicht auch, darüber hinaus, dem Klanglichen eine wesentlich größere Aufgabe zuweisen, als die bisherige, nur Kulisse zu sein» (Feld, «Hokuspokus»). This last remark reminds us that in the very early stages of sound film’s commercial viability, it was the norm to encounter movies that seemed like silent films with sound occasionally mixed in. In fact, many early talking pictures (The Singing Fool and its companion piece l The Jazz Singer among them) were exactly that. These films, whose audio-tracks were provided by high-quality phonograph discs (known generically in Germany as Nadelton) were called «part-talkies» in American parlance, and they still showed many stylistic and structural features of silent film. Taken together, Feld’s comments demarcate a basic critical position: theater-sourced film is not filmed theater; in fact, achieving a cinematic flow of verbal interchange that blends the vocal rhythms of the live stage with the larger-than-life visual impressions of the screen constitutes a successful breakthrough into new medial and artistic territory (Neuland is a term that d recurs throughout his review). In direct opposition to Kracauer, Feld identi- The Hokuspokus Debate 243 fies the move toward dialog-driven story as exactly the kind of progress in the area of sound that Kracauer claims is destroyed by dialog. Betz’s Der Film review stressed the necessity of considering the entire apparatus of audiovisual recording at each stage of the creative process. Hartl and Reisch «haben Wort und Bild ausgewogen, gegeneinander ausgespielt, miteinander wirken lassen,» he maintained, and the actors displayed a new level of competence in delivery for the microphone (Betz, «Hokuspokus»). Feld’s Film Kurier review also praised both conception and execution. «Schon das Drehbuch bedarf einer ganz anderen geistigen Durchdringung,» Feld observed, and he lauded Ucicky as a director of cinematic voices: «Ucicky, c in der Führung der Sprecher am Unsterblichen Lump geschult und darüber hinausgewachsen, gibt ihnen die Möglichkeit der Entwicklung. (Womit der Beweis erbracht, dass auch differenzierte Sprechfilmregie kein Monopol der Theaterleute ist)» (Feld, «Hokuspokus»). The actors, he noted, were becoming more proficient enunciators, which is to say more aware of the medial nuances of their vocal art: «Die Filmleute stehen hinter den Kollegen vom Theater kaum zurück; sie sind dabei, den Vorsprung der Dialogbeherrschung einzuholen.» Film could not only stand alone vis-à-vis theater; it could be better. Feld summed it up in these terms: «Mit dem Dialogfilm Hokuspokus hat die Ufa dem tönenden Film auf einem bisher unbeschrittenen Gebiet zu einem Triumph verholfen, der für die grandiose Aufwärtsentwicklung des deutschen Tonfilms das beredtste Zeugnis ablegt» (Feld, «Hokuspokus»; emphasis added). These reviews stake out a position that both undercuts and reinforces Kracauer’s central thesis about the antithetical nature of speech and non-verbal sound in the nascent talking picture. On the one hand, they demonstrate the sensitivity of artists, industry types, and audiences to medium-specific problems of sound film design (broadly understood). Their discussion shows that contemporaries framed sound film in 1930 not as a quantitative addition of audio to visual but as a new medium, which explored new aesthetic territory. On the other hand, the reviews demonstrate that Hokuspokus is Kracauer’s prophecy fulfilled, in the way that the film relies on the spoken word to be the scaffolding, without which the entire cinematic undertaking will collapse. Betz designates Hokuspokus a Dialogfilm, and this term was just one element in the typology of films that Müller reconstructs in her study of the silent-to-sound transition. She notes Gesangsfilm, Sprechfilm, and Geräuschfilm as three further common designations, the last of which was used to describe exactly those projects that sought to forego dialog-driven stories in favor of representing aspects of the sounding world that had nothing to do with 244 Theodore F. Rippey human speech. Müller argues that a major impetus behind such experimental projects originated with the «Sound Film Manifesto» 5 drafted by major artists of the Soviet cinema (Pudovkin and Eisenstein, most prominently). Though scholarship has traditionally traced the effects of that manifesto only in the Soviet cinema, Müller argues that its prompt translation and broad dissemination through critical and creative ranks in the German film scene meant that the ideas of Eisenstein and his peers had a palpable impact on German theory and practice as well (18). It is clear that Kracauer’s either/ or position shared much with the Soviets. As the trade press discussion of sound dramaturgy indicates, however, there were dimensions of early sound cinema for which Kracauer’s criticism did not rigorously account. Furthermore, neither the Soviets’ nor Kracauer’s frameworks could accommodate films that worked outside the binary, both reinforcing nascent dialog-narrative conventions and casting a critical (or at least ironic) light on those conventions by signaling the mechanisms of their construction and exploring the experience of sound for its own sake. Over the balance of this article, I will argue that Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier was just such a hybrid. The initial run of Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier saw busy box offices and r packed houses, and the response in the trade press bordered on effusive. Reviewing again for Der Film, Betz wrote: [W]as das Bild an Aufregendem, an Sensationellem und an packenden Überraschungen bringt, das steigert der ihm verbündete Ton zu einem dramaturgischen Effekt von nie dagewesener Wirkung. Noch nie ist in einem Tonfilm die Fülle der neuen technischen Möglichkeiten so geschickt, so meisterhaft verwendet worden wie hier. (Betz, «Durchschlagender Erfolg») The review specifically lauded Zeisler for his overall aesthetic approach, which treated «Ton und Geräusch als dramaturgisches Element - nicht nur als gegebenes und daher irgendwie zu verwendendes Hilfsmittel.» It mentioned cinematographer Werner Brandes, set designers Willi Herrmann and Herbert Lippschütz, and sound editor Erich Leistner by name, praising all for their role in generating the compelling audiovisual world. And it made explicit mention of the quality of recording and playback, which was «voll und flüssig, ohne die geringsten Nebengeräusche.» Here one detects the affirmative tone that frequently characterizes film reviews in the trade press, but there is also evidence once again of attention to the new possibilities of sound and the desire to judge a film based on its exploitation of its new medial potential. As the review makes explicit, these were judgments of the dramaturgy of sound, a concept that appeared frequently in the trade press in 1930. Again, there was a recognition that sound was not merely a supplement to the visual image but a co-constituting element of a new kind of art. The Hokuspokus Debate 245 Regarding technical dimensions, Film-Kurier reviewer Georg Herzberg echoed his colleague at Der Film: «Das Tontechnische des Films ist vollendet. Man spürt die Technik gar nicht mehr, und das ist das Beste» (Herzberg, «Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier»). This comment represents the second prime criterion in the critical judgment of early sound cinema. Even as detractors and defenders stressed the importance of attending to sound as a co-constituent of the audiovisual image, not merely a supplement to pictures, they also placed great value on the technical apparatus of sound capture, production, and reproduction erasing itself. Like the visual image, sound was expected to achieve great sensory and dramatic magnitude, even as the machinery that produced it disappeared in exhibition. Kracauer agreed that this second objective of technical proficiency and the auto-erasure of the apparatus was well met in Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier: «Die Wiedergabe des Tons hat sich merklich vervollkommnet, und das gelispelte S wird wohl bald ganz verschwinden. Dank dem technischen Fortschritt sind die darstellerischen Leistungen lockerer, freier» («Film- Notizen» 389). But he directly contradicted the trade press consensus on the matter of sound film vs. theater. What he had stressed in his review of Hokuspokus applied here as well: «Die großen Chancen des tönenden Films werden vertan, wenn man die Leute Dialoge führen lässt wie auf der Bühne. […] Macht man die zusammenhängende Rede zum Handlungsgerüst, so ist das rein visuelle Geschehen eine bloße Zutat und kann sich nicht mehr ungehindert entfalten» («Film-Notizen» 389). It is tempting to take such remarks as garden variety aesthetic conservatism, with an emotional charge of nostalgia: the champions of film art, forced to witness that art’s undoing of its own progress, now long to wind back the medium’s technological clock. But were it that simple, then there would be no need to insist on «great opportunities.» This raises the question of whether the compulsion of speech that quickly became the norm in the early sound era foreclosed the possibility of realizing the opportunities of the new medium, as Kracauer thought was the case with Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier. The film’s detective story genre supplies a character whose modus operandi mirrors that which Kracauer ascribes to the medium in general. Kriminalrat Holzknecht (Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur) articulates his rule of thumb simply and straightforwardly: «Ein schönes rundes Geständnis ist mir lieber als ein ganzer Sack voll Belastungsmaterial.» Like the sound film, the homicide investigator is driven to make people talk. In pursuing his objective, Holzknecht manages by design and by accident to discover previously unknown dimensions of the sound film world. The movie itself generates similar illumination about its medium, even as it - to Kracauer’s ear - generally does the wrong thing. 246 Theodore F. Rippey The film begins with an embrace and a kiss. In a medium shot, we see two figures in profile, and we hear the chime of a clock. Immediately, then, the film signals its new bisensory representational capacity, first using only the sound, then using a brief insert shot of the clock to confirm the source. The lovers are soon interrupted by a more troublesome sound: the door buzzer. It could not possibly be Fräulein Caspary, the man insists, somewhat out of sorts, ushering the woman into the adjacent bedroom. Naturally, it is Caspary, and a classic scene of confrontation between the jilted lover and the new couple ensues. As the verbal sparring boils over into a physical confrontation, Caspary draws a pistol from her purse, tries to force her way through the man into the bedroom, and fires a shot through the door. We then hear a scream and shout in quick succession. The scream is not speech but intelligible noise: it is the young woman’s death scream. The shout is verbal - «Halt! » - and the response to it by characters and camera signals immediately that this opening is actually a scene (scene 25b, to be exact) of a film within the film Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier. The source of the shout (as a panning camera soon shows) is Kalser (Erwin Kalser), the director of the film within the film, and he clarifies for the confused actors that the scene must be reshot because the gun discharged too soon. Just after Kalser’s «Halt! » the sound engineer notes from his cabin above the set that the death scream of the actress playing the new girlfriend (Fräulein Saylor, played by Berthe Ostyn) sounded brilliantly authentic. Moments later, the composure of all present is suddenly and severely tested: in the brief exchange that ensues as cast and crew reset for the scene, it becomes clear that Fräulein Saylor has been shot with a weapon that is all too real. The authenticsounding scream signaled an actual death. One of the first lessons of sound filmmaking was the necessity of a hermetically sealed sonic environment, in which «quiet on the set» would be synonymous with quiet, period. Egresses were few, a fact that the film accurately reflects. Kalser recognizes the criminological expediency of the building design almost immediately, and he orders a crew member to seal the sole door and stand watch there until further notice. Holzknecht and his sidekick, Kommissar Möller (Alfred Beierle), make the scene in short order, and in the balance of the film, we explore together the spaces of cinematic production and homicide perpetration, with eyes peeled and ears piqued. In 1930, moviegoers familiar with accounts of film production published frequently in the trade and popular press had a preconceived image of the world behind the scenes (Müller 367-68). In that image, the camera was immobile, hermetically sealed in a cramped cabin (Box) within the cavernous soundstage, clicking and whirring away, sonically isolated from the sensitive The Hokuspokus Debate 247 ear of the microphones placed within the walls of the set and hanging from booms above. We see and hear this ourselves throughout Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier: the box that houses the optical camera and its two operators is shown multiple times from within and without, and a series of exchanges between the Berlin dialect-speaking cameramen provides local color and comic relief at various junctures. The shots of the box are accompanied by shots of the sound apparatus: the lead sound engineer in his booth, on the mezzanine level above the set; the microphone booms; and the technicians in the recording rooms, where the remotely located sound cameras record the audio signals from the microphones on celluloid, creating the raw sound track. What we do not see, of course, is the unchambered, movable camera that captures the images of the immobile, chambered camera. It is this «blimped» camera (verpackte Kamera in German), in the middle of the set but never shown in the film, that shoots the opening sequence. Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier draws back the filmmaking curtain extensively. The camera in the middle remains hidden, though, despite the fact that it could easily be showcased. All eyes receive visual data that point to its existence - it pans 180 degrees in the opening sequence, for instance, which would be impossible for the camera in the box - but only a spectator with trained eyes would take conscious note. It is not surprising that any reference to the visually concealed yet undoubtedly present blimped camera is absent from reviews in the popular press, since such technical details were not especially pertinent to general commentary on production and entertainment value. More surprising is the absence of such observations by trade press journalists, who frequently visited studios and would have easily noted the missing camera. Müller argues forcefully that this silence was conspiratorial: the writers, she claims, agreed not to mention what was obvious to them because they did not want to ruin the effect of the legend of sound film production, which the industry wanted its audience to keep on believing (366-69). Without contradicting that argument, I emphasize here a further correspondence between the reviews. They also, without fail, take up the very issues of speech, sound, and the aural-visual balance that were treated in the pieces on Hokuspokus, suggesting the dominance in August and September 1930 of larger conceptual concerns about how the new medium should define itself against speech-based theater and image-based silent film. As even Müller concedes, the film itself accurately reveals a number of authentic aspects of sound film production. In other words, it participates visually in a process of medial self-definition. And the object of greatest technical, narrative, and visual interest in Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier is arguably the 248 Theodore F. Rippey sound system, to which the audience is granted ample visual access, even as the blimped camera remains unphotographed. This simultaneous display and concealment generate a fraught perceptual situation: the audience is granted a look and a listen behind the veil of sound film production yet shielded from sensory data that would disrupt the pleasurable processing of the unfolding narrative. The sound film draws attention to itself as sound film, but not in a way that disrupts conventional patterns of reception. As Marion Tendam argues in an essay on meta-phenomena in early sound film, these «sound film signals» to the audience break cinematic illusion at targeted moments in order to cement filmic reality effects in the final analysis. Borrowing a term from Michel Chion, Tendam argues that the game initiated by these signals reinforces an «audiovisuellen Pakt» that connects the events on the screen to the realm of reception, «um auf diese Weise das rein technische Zustandekommen der tonfilmischen Wahrnehmungsatmosphäre vergessen zu machen» (Tendam 228). This is the dual edge of reading Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier: even as the audience watches and listens to a movie about making a movie, it has little opportunity to probe into the techniques that conceal the technologies that generated the very movie it sees and hears. As the film exposes the world behind the scenes, the spectators become insiders who are unaware of their blind spots. They can be confident that they know all the essentials of how sound film is made, while actually grasping very little about how this sound film was made. In their world, the fictional cast and crew are film professionals, so they are familiar with the technical dimensions of filmmaking. As with the audience, however, that familiarity has its limits. In the studio, the characters inhabit an environment densely populated with recording devices. Though generally aware that they are encompassed by these technologies, they are unable to attend simultaneously to all those devices, how they function, when they are functioning, and what the ramifications of the recording process may be. They think that they already have it figured out, and even if they did not, such multifaceted attention is simply too tall an order for an individual human perceiver. There is thus a lag between the characters’ understanding of their media-related experience and their analytical grasp of precisely how the medial component of their environment changes that experience. They know, for example, that the microphone hears all, but their verbalization still follows the unspoken principle that if they speak when no one else is around, no one else will hear. There is a logic to thinking that no one else can hear when no one else is around, but it is not a logic that is consciously elaborated and confirmed with each utterance. In fact, this kind of thinking is hardly thinking at all: it is the The Hokuspokus Debate 249 kind of intuitive, preconscious mental guidance of behavior that transpires in milliseconds and goes unreflected. It is a habit, in this case one formed over millennia of human audition. Those millennia had seen any number of means of eavesdropping; the very term harkens back to surreptitious listening without technological aid. But this habit accumulated a much more significant degree of risk in the age of the microphone. In addition to being a whodunit and a police procedural, Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier also charts a move toward awareness of the ramifications of technological aurality. At critical moments, characters become acutely aware of the suddenly perilous dimensions of their habit of letting the eye judge what could and could not be heard by whom. These short bursts of awareness create conditions for a new understanding not only of the technology but of the habits themselves, habits that must be reconsidered once aurality and technology interpenetrate. It is at such moments that the film becomes an unwitting document of this moment in the history of aural experience, a moment at which an environment permeated by recording technology becomes feasible on a limited scale. The sound studio is by no means paradigmatic of the degree to which recording devices have proliferated in all spaces of life by 1930. It is an exceptional case, but it proleptically indicates the possibility of a much wider presence of technologized aurality. The absence of acknowledgment of these issues in Kracauer’s review is strange - the habits and conditions of perception, after all, were among his central analytical foci throughout his intellectual career. I will now turn to his theorization of those habits and conditions, in order to recognize in Kracauer’s thought what is missing from his film comment and to provide as a basis for my further analysis of the film. Kracauer’s interest in perception, habit, and everyday experience is traceable as early as 1922, in a series of remarks from «Die Wartenden.» In this early essay, he focuses on the historical undoing of the traditions of religion, which augured the modern conditions under which individuals lead socially atomized, culturally impoverished, spiritually empty lives. There is no nostalgic wish for old times to return, however, nor is there pessimism. Instead, Kracauer sketches out an attitude or stance (Haltung) of waiting as a hesitating openness, through which those who wait might be able to reinject meaning into existence, a meaning appropriate to their juncture of history. This stance should foster a mode of understanding that cannot be conveyed as knowledge: «[Es] lässt sich nicht als Wissen vermitteln, da es gelebt zu werden verlangt und überdies Erkenntnis des Betrachtenden dem Leben und seiner Kunde vorgreift» («Die Wartenden» 169). In playing the archaic Kunde off against its more modern counterpart Wissen, Kracauer establishes an opposition between an understanding that maintains close proximity to the physical 250 Theodore F. Rippey and sensory experience of life and the abstract knowledge that has a stronger affinity with theoretical discourse. The problem with Wissen is that it literally removes human beings from their own reality, jumping ahead of life to draw conclusions before things unfold. To move toward Kunde, one must shift emphasis «von dem theoretischen Ich auf das gesamtmenschliche Ich» (169), a shift that forms a mutually reinforcing relationship with the movement «aus der atomisierten unwirklichen Welt der gestaltlosen Kräfte und der des Sinnes baren Größen» and into «die Welt der Wirklichkeit und der von ihr umschlossenen Sphären» (169). According to Kracauer, the intellectual trend of the postwar years has led thinking people directly away from reality, not toward it: Infolge der Überspannung des theoretischen Denkens sind wir dieser Wirklichkeit, die von leibhaftigen Dingen und Menschen erfüllt ist und deshalb konkret gesehen zu werden verlangt, in einem entsetzenerregenden Maße ferngerückt. Wer versucht, in sie einzuschwingen und sich mit ihr zu befreunden, der gelangt natürlich nicht ohne weiteres zu einem sie konstituierenden Sinn (169; emphasis added). Those who do make the attempt to reenter reality may, though, at least discover that «das Leben mit dem Nächsten, dass überhaupt die wirkliche Welt in ihrer ganzen Breite mannigfachen Gesetzlichkeiten unterliegt, die weder theoretisch-begrifflich ausmessbar, noch lediglich die Frucht subjektiver Willkür sind» (169). Meaning does not simply leap out at those who take these steps, but a modicum of understanding of the governing principles of life may be possible. It is a modest objective, but one that can only be had (if at all) by living one’s reality, seeing it concretely, perceiving and becoming friendly with it. These principles, however, are neither so general that they can become axiomatic (like the laws of physics, for instance) nor so specific that they can be seen as the result of individual arbitrary inclination. They form a system, but it is a system that can only be glimpsed at close experiential range. When Kracauer speaks of the I that is common to all humanity, then, he is not thinking in idealistic, moral terms but in terms of concrete experience: we all see, hear, touch, and navigate an environment of people and things. That is what connects us. The desire to understand reality in this way is what draws Kracauer to the quotidian, the popular, the everyday. Christian Sieg argues that Kracauer «searches for phenomena of everyday life that throw into relief what is normally experienced but not recognized as such» (112). As framed by Sieg, Kracauer’s concept of the real «refers to a field of human action that unfolds along lines as yet unrecognized but principally understandable. […] [T]he ‹real› in Kracauer might be characterized as preconscious behavior, situated precisely between [the] unconscious and consciousness» (113). Kracauer’s redemptive The Hokuspokus Debate 251 criticism, as Miriam Hansen designated it, «attempts to rescue experiences from the ephemeral» in order to assess them on their own terms, and these experiences without doubt encompass what Sieg calls «the habitual sphere» (113). With this in mind, one can read Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier as a docur ment of what happens when a new phenomenon (the microphone) becomes present in and thus disrupts reality, forcing habits of verbalization and audition from the preconscious to the conscious realm and triggering a reconfiguration of perception. Even as Kracauer wrote off the film, it was doing his work for him. In Holzknecht, the film features a character who is rigorously trained as an aural perceiver and thus more consciously attuned to aural habits and sound processing. When he arrives, he conducts an inventory of vocal responses to the crime and a survey of the engineered space of seeing and hearing, in order to determine how its assets may work in his investigative favor. In one scene, he touches and contemplates the microphone that hangs in the vicinity of the shooting before strolling slowly past some crewmen, picking up their ad hoc eulogies and quietly scanning their words for case evidence. They notice his listening, and the conversation lulls. Holzknecht puts two and two together. Proceeding on the most plausible hunch that the shooter is either Fräulein Maurus (Gerda Maurus) or Harry Frank (Harry Frank), Holzknecht maneuvers them into location for a brief conversation, then leaves them alone to calm each other by talking through what has happened. Möller is confused by the tactic of leaving two suspects alone to sort out their stories, but Holzknecht heads directly for the command and control center of sound cinema: the audio control booth. Here, he asks the sound engineer (Friedrich Franz Stampe) to engage microphone seven, which hovers above Maurus and Frank, who now speak freely, guided by the preconscious notion that Holzknecht’s corporal absence means that they are beyond his audible range. This is a fruitful tactic at first: Maurus and Frank are engaged to be married, and the recently deceased Fräulein Saylor is Frank’s former lover, which means that they are inclined to suspect and interrogate one another - with Holzknecht listening in at the sound engineer’s side and watching them from above. Frank pleads with Maurus to be honest with him and asks her whether she was the shooter. Maurus turns her head away and upward in a diva’s show of exasperation, and as she does so, her line of sight crosses the microphone. She freezes for a moment, then states the obvious and asks an ominous question: «Da hängt ein Microphon! Vielleicht ist es eingeschaltet? » A cut takes us back to Holzknecht, who instructs the engineer to switch off. «Ich glaube, wir werden jetzt nichts Interessantes mehr zu hören kriegen.» 252 Theodore F. Rippey As a narrative component, this scene displays a new investigative method and thus tips off the audience as to how Holzknecht might solve the crime. In terms of aural and verbal habits, Maurus’s reaction illustrates the lag effect noted above, which occurs when a new medium proliferates in an everyday setting: everyone knows about the medium, but few understand with precision its structures, techniques, and ramifications. Most, therefore, do not realize how to best adjust their expressive and communicative habits, given the presence of the new medium. And even those who should know better suffer lapses of attention, as Maurus and Frank demonstrate. Questioning one another at the table, they fail to arrive immediately at the simple realization that the microphone need make no distinction between recording their performances and recording their private conversations. Maurus becomes aware of the mic by accident, and when she does, a moment of stunned silence signals the actors’ realization that the microphone is far more than a tool that helps them ply their trade. Despite Holzknecht’s remark to the sound engineer, there are interesting things yet to hear in the film. Holzknecht and Möller cannot track down the murder weapon, for example, but the weapon betrays its own location through sound when excessive heat in the resistor box where the murderer stashed the pistol makes a shell discharge. Moments later, we witness another aural explosion. An image of a hand dropping a match into a pile of unspooled film sets up a one-minute fire-in-the-studio sequence, in which a torrent of screams fills the soundtrack and all but drowns out the shouted exchange between Kalser, assistant director Kemp (Paul Kemp), and the two investigators. Aside from a sensory rush that signals the imminent narrative climax, this sequence also shows how quickly the precisely engineered aural system of the sound studio can be overwhelmed. Instead of sound being controlled, here it dominates: no one can escape the physical impact of the collective scream. This intense impact is due in large part to the sealed, comparatively small space of the studio. Within those spatial bounds, sound achieves greater reverberation than it would in an exterior setting. To the ear, the sound lives a little longer, and so to our perceptual processing center, the sensory information remains readable for another split-second. This illustrates the basic principle that sound can be conserved and manipulated through technical (in this case, architectural) intervention. Along with the insurmountable boundary of the spatial seal, this principle will be the murderer’s downfall. It is directly after the aural deluge stemming from the fire-triggered panic that Holzknecht becomes educated about a more permanent means of sound conservation. He wanders into an editing room, where he meets a sound editor’s assistant (Eva Behmer), who is cutting the unneeded sections of film The Hokuspokus Debate 253 away from those to be used in the final print. Holzknecht notices something odd: the film is not imprinted with meters of still images in identically sized and spaced frames, rather with a narrow, constantly exposed strip of endlessly shifting shades of gray, near the left edge. This is the sound track of the Tobis sound-on-film system, and Holzknecht is perceptually arrested in his contemplation of it. He is especially intrigued when the assistant tells him that they always have recordings of pre-shot banter that the microphones catch while the remote sound cameras are reaching their proper synchronous speed. «Wir lachen uns manchmal halb tot, was da unten im Atelier alles gequatscht wird, wenn die Leute glauben, es hört niemand. Für den fertigen Film wird das alles weggeschnitten.» He immediately asks her to edit together a length of film containing everything that she has thrown away, and it is this joined strand of castaway threads that contains the murderer’s pre-crime allocution of his guilt. The unraveling of the killer’s cover-up is literal, an unraveling of audio film. This cutting room collaboration sets up the film’s climactic interrogation. Having heard the killer incriminate himself on the discarded length of sound film, Holzknecht has the evidence prepared for a special exhibition in the screening room. He first plays the sound scene - it is only the audio track, no images - for director Kalser, Kemp, and the sound engineer. The sound engineer confirms that the exchange just heard is a conversation captured inadvertently between takes, and after a few moments of contemplation and discussion, Kemp and Kalser confirm that the voice of the apparent killer belongs to a bit-part player named Max Seemann Thoeren (Robert Thoeren). What they all hear (along with the cinema audience) is an exchange in which a male voice demands more money, a female voice refuses to pay any more, and the male voice threatens dire consequences. Lest there be any doubt what is at stake, the female voice exhorts the male voice at one juncture: «Was fällt dir denn ein? Tu den Revolver weg! » Once consensus on the killer’s identity is reached, Holzknecht requests that Kalser summon Seemann Thoeren to the screening room for questioning. Seemann Thoeren enters the scene with a tenuous confidence that is further shaken in his verbal exchange with Holzknecht and Möller. The actor first denies that he even knows the deceased Fräulein Saylor, but after making him stumble in direct examination, Holzknecht trips his suspect up completely with the captured conversation. The actual playback sequence is subtly yet thoroughly self-reflexive. In essence, this is a fifty-second, shot-countershot dialog (fifteen shots, alternating with perfect timing). Zeisler carefully matches the duration of the takes to the rhythms of the verbal back and forth between Berthe Ostyn and Robert Thoeren, but Ostyn’s Fräulein Saylor is of 254 Theodore F. Rippey course dead, so her presence in the scene is strictly sonic. The alternating images are thus not of a speaking Seemann Thoeren and a speaking Fräulein Saylor. Rather, they show a speechless Seemann Thoeren and the static grille of a loudspeaker, mounted in the screening room wall, that becomes interactive with Seemann Thoeren as it conveys both his and Fräulein Saylor’s voices. Instead of an exchange between two human figures with mouths moving synchronously with articulated words, what we see and hear is an exchange between a human figure and a strangely incarnate speaking thing, both of which feature static vocal openings, and only one of which actually produces sound - as it re-produces speech. Seemann Thoeren stands in shock as the dialog unfolds. Only now does he realize that he, having so cleverly concealed the deed and eluded apprehension thus far, had acoustically betrayed himself at the moment he committed the crime. As Adalbert Forstreuter and other critics seeking to characterize the strange character of the radio voice in the mid-1930s would recognize, the fact that our own skull is a resonance chamber means that there is literally no other human being for whom our voice sounds as it sounds to us. Our voice, conveyed by an audio medium and thus externally sourced, is in concrete terms a new sound to our ears. It is foreign, even if immediately familiar. This uncanny fusion of the known and unknown aural signature of the self produces a moment of shock, and this shock is a component of the paralysis experienced by Seemann Thoeren when he hears the sound of his own voice originating from the vibrations of a speaker membrane, not his own vocal cords. Here he becomes suddenly conscious of being caught in an exchange that he thought no one else could hear, and this awareness jarringly casts his preconscious aural and verbal habits into stark relief. If we break down this moment of insight as a case example that tells us something about the history of media and the history of sound, we find an illustration of what it would mean to live in a world - virtually realized in the artificial, sealed environment of the soundstage - in which no sound ever dies, even those that, for whatever reason, one would prefer to lose to silence. As a work of architecture, the studio itself is a technical intervention that prolongs the life of sounds by fractions of seconds, as was demonstrated in the cacophony caused by the fire. In the sound film studio, the apparatus of audio capture, processing, and playback is a near-ubiquitous infrastructure within that structure, an infrastructure capable of regenerating the sounds of the past - not only those designed for recording, but also the incidental verbal and non-verbal sounds that flesh out a given soundscape. In the aural environment of the soundstage, sounds are redeemed from dissipation, and speech and noise temporally past but still virtually reverberating can be made resonant again. To make a past sound The Hokuspokus Debate 255 present again - not in a dream or a story told but via mechanical-electronic capture and playback - is to make a dead moment vibrant again, creating a synchronous existence of past and present that time itself does not allow. In the age of smartphones, podcasts, and cloud-based audio servers, this technological archiving of aural experience is nothing unusual. In 1930, it was markedly stranger, since such archiving was the province of the sound-media industries, not a hobby that one could indulge in via a common, mobile device. The fictional cast and crew who populate Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier are a group of people for whom a principal space of everyday life - the workplace - overlaps with an audio industry. This overlap creates the basic condition for a murderer to betray himself, but that is just the most sensational illustration of how aural life changes, once recording infrastructure spreads through the structures of everyday experience. Was this world of sound’s virtual immortality tantamount to a «Darstellung und Formung der durch keine früheren Mittel noch vernommenen Wirklichkeit, jener Wirklichkeit, die auf der Bühne bisher nicht mitgesprochen hat,» as Kracauer sought in his programmatic 1928 essay («Tonbildfilm» 124)? Did Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier provide a new sense of «das Tönen und Lärmen r um uns, das mit den Bildeindrücken noch niemals kommunizierte und stets den Sinnen entging» («Tonbildfilm» 124)? My reading emphasizes the film’s unprecedented depiction of sonic environs and audio recording, and the trade press critics were in consensus that Zeisler’s film followed the trail blazed by Hokuspokus in fusing elements of theater and silent film into a definitively new art form. But Kracauer’s review of Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier makes it r clear that he did not see aural innovation in the film, and there are three basic reasons for this. To understand the first, we can return to «Die Wartenden» and to Sieg’s account of Kracauer’s theory of the ordinary. In the passages that I considered from that text, one notes the preponderance of visual concerns. The reality that lies beyond the grasp of overwrought theoretical thinking, according to Kracauer, must be lived and d seen concretely. Living involves all senses, but in Kracauer’s framing of the move from abstract Wissen to the Kunde of reality, vision predominates. The soundscape is a recurring concern throughout his feuilletonistic writing of the interwar era and his major late texts (Theory of Film in particular), but it does not achieve equity with the visual image at the center of his intellectual project. Sound’s invisibility and ephemerality simply do not align well with his method. Secondly, Kracauer’s interest as a cartographer of modern experience is surface-oriented. When his attention turns to sound, he is interested in it as a perceptible component of the complex sensory mosaic of the world, not so much in the infrastructural entrails that yield it. His term das Tönen und 256 Theodore F. Rippey Lärmen um uns describes the extant soundscapes of the late 1920s and early 1930s (especially in cities), those unwieldy yet not totally random masses of sonic material that were not especially comparable to the engineered, controlled soundscapes of the film studio. This reason connects to the third, which involves Kracauer’s embeddedness in this moment of media history. Reading Kracauer and the film retrospectively as I do allows one to recognize the media-historical points that he missed, but it would have been difficult to speculate about a medium’s future permeation of aural experience from his temporal location (nor does his interwar work suggest strong interest in such speculation.) Kracauer did not see evidence in Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier of noises that would take on the same life, «zu dem einst der stumme Film dem Spiel der Schatten und Lichter verhalf» («Über den musikalischen Tonfilm» 411). Perhaps he saw the killer witnessing his own unwitting testimony as yet another trick to get audience attention hung up on speech, a trick set up over the course of a film that trains its audience to attend to recording and playback in such a way that the sensory incongruity of the flowing words and the motionless mouth of Seemann Thoeren would seem unremarkable. Or perhaps it was simply the elaborate contrivance of the film within the film, all those sound film signals to the audience, drawing them into a game that would allow the most striking aural moments to register with the ear but fail to violate the audiovisual pact that Chion and Tendam characterize. In any case, Kracauer in the early sound era was searching for a film, «der […] die Dialogform zerbricht» («Film-Notizen» 189). In Der Schuss in Tonfilmatelier, he saw nothing that broke the paradigm of the stage, as the great silent cousins had broken the bounds of the word. Nevertheless, I have drawn here on Kracauer’s own ideas about sensory aspects of reality, patterns of human perception, and levels of awareness of those patterns, in order to derive a vocabulary that allows us to characterize the density and complexity of Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier as a document of r technologically augmented aurality. As a film critic, Kracauer sees nothing of note in this movie. But as an experience-based aesthetic theorist, he charts an analytical trajectory for those who seek a more precise grasp of what cinema - outside or within the bounds of convention - did with problems of sound and media during its technological revolution in the twilight of the Weimar Republic. The Hokuspokus Debate 257 Notes 1 Müller’s close focus on the transitional phase allows her, for example, to consider Fritz Lang’s M «a comparatively late sound film,» and her analysis treats Wilhelm Thiele’s M Die Drei von der Tankstelle (The Three from the Gas Station, 1930) as a case of the «perfection achieved at Ufa after only a half-year or so of accumulated sound filmmaking experience» (21). This scope is fruitful because it illuminates the magnitude of the technical and formal progress of the first year of commercial sound cinema. 2 As was common in the Weimar era, this critic is identified with an abbreviated name. For the sake of readability, I am omitting the period at the end of Ryk. in subsequent references, as I will do with Betz., who also wrote for Der Film. 3 Extant versions of the film make it difficult to assess how compelling Ryk’s claim is, but the conviction illustrates the perception of high quality. 4 According to Rudolf Arnheim, this limitation, jarring at first to our perceptual system, is the principal root of the medium’s creative potential. 5 The «Sound Film Manifesto» is also known as the «Statement on Sound Film,» the «Statement on Sound» or simply «A Statement.» It was originally signed by Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov, and it is generally associated with proponents of the Soviet cinema of montage (see Eisenstein et al.). Works Cited Betz. «Der große Tonfilm-Lustspielerfolg im Gloria-Palast: Hokuspokus.» Der Film 28 (12 July 1930). -. «Durchschlagender Erfolg im Ufa-Palast am Zoo: Der Schuß im Tonfilmatelier.» Der Film 30 (26 July 1930). Eisenstein, Sergei, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Gregori Alexandrov. «A Statement.» Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1977. 257-59. Feld, Hans. «Kritik/ Film: Hokuspokus.» Film-Kurier 163 (12 July 1930). Forstreuter, Adalbert. «Rufer und Hörer in schöpferischer Gemeinschaft.» Rufer und Hörer 4.8-9 (1934): 337-45. r Hansen, Miriam. «Decentric Perspectives: Kracauer’s Early Writings on Film and Mass Culture.» New German Critique 54 (1991): 47-76. Herzberg, Georg. «Ufa-Palast am Zoo: Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier.» Film-Kurier 175 (26 July 1930). Kracauer, Siegfried. «Film-Notizen.» 1930. Werke. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach et al. Vol. 6.2. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004. 389. -. «Tonbildfilm.» 1928. Werke. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach et al. Vol. 6.2. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004. 122-25. -. «Über den musikalischen Tonfilm.» 1930. Werke. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach et al. Vol 6.2. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004. 410-12. -. «Die Wartenden.» 1922. Schriften. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach. Vol. 5.1. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. 160-70. -. «Those Who Wait.» The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. 129-40. 258 Theodore F. Rippey Müller, Corinna. Vom Stummfilm zum Tonfilm. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003. Roland, Marc. «Tondramaturgie.» Reichsfilmblatt 11 (15 March 1930). Ryk., H. «Ein Jahr Tonfilm: Von Al Jolson über Jannings und Tauber bis zu den vier Infanteristen.» Der Film 23 (7 June 1930). Sieg, Christian. «Beyond Realism: Siegfried Kracauer and the Ornaments of the Ordinary.» New German Critique 37.1 (2010): 99-118. Schweinitz, Jörg. «Wie im Kino! Die autothematische Welle im frühen Tonfilm. Figurationen des Selbstreflexiven.» Diesseits der «dämonischen Leinwand.» Neue Perspektiven auf das späte Weimarer Kino. Ed. Thomas Koebner. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2003. 373-92. Tendam, Marion. «Tonfilmsignale und Meta-Strukturen im frühen Tonfilm: Alfred Zeislers Film und Curt Siodmaks Filmroman Der Schuß im Tonfilmatelier (1930).» r Metaisierung in Literatur und anderen Medien. Ed. Janine Hauthal et al. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. 227-43. Wollenberg, Hans. «Der blaue Engel.» Lichtbild-Bühne 79 (2 April 1930). Be/ Ruf: Sound Control and Vocal Training in ff Der blaue Engel KATA GELLEN D UKE U NIVERSITY What is the relationship between an actor’s voice and a character’s voice? How does a sound film translate dialect, accent, and degraded forms of speech for a foreign audience? Must it translate silence and noise, or are these universal acoustic signs? How does the voice in particular, which can be trained and manipulated in various ways, play into the experience of film sound? More specifically, is there a relationship between vocal refinement (of actors/ characters) and auditory attunement (of listeners)? This essay will address these broad questions about early sound film by examining the practice of vocal training and techniques of sound control in and for Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1930). This involves a close analysis of Rath’s and Lola-Lola’s voices in their aesthetic, social, and professional dimensions, the influence they exert over the voices of others, as well as issues of acting, staging, and sound editing. The essay will argue that the film advances an idea of vocal determinism in modernity: individuals are defined by their speech, their silence, and their noise - in short, by how they use their voices and manipulate the voices of others. In Der blaue Engel, a modern form of and forum for entertainment - the sordid cultural institution of the Tingeltangel 1 - is intimately tied to the practice of vocal training, and yet all acts of vocalization within this context, whether or not they appear successful, lead to stagnation and death: this is the tragic dimension of vocal determinism in modernity. In his scathing review of Der blaue Engel, Siegfried Kracauer notes the film’s impressive treatment of sound, noise, and silence, only to dismiss it as histrionic and pointless. He saves his sharpest criticism for the film’s dramatic ending, in which the humiliated Professor Rath (Emil Jannings) descends into uncontrolled animalistic crowing before expiring in his former classroom, where he had once taught proper diction and pronunciation, and thus represented the apex of refinement and Bildung. «While in truth Professor Unrat should disintegrate noiselessly, in the film he perishes with a great flourish,» Kracauer opines, further pointing out that «the screeching and the clattering; the sadism and the battle cries at the end: what a hopeless comparison 260 Kata Gellen between hullabaloo and meaning is set up here. But the hullabaloo is required to conceal the lack of meaning» («The Blue Angel» 631). The reason this is pointless, according to Kracauer, is that the film is utterly unconnected to contemporary reality. It fails to examine individual fates as a product of social and economic conditions. Rath’s destiny, for example, is not conditioned by external circumstances and it is not one instance of a general phenomenon; for Kracauer, this lack of representativeness strips the film of depth and relevance. «[The film] suppresses the social environment that would force itself upon the native spectator of Unrat’s catastrophe, it tears the performers out of any social context in which they would have gained contemporary significance and places them in a vacuum» («The Blue Angel» 631). It is possible to argue against Kracauer without rejecting the requirement of representativeness and contemporaneity. One can claim, for instance, that far from «suppress[ing] the social environment» responsible for characters’ fates (631), Der blaue Engel centers on an exploration of a crucial aspect of l modern socio-aesthetic existence: the training of the voice. Moreover, it does so in a decidedly modern setting, the Tingeltangel, a site of entertainment, sociability, and a certain kind of professional/ vocational instruction. 2 Kracauer is right to note the remarkable use of sound and silence in the film and to hint at its dramatic, perhaps excessive displays of vocal virtuosity. However, he describes the film’s impressive acoustic effects without recognizing that vocal training and sound control are central features of Der blaue Engel that link up l with contemporary socio-aesthetic norms and practices. Silence and noise, singing and speech: these are not decorative and empty acoustic gestures, but instead lie at the heart of the tragic modernity the film represents and enacts. Drawn to Tingeltangel for different reasons, the main characters discover that l this world places certain demands on them, especially on their voices. Despite their efforts at vocal adaptation - they submit to vocal training and subject others to it - their voices are precisely what cause (and figure) their downfall: in Der blaue Engel, tragic fates are «performed» through the voice and in the modern context of the Tingeltangel. I thus wish to argue against Kracauer by demonstrating that an aesthetic feature of the film can constitute its social realism and hence its contemporary relevance. 3 Der blaue Engel engages with a moment of Weimar history and one of l Weimar film history, both of which relate to the issue of vocal refinement. Rath and Lola-Lola (Marlene Dietrich) come from opposite ends of the social spectrum to do the same thing, namely to make a living by training their own voices and the voices of others. Rath’s demise can be described as a fall from a tradition of education and cultivation, from a code of proper behav- Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 261 ior, and above all from professional conventions and practices. Indeed, Rath goes from practicing a profession (Beruf) to merely carrying out an occuff pation, if his work as a varieté performer can even be called that. This fall takes place in and through his reconfigured relationship to the voice: from a teacher of diction and recitation to a crowing clown, from Shakespearean English to noise, from Rat(h) (advice, counsel) to Unrat (garbage, waste, or refuse). Lola-Lola seems to rise through her command of the voice - her seductive song is crucial to her success and appeal - as well as by luring Rath away from a vocal practice that promotes education and high culture and re-functionalizing his voice for the purpose of crude amusement. Indeed, Rath, who in Lola-Lola’s presence is generally silent or produces senseless sound, is undone by her: hence he becomes «Unrat,» and his voice becomes a non-voice. By chipping away insidiously at the foundation of culture and refinement that Rath’s voice embodies, Lola-Lola seems to gain some upward mobility. She increasingly commands more respect, assumes greater authority, and wears nicer clothes as the film progresses. But this is nothing more than the illusion of rising in the ranks of society. Here again voice and name are the best index of social stature, and both suggest an endless repetition of the same. As if the doubleness of Lola-Lola’s name were not a clear enough indication of her self-duplication, the film literally invites us to see the writing on the wall (see Fig. 1). In addition to the ceaseless repetition of her name, Lola-Lola’s final song is also an echo, not of the first song she sings in the film, but of what is certainly her most famous number, «Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt.» This closing tune, which constitutes the last time we hear Lola-Lola’s voice in the film, indicates that her vocal practice is also stuck in an endless repetition of the same. Her voice can and will only ever prolong the status quo and never raise her out of the lowbrow world of Tingeltangel. She finds her end on the same stage where she started, singing her signature song with an air of familiarity and resignation, while Rath/ Unrat finds his end at his schoolteacher’s desk, silent and expired, in every sense of the word. Just as the shift from «Rath» to «Unrat» is brought about by a degraded vocal practice that corresponds to an irreversible decline in social stature - a literal undoing of the name accompanied by the alternatively silent and noisy performance of a voice undone - the name «Lola-Lola» captures an ineluctable vocal sameness that guarantees social stasis. In both cases, the voice is an index of tragic modern fates. It is thus clear that the film engages intensively and consistently with the use and abuse of the voice, and that it portrays vocal refinement and vocal 262 Kata Gellen Fig. 1 coarsening as socially inflected. More than just a central theme in Der blaue Engel, these processes also represent a crucial dimension of the film’s production history and historical status. Der blaue Engel was one of the first sound l films to be made in Germany, which meant that its actors needed to learn how to speak for the camera (which was different from acting in silent film, and also different from theatrical performance). Since social class is an essential feature of the film’s plot, and since Sternberg wanted to give some sense of «local flavor» (Lola-Lola speaks Berlinerisch), the actors also needed to be able to mimic certain dialects and accents. Finally, Der blaue Engel was simull taneously filmed in multiple language versions (MLVs) - German and English - which meant not only that the film’s stars Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich needed to be able to speak their parts in English as well as their native German, but that the English-language version had to «translate» linguistic difference (the use of foreign languages, dialects, and accents) for an Englishspeaking audience. Such an adaptation is in itself a challenging endeavor, and one that was further troubled by Dietrich’s non-native but excellent English and Jannings’s rather poor English. 4 Consider one example of the confusion and complication that arose in the production of a film that both thematizes the voice and requires extensive vo- Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 263 cal modulation in more than one language. In the German version, there is an early scene in which Jannings, as Professor Rath, recites a line in English from Shakespeare. The fact that he is insisting on correct pronunciation adds complexity and irony to the scene. Though Jannings has a thick accent in English, this is plausible within the context of a German-language film set in Germany. In the English-language version, however, Jannings’s thick German accent and distinctly German intonation, together with the generous peppering of his speech with German words, serve as a sign - one based more in a semiotics of association and mimicry than mimeticism - of his Germanness: his English spoken with a German accent comes to signify the German language for an English-speaking audience. The tactic with Dietrich/ Lola-Lola is different: since her English was significantly better than Jannings’s and since the songs were re-written with English lyrics, her entire character was transformed. She became an American actress speaking and singing English in Germany, rather than a German speaking «German» (i.e., English with a German accent, intonation, and select vocabulary) in Germany. This too is an imperfect solution: for all of Dietrich’s talents and efforts at vocal refinement, her English is not accent-free. This makes for somewhat comic and strained scenarios, for example, when despite her German accent Lola-Lola must ask what people have said when they speak to her in German. If with Jannings we must take English with a thick German accent as «German,» with Dietrich we must take English with a slight German accent as «native English.» As Amy Lawrence puts it, «Dietrich’s German accent when speaking in the English Blue Angel is presented l as ‹not-to-be-read›» (84). Both characters, in any event, require the Englishspeaking listener to suspend disbelief. These examples illustrate how vocal training is both a central theme that infuses the film (in both versions) and a practical concern for their production. In addition to expanding and specifying this argument in the following sections of this essay, I would like to suggest that there is a history to Der blaue Engel’s exploration of the link between professional viability and vocal mastery. George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) introduces this particular nexus of vocal refinement, social ascendancy, and professional success in the context of theater and pedagogy, and offers a model for thinking about the fate of the voice in Der blaue Engel. These works reflect various aspects of acoustical modernity, specifically in relation to professions and occupations, as they revolve around the work of teachers, singers, speech coaches, theater and movie actors, and sound technicians. Either these jobs are linked to a specifically modern form of art or entertainment (cabaret, film), or they reflect a modern idea about the malleability of social and professional status. In both 264 Kata Gellen cases, however, they must be performed through acts of vocalization, articulation, and elocution. And yet in these works successful training of the voice generally fails to bring about the desired or anticipated consequence - this is where the fate of the voice in modernity can appear tragic, comic, or ironic, depending on the tone of the work. Pygmalion and Der blaue Engel demonl strate that the cultivation and perfection of vocal effects does not in fact correlate to social and professional ascendancy in any direct or predictable way. These works reinsert the notion of voice into vocation, or Ruf into f Beruf, ff in unexpected and complex ways. They capture the vocal dimension of these professional endeavors, at the same time as they depict a falling away from professionalism (Rath, for instance, goes from respectable professing to raunchy performing) or social and professional stagnation and immobility (Lola- Lola’s singing - and, I argue, Eliza Doolittle’s speech - do not open professional horizons). In these works, personal fate is determined by the voice, but voice is itself controlled and manipulated by external forces, specifically by the demands that modern forms of art, entertainment, and sociability place on it. The characters in these works are thus increasingly beholden to their voices, a crucial aspect of social and professional life, as well as an intimate dimension of bodily existence. The voice appears to be eminently trainable and manipulable - this is the promise of the voice in modernity - and yet these characters are shown to exert decreasing influence and control over it. One could say that their voices run away with them, or that in modernity vocal training is both required for and denied any direct relationship to d professional advancement or success. Thus the interplay of voice and profession in Pygmalion and Der blaue Engel can be tragic, comic, or ironic by l turns. 5 Der blaue Engel is an adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s 1904 novel l Der Untertan, and critics have frequently analyzed the similarities and differences between the works, particularly with respect to the shift from Wilhelmine to Weimar Germany (e.g., Firda; Koch). In tracing an alternate genealogy, I do not wish to assert direct influence or inspiration, but to suggest, instead, that a set of concerns - centered on voice, class, and profession in modernity - that do not appear in Mann’s novel becomes relevant in the film. Indeed, as I explain below, Dietrich thought of herself and specifically of the process of vocal training that she underwent to prepare to film Der blaue Engel and l The Blue Angel in terms of l Pygmalion. The two main characters in Shaw’s play, the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle and the professor of phonetics Henry Higgins, are firmly entrenched in a world in which social and professional fates are determined by Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 265 the voice. Eliza wants to learn how to speak proper English so that she can work in a real flower shop instead of selling flowers by the road - this, for her, is professional advancement. Higgins, in turn, wants nothing more than to prove that his mastery of phonetics knows no bounds, which is why he takes on the seemingly impossible task of turning Eliza Doolittle into a proper lady, which is to say, a speaker of impeccable English. Higgins succeeds only too well. In the final moments of the play, while she continues to be derided and degraded by Higgins (who has taught her to speak well, but will never learn to think well of her), Eliza Doolittle makes a threat that strikes Higgins at his core. «I’ll go and be a teacher,» she declares. «What’ll you teach, in heaven’s name? » Higgins asks. Eliza’s reply? «What you taught me. I’ll teach phonetics» (131). This throws Higgins into a jealous rage, whereupon Eliza realizes that she can win Higgins’s respect and esteem not by being a good subject (a perfect English speaker), but by doing what she does even better than he can (becoming a perfect English teacher): Aha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! […] I’ll advertize it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself. (131-32) Eliza realizes that anyone can learn to speak well - as Higgins’s experiment has proven - but this means neither that proper speech equals proper behavior (in the sense of being kind and civil), nor that anyone can rise in social stature. To do this one’s voice must go from being manipulable to manipulating others, from being controlled to controlling others, from being trained to training others. In other words, vocal mastery is not about mastering one’s own voice, but about mastering the voices of others. Pygmalion comes down to a contest of speech, and, more specifically, of professional mastery of speech. While it is true that following her vocal training Eliza Doolittle will no longer be a flower girl, her professional horizons have hardly expanded. Once she has learned to speak properly, all she can do is continue to speak properly and train others to do the same: having become a proper lady, there is rather little that Eliza Doolittle can actually do. 6 Devoting oneself to matters of the voice seems to overtake other professional commitments. Voice swallows and consumes vocation, reducing professional existence to issues of pronunciation, elocution, and diction. This would explain the proliferation of people in Henry Higgins’s milieu - including the 266 Kata Gellen characters Pickering and Neppomuck - whose professions involve the cultivation of the voice. In the end, Pygmalion suggests, hyperbolically and ironically, that all professional development is a matter of vocal refinement. This conclusion reveals the senseless and self-perpetuating quality of the modern motor of vocal training. I have characterized Pygmalion as a work about the professionalization of speech practices not because I want to prove that Der blaue Engel is an adapl tation, deliberate or unwitting, of Shaw’s play, but rather because I would like to suggest that Pygmalion anticipates the fate of the voice in modernity, as exhibited in Sternberg’s film. Shaw’s attention to the pedagogical and performative aspects of the voice and his insistence on the centrality of vocal training for professional and social «ascendancy» - in Eliza’s case, as I have argued, her new speech closes as many doors as it opens - prove highly relevant for the practice and depiction of vocal training in Der blaue Engel. There are obvious ways that this film presents the centrality of voice in professional life, some of which have already been touched upon. Professor Rath and Lola-Lola are both masters of the voice. Rath commands a great deal of authority among his students, and he needs only to utter a single word («Setzen! ») in a deliberate, forceful, and controlled way to exert influence over them. Indeed, he is deliberate, forceful, and controlled in all the sounds he makes - this turns l comical when we witness his nose-blowing ritual (twice over), executed with tremendous precision and care. Rath’s use of the voice should serve as a model for his students, both in the general sense that he seeks to teach them restraint and self-possession and in his more specific pedagogical task of training their voices. The most striking instance of this, which was invoked earlier, comes during a lesson in English pronunciation, a demonstration of the utmost vocal precision that Rath demands. Displeased with a student’s recitation of the first line of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy - «To be or not to be, that is the…» - Rath stops him at the word «the»: «Halt. Falsch,» he says sharply. He approaches the student, whereupon the lesson in English pronunciation reaches a level of comic and absurd intensity: he forces the student to repeat the word «the,» modeling the proper pronunciation for him and demanding precise mimicry. The humor comes not only from what Marc Caplan has called the «parodic deformation» of «a purposefully clichéd reference to high culture» (186), but also from the increasing physicality of the vocal encounter. Standing face-toface, Rath and the student exchange increasingly loud and deliberate «the’s,» each alternatively wiping the spittle that has landed on his nose from the other’s exaggerated vocal efforts. Finally, Rath inserts the pencil he is holding between the student’s teeth (Fig. 2), attempting to force the proper pronun- Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 267 ciation of the English article though an articulatory phonetics intensified by physical contact. Fig. 2 This literally close encounter is marked by a mood of seriousness, even terror (on the part of the student), which contrasts starkly with the insignificance of the vocal task. The irony is intensified by the fact that Rath is aiming for a kind of regularization of the voice, but that his mechanical intervention fails: he cannot get the student to pronounce the word correctly, and he certainly cannot strip away that which makes the student’s voice truly individual: accent, intonation, cadence, etc. (see Dolar 20-23). Training the voice involves approximation, not absolute standardization. There is a further layer of comedy and irony in this scene, one probably lost on contemporary (and possibly later) German-speaking audiences: for all his lessons in «extreme pronunciation,» Rath/ Jannings cannot reproduce the initial voiced dental fricative in the word the. One does not need to compare the English and the German versions of the film in order to explore the problems that English and German voices present in the age of sound film, for there are productive slippages within the German version itself. These slippages expose the hidden problematic of vocal training and professional advancement for sound film, and hint at their complex relationship in modernity in general. 268 Kata Gellen In addition to his role as a trainer of voices, Rath is a master of silence, and here too his execution is skillful and authoritative. Before he enters the classroom, the students are boisterous and noisy; the moment the door opens and Rath walks in, a deafening silence spreads across the room. But the power of Rath’s silence is already apparent in the scene that precedes this one, the remarkable breakfast sequence, in which Rath does not utter a single word and communicates only with whistles and gestures. His silence and non-verbal expressions transmit the solemnity of the occasion: the death of the non-singing songbird, the passing of Rath’s companion. Much like Rath/ Unrat, this creature embodies the act of vocal expiration. It is of course highly symbolic that the film starts with the death of the bird and ends with the death of the vocally degraded Professor Rath, who has gone from speaking and teaching English pronunciation to increasingly desperate and noisy crowing and finally to silence. His silence at the end of the film is not, however, equal to the sovereign and controlled silence of the breakfast scene: in the first sequence silence is a demonstration of vocal restraint and control, whereas in the final scene silence is the inevitable consequence of Rath’s debasement and dehumanization - it is the quiet that precedes death. Silence is not always grave, but it does operate consistently within an economy of control and mastery. For example, Rath is silent when he visits Lola-Lola in her dressing room for the first time, though he does not create or command the absence of sound. Here he seems stunned into silence by Lola- Lola’s forwardness and self-confidence; his reticence is a sign of his subjection. Rath’s silence thus differs from what he displayed in the breakfast scene, for it is neither deliberate nor controlled, but the necessary consequence of his bedazzlement. Rath is silent because he is not the master of this situation, or really any situation that involves Lola-Lola. At the end of the film, when the variety show returns to Rath’s hometown and he is forced to appear onstage at the «Blaue Engel» nightclub, Rath remains silent in the face of the impresario’s commands, passively submitting to his increasingly aggressive and agitated shouts without uttering a sound. This should not, however, be seen as an act of resistance; it is not silence as a last-ditch effort to avoid humiliation and defeat. At this point in the film Rath is not capable of any such willed action, and certainly none that depends on an exercise of vocal control. Instead, Rath is more like his students at the start of the film in that he is stunned and terrified, but unlike them he is too weakened, emasculated, and dehumanized even to obey the commanding voice of authority. All he can do is cower onstage, make a feeble attempt to retreat, and eventually, tragically and excruciatingly, release a horrifying, monstrous crow. However, much as his silence is not an act of willful defiance, his final Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 269 act of vocalization does not constitute an act of obedience: Rath is beyond commands, beyond subverting them and beyond submitting to them (note that he tries not to run off the stage, but simply to hide behind the curtain). The sound he lets out is a dramatic deformation of the one he has been ordered to make - «kikirikiiii,» the rooster’s crow - desperate and unmodulated, approaching a kind of indeterminate noise. Judging from Rath’s facial expression, the act of vocalization is straining and even painful, and judging from its sound, perceptible to both the members of the film audience and the guests at the Tingeltangel, its effect is jarring, dissonant, and even frightening. This is a reminder that sound film can convey not only the process of vocal refinement and variously inflected forms of silence with remarkable depth and subtlety, but that it is uniquely poised to transmit the unrepresentable, untranslatable effects of noise. Rath’s descent into babble, the garbled «kikirikiiii,» comes close to «the most salient inarticulate presymbolic manifestation of the voice, […] the scream» (Dolar 27). The film thus depicts Rath’s decline from the height of vocal mastery - training students, commanding silence - into the mire of human noise, as manifested in uncontrolled and barely articulate speech, at the same time that it required the actor Emil Jannings to cultivate this vocal role. After all, Rath’s crowing is not actually babble or noise, but a carefully executed act of vocalization recorded and preserved for past, present, and future audiences. Der blaue Engel reveals with remarkable insight l how sound film, a medium that both transmits sound and requires the cultivation and manipulation of the voice, both enacts and displays the tragedy and irony of vocal practice in modernity. Rath’s demise, as figured through his initial command of silence and speech and his eventual loss of vocal control, is not the only fate that Der blaue Engel reflects through sound. Lola-Lola is also a master of the voice - that is, of her own voice and of the voices of others. While it is not her task to teach others to speak or sing, Lola-Lola clearly exerts significant influence over other people’s voices, most notably Rath’s. When Rath first comes to her dressing room Lola-Lola exudes confidence and competence - in the way she speaks, moves, and adorns herself. It is clear from the first moment that Rath has nothing to teach her, especially not about how to use her voice. In fact, from this point on it is Lola-Lola who exerts control over Rath’s voice. Upon entering the dressing room he introduces himself and voices his complaint - that she is corrupting his students - and she responds by informing him that she is not running a nursery school and undressing in front him in a way that is at once provocative and matter-of-fact. Lola-Lola moves about freely and comfortably while Rath is stunned into silence and stillness: she is a master of this space and of her body. The exchange of gazes makes it obvious that her actions and move- 270 Kata Gellen ments are a deliberate expression of power. Here, being watched is far from passive; it is instead an intentional and forceful exertion of authority that Lola-Lola achieves by making an enticing spectacle of herself and the space she occupies. «Na, nun sagen Sie gar nichts mehr,» she proclaims, somewhat triumphantly. Ostensibly a description of the circumstance, her comment also functions as an imperative. The transfer of power, signified already by the shift from Rath’s classroom to Lola-Lola’s dressing room, is completed and confirmed in this act of silencing: from here on, Rath will/ may say no more. It is not only Rath’s silence, but also his voice that is either controlled outright by Lola-Lola or at the very least correlated directly with her desires and intentions. It is telling that Kracauer, in his seminal work From Caligari to Hitler, is so attuned to the role of sound in the film that his plot description treats Rath’s cockcrowing as a metonymy for his demise. During his wedding party, having fallen into a state of euphoria, he succeeds in impressing the artists with a wonderful imitation of cockcrowing. But this high point of his career as a free man is also the beginning of his downfall. While the troupe travels from town to town, Lola Lola not only makes him drudge for her, but agrees to the manager’s suggestion that her husband produce his funny cockcrowing on the stage. His humiliation reaches its climax when the artists return to The Blue Angel in the hope of stirring up a sensation with the ex-professor. Their hope proves justified: the whole town rushes in, eager to listen to their fellow citizen’s cock-adoodle-doo. Asked to perform, he launches into a terrific crowing, walks off the stage and, incessantly roaring, begins to strangle Lola Lola. (216) Whereas Kracauer sees the cockcrowing as emblematic or metonymic of his downfall, I argue that the two are inextricable: Rath’s vocal degradation is not an external sign of his general fate, but integral to it. In my reading, then, the uses and abuses of the voice do not merely stand for greater truths about mor dernity - the commercialization of culture, the eroticization of everyday life, the loss of tradition, the changing balance of power between old and young, and so on - but are part and parcel of them. As in his review of the film, Kracauer’s impulse to highlight the role of sound is logical, but he does not explore its far-reaching implications. Rath’s demise, on the professional level, is tied closely to his vocal practice: as a teacher in a Gymnasium, he trains the voices of the new generation; as Lola-Lola’s husband and stooge, he uses his voice first for cheap if good-humored fun, then for low-brow but profitable entertainment, and finally for nothing at all, for during his final performance it becomes clear that Rath no longer commands his own voice and that the sounds that issue from him are uncontrolled expressions of his madness. Rath’s tragic fate, in other words, is a function of the unhinging of his voice, a process for which Lola-Lola is directly responsible. Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 271 A similar point could be made about the end of Kracauer’s account of the film in From Caligari to Hitler: A running motif in the film is the old church-clock which chimes a popular German tune devoted to the praise of loyalty and honesty (Üb’ immer Treu und Redlichkeit …) - a tune expressive of Jannings’ inherited beliefs. In the concluding passage, immediately after Lola Lola’s song has faded away, this tune is heard for the last time as the camera shows the dead Jannings. Lola Lola has killed him, and in addition her song has defeated the chimes. (217-18) The fact that one sound pushes out and replaces another is not merely a sign that one order is replacing another. It is, instead, a performance of the kinds of noise, voice, and silence that characterize modernity - specifically, ones with crude entertainment value. The last line of this account suggests that there is some level on which Kracauer wants to make this point, given how closely he ties shifts in sound (her song defeats the chimes) to shifts in agency and power (she kills him). Though he does not state it explicitly, Kracauer’s descriptions of Rath’s fate as a function of sound convey an intuition, if not a conscious declaration of vocal determinism in modernity - the idea, expressed so powerfully in Der blaue Engel, that individual fates are governed by vocal practice, but that vocal practice eludes individual control. In addition to the direct influence that Lola-Lola exerts over Rath’s voice, the film makes clear that her own status among the performers and the audience depends not only on her legs and bust (as many have pointed out), but also on her clear, powerful, and controlled voice. Lola brings the same kind of deliberateness and self-assurance to her singing as she does to her gestures, movement, and facial expressions. Even if her voice is not particularly beautiful, it is incontrovertibly strong and clear: whether singing or speaking, when Dietrich plays Lola-Lola she projects her voice, articulates her words, maintains volume, and is always comprehensible. Lawrence describes the effect of her voice as «the vocal equivalent of an acting style characterized by emotional distance, limited range, discipline, and a marked lack of sentimentality» (79). 7 It is significant in this context that Lola-Lola’s most famous song contains an explanation of her professional status: Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt Denn das ist meine Welt Und sonst gar nichts Das ist, was soll ich machen Meine Natur Ich kann halt lieben nur Und sonst gar nichts. 272 Kata Gellen Loving and singing about love are, in fact, one and the same: together they constitute Lola-Lola’s occupation, her livelihood, her only chance for making it in the modern world. Lola-Lola declares her professional identity through vocal performance not only because Der blaue Engel is a musical of sorts, but l because her social and professional identities are inextricable from the use of her voice - her song, her speech, and the power she exerts over the voices of others. Lola-Lola’s «Beruf» demands that she speak and sing in a certain way (authoritatively and clearly) and about certain things (love, desire, sex), which means that her professional life, like Rath’s, is thoroughly contingent on the use of her voice. For both characters, however, the link between «Ruf» and «Beruf» must be understood ironically. Rath may have had a calling, and it d certainly involved vocal training, but he has been lured away from it, called away from it, even, by the siren’s song. In Lola’s case, her status as a singer (or call girl) only qualifies as a «calling» in the most literal sense: she is being (cat) called and she makes calls on others, but this is a far cry from what is traditionally identified as a «vocation.» As in the case of Eliza Doolittle, Lola-Lola’s vocal practice is a professional dead-end: it allows her to earn a living, but only by inscribing her in a stifling, unchanging cycle of work and relationships. Lola seems to draw men in with her voice, body, and gestures, to make them subservient to her and eventually destroy them, and then to discard them and return literally to the exact same performance. Though it appears that she is holding the cards - controlling others’ voices, destroying others’ lives - she is as much a victim in all this as they are, only instead of simply expiring she dies the death of infinite sameness. Lola has elevated this song-and-dance routine to a way of life, one that insures some degree of financial stability at the same time as it signifies a kind of spiritual suicide. It is in this sense that her voice signals a fate as tragic as the songbird’s and Rath’s. The question of voice and profession in the film is related in close and complex ways to the question of voice and profession around the film. Simply d stated, the newest vocal profession in 1930s Berlin was that of talking actor, or Sprechschauspieler (in addition to related jobs such as diction coaches for r sound film actors, sound film technicians, and sound film editors), and like other sound films from the period Der blaue Engel was being judged accordl ing to its successful use of sound (Kosta 115-16). Having internalized this standard, the film focuses intently on the role of vocal training and manipulation. Was this not precisely the task the new medium needed to confront: to train and manipulate the voice for modern media and modern audiences? Considered in this light, Der blaue Engel can be understood as a sound film l Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 273 that reflects the advent of sound film and thus serves as a key document of and about Weimar film history. 8 One can identify three levels of complexity with regard to the issue of filming voices for Der blaue Engel: the difficulties arising from the new medium itself; the difficulties related to the film’s own thematization of language and voice; and the difficulties that emerged from producing the film in multiple language versions. At any given moment in the film, one or more of these strands informs and complicates the status and meaning of sound and voice. In this section, I will therefore consider their interplay in two aspects of the film: preparing Dietrich for her role as Lola-Lola and the techniques of film sound control. Though she had made a few films before Der blaue Engel, Marlene Dietrich had mostly been a stage actress. It was therefore necessary for her to undergo a process of vocal training for this film, because neither silent film nor the theater required the same use of the voice as sound film. 9 It was Sternberg, Dietrich claims in her autobiography, who assisted her transition from the theater to film: «[he] had only one idea in his head: to take me away from the stage and make a movie actress out of me, to ‹Pygmalionize› me» (qtd. in Baxter 171; Dietrich, My Life 45). 10 The Pygmalion reference is significant, since the training to which Dietrich is referring was largely vocal. Like Eliza Doolittle, Dietrich needed to learn how to speak properly - though in this case what was proper was not necessarily upper-class - in order to keep up the with the demands of her profession. Speaking properly meant, first and foremost, learning how to speak and sing for the camera. This involved internal modulations of the voice (volume, tone, rhythm) as well as adjustments to external factors, such as microphones and sound recording equipment. To make Der blaue Engel, two damping systems were employed alternately so that sounds and silence could be recorded on the set: either the noisy cameras were encased so as to insulate against their noise (Baxter 181) - the blimped or «verpackte» camera - or both the cameras and cameramen were contained in larger, insulated glass booths (Kosta 116). Moreover, in this early stage of sound-film production when the recording devices were not yet very sophisticated and directors and sound film technicians were still learning how best to capture and present sound for a film audience, actors needed to adjust their vocal performances (louder or softer, higher or lower, projecting in particular directions, and so on) to accommodate these changed circumstances. The fact that Der blaue Engel was filmed in German and English meant l that Dietrich also had to learn to speak and perform in English in front of the camera. Sternberg, who was born in Vienna but had grown up largely in the United States and returned to Germany from Hollywood to make this film, 274 Kata Gellen personally took charge of Dietrich’s English lessons, for she needed to speak a particular kind of English. As she explains in her autobiography: Von Sternberg drehte die englische Version des Blauen Engels auf völlig logische Weise. Er machte mich, die Lola, zu einem amerikanischen Flittchen, das ein vulgäres Amerikanisch sprechen mußte; alle anderen sprachen Englisch. Da keiner der Schauspieler Englisch konnte, übte er jeden Satz Wort für Wort mit ihnen ein. Die Geduld, die er mit uns allen hatte! ! (73) Though some critics assert otherwise, Dietrich’s claim that she is meant to be playing an American is convincing. 11 Not only was Sternberg coming from America, but his American editor, Sam Winston, was Dietrich’s other English coach (Baxter 175). Nevertheless, the fact that there is disagreement on this point illustrates the problem with Dietrich’s English: regardless of what Sternberg intended for the English-language Lola-Lola, details such as nad tionality and social class cannot be discerned from her speech and song. Dietrich’s English is clear, comfortable, and articulate, 12 but it is not so refined, natural, or subtle that one could distinguish her as American or British, or as a member of a particular social class. (After all, it is less American or British English than German-accented English.) The status of her spoken English notwithstanding, it is interesting that Sternberg had conceived of this play with accents for the English-speaking Lola. 13 He wanted to use the new technology of sound film, combined with intense vocal training, not simply to communicate the content of speech (which could of course be done with intertitles), but to convey precisely those aspects of speech that silent film cannot, such as pronunciation, intonation, and accent. In this way, he hoped to be able to represent national and class differences as well as physical and emotional dimensions of speech and silence by means of vocal adjustments. It was not only the English version of the film that required vocal manipulation and refinement. Lola-Lola was meant to speak a particular kind of German, as were other characters in her milieu, and it was Dietrich - as she claims in her autobiography - who served as the resident expert for this type of speech: Von Sternberg wollte meine Stimme im typischen Berliner Dialekt, hoch und näselnd, ähnlich dem Londoner «Cockney,» als die Stimme, die zu Lola, dem Mädchen aus dem blauen Engel, paßte. Mit meiner auf der Reinhardt-Schule erlernten Stimmtechnik war da nicht viel anzufangen. Sternberg benutzte mich auch als Expertin für den Berliner Dialekt; als Österreicher kannte er sich da nicht aus. Vielleicht wundert man sich, wieso ich, ein Mädchen aus gutem Hause, Expertin für den Berliner Straßenjargon sein konnte. (72-73) Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 275 According to this admittedly self-mythologizing report, Dietrich’s voice was too cultivated for the part, but she was nevertheless able not only to achieve the proper lower-class Berlin dialect (which, interestingly, she can only describe by comparing it to Cockney, making it another instance of vocal translation), but also to train others to speak it. She takes distinct pride in this exchange of voice lessons, but she is clearly also disturbed, on some level, that what is being taught and learned is not vocal refinement, but vocal coarsening. Dietrich thus insists on her cultivation and expertise - hence the reference to her training at Berlin’s most elite acting school - in the same breath that she claims native knowledge and sensibility in order to prove her qualifications as a speaker and teacher of Berlinerisch. She thereby describes a reversal of the conventional scenario of vocal instruction, as depicted in Pygmalion and in the scene in Rath’s classroom. Instead of training others how to speak upper-class or Shakespearean English, Dietrich uses her expertise to teach actors how to speak lower-class German, Berliner Straßenjargon. This is the irony of the new medium of sound film - it demands rigorous training and practice, but not necessarily in order to become more polished, distinguished, or cultured - as well as one of its democratizing effects: one no longer has to speak with an upper-class accent in order to be heard. In any event, professional success gets uncoupled from vocal «improvement»; or, stated somewhat differently, the voice is now being trained for various ends. Dietrich’s comments help track a move from classical academic vocal training to a modern media-grounded training that complicates, even upends the social hierarchies that interlink with classical training. It is clear, then, that Der blaue Engel not only depicts the training of the l voice, but also participates in this process: it is engaged in a critical advancement and analysis of its own vocal operations. 14 This claim is supported by the ways the film transformed sound-film acting into a modern acoustical profession - which is to say, by adapting and refunctionalizing the techniques of older, more traditional acoustical professions so as to make them serve modern media and audiences. But the manipulation and refinement of voices for the cinema is not only a matter of factors linked to acting and performance such as «Stimmtechnik,» accent, dialect, pronunciation, and projection. It is also a function of sound recording and editing. In other words, voices are trained by actors, directors, and voice coaches, but they can be controlled and manipulated by the medium itself. The single most compelling, forceful, and frequently used technique of sound control is the stark and sudden onset and termination of sound. The film presents many enclosed spaces - Rath’s room, the classroom, Lola-Lola’s 276 Kata Gellen dressing room, and so on - and it frequently depicts the boundedness of these spaces by the physical barriers that separate them from other spaces, such as windows, doors, and walls. These borders are not only, or even primarily, visual; the film viewer-listener becomes acutely aware of their presence as they block and permit the flow of sound. The first instance of this comes in the initial classroom scene, as the students are given a writing assignment and silence falls over the room as they begin to work. It is almost completely quiet for twenty seconds as the students begin to write and Rath walks over to the window. The instant he opens it, a chorus of angelic and remarkably clear singing voices enters the room and the auditory space of the film; approximately one minute and twenty seconds later, having discovered a student examining a postcard of Lola-Lola, Rath returns to the window and closes it, putting an abrupt end to the music. The ability to turn sound on and off at will reflects the power and authority that Rath wields at this moment and in this location: he controls not only the students’ voices, but also the sounds that occupy the space of the classroom. His control, however, is contingent on cinematic techniques (e.g., editing, sound recording, audio mixing), which point to the film’s own command of sound and silence. The scene trains the viewer-listener to perceive a similar effect in the first scene in Lola-Lola’s dressing room, though now it is more complex. In the classroom scene, sound gains entry only one time, long enough to get a sense of the beautiful song, and then it is shut out once and for all: even if the sound starts and stops suddenly, the overall impression is pleasing and congruous. The film uses essentially the same technique in multiple scenes in Lola-Lola’s dressing room, but there the sounds come from multiple directions and they are not harmonious. Situated between the noisy stage and another equally raucous dressing room, this space is constantly being broken into from right and left - by characters moving through, but also, very distinctly, by a cacophony of voices that rushes in whenever a door opens. This has the effect of framing the space of the dressing room not only visually, but also acoustically. For example, when the mute clown intrudes on Lola-Lola and Rath during their first conversation, his sudden presence and equally sudden absence are each announced not only by the opening and closing of a door, but, in a rather unruly manner, with loud chatter coming from one side and cabaret music coming from the other. Both his muteness and the lull in Rath and Lola-Lola’s conversation - two forms of silence - are framed and highlighted by these noisy bookends. It is the same technique used in the classroom scene, but instead of heavenly voices that frame Rath’s authoritative silence, the sounds of modern lowbrow entertainment frame the silence that the singer-seductress Lola-Lola imposes on her male victims (Rath is at this point her future lover/ Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 277 cuckold, and the clown is her past one). As in the earlier scene, Lola-Lola’s own vocal control is complemented and confirmed by a cinematic technique of acoustic control. These sudden shifts between noise (the sound of multiple, sometimes uncoordinated, and frequently incomprehensible voices) and silence (the complete absence of sound) thus produce the illusion of total acoustic control. In reality, simply closing a door or window would not successfully block out all exterior sound, especially in the case of a noisy cabaret. As material barriers, these architectural features are simply not that effective; certain sounds, especially loud ones, would seep through, even if muffled or partially muted. And yet the film presents sound and silence as entirely manipulable and controllable, concealing the actual difficulties of regulating noise, voice, and silence in early sound films. In reality, cameramen Günther Rittau and Hans Schneeberger were continually confronted with bothersome background noise. The use of blimped cameras and insulated booths helped, but these were imperfect solutions. The film goes to great lengths to present a carefully constructed illusion of perfect sound control and makes it seem as effortless as opening a window or closing a door. This can be understood as a future or imagined sound-film fantasy that emerges out of an imperfect sound-film reality. The extensive engagement with the question of vocal training both in and for the film can be read in the context of cinema discovering and relishing its newfound ability to capture and manipulate sound. The film draws our attention to voice and urges us to think of it as something that can be trained through human effort and practice, and it reveals the voice in cinema to be a product of technical manipulation. Der blaue Engel does not pit traditional l practices of vocal refinement against cinematic techniques of sound control; we are not asked to choose between «Stimmtechnik» and «Filmtechnik.» Instead, these practices are complementary and mutually reinforcing. Training the voice through painstaking human effort and manipulating it through d technical means are both part of the new filmic reality. Der blaue Engel paints l such a vivid picture of the acoustical professions neither to mourn nor to celebrate their demise, but because they take on new relevance and changed forms in the age of acoustic technology. The new sound film is not about rejecting old forms of cultivation and refinement, but about recalibrating voices, reattuning listeners, and learning how to record and edit sound effectively. Throughout this essay I have tried to describe the ways that Der blaue Engel is a film about vocal determinism - it depicts the contingency of individual fates on the command of speech, song, silence, and noise - as well as one of the first German films whose production depended crucially on acts of vocal 278 Kata Gellen training and new sound film technology. The centrality of the voice emerges with particular clarity because it was filmed simultaneously in English and German, but the range of associations and anxieties surrounding the manipulation and control of voice, noise, and silence is present in each version of the film independently of the other. The links to Shaw’s Pygmalion, I have suggested, draw out the social and professional dimensions of vocal training in the film, and provide a model for recognizing that vocal refinement, even when successfully achieved, does not necessarily promise advancement. Eliza Doolittle’s vocal fate can be understood as a kind of professional tragedy: she goes in for speech lessons in order to broaden her horizons, but she becomes yet another person who can do nothing but teach others to speak properly; vocal training is an abyss. I have tried to demonstrate a related but more complex and far-reaching relationship to vocal training in Der blaue Engel, specifically with reference to Rath and Lola-Lola, both of whom suffer tragic fates as a function of voice. For them, vocal training seems to be what allows them to participate in modernity - constituted by the Tingeltangel and the world it creates around itself - but it l also causes and reflects their downfall: in other words, their voices «perform» their fates. Rath’s voice cracks, becomes noise, indicating that he never really was part of this modern world and that there is no way back into the old one in which he was a master of the voice; the only possible end for him is death. Lola-Lola suffers an equally tragic fate, not because her voice does not belong to this world, but because it belongs to it so completely and irrevocably that she is destined to remain in it forever; she is imprisoned in the Tingeltangel. However, the idea of vocal determinism extends beyond the characters depicted in the film and even beyond the historical and biographical situations of the actors playing them. Not only individuals, but sound film itself, a newly emerging modern art form - indeed, a parallel world to the Tingeltangel - is judged by its power to manipulate voices and control sound. Thus l Der blaue Engel is keen to demonstrate its mastery over noise and silence, despite l the actual difficulties it faced in this regard, and loathe to puncture this illusion. Everyone and everything, in a word, is trying to prove itself in a modern world governed by vocal control: Rath and Lola-Lola, Jannings and Dietrich, and Der blaue Engel itself. l Notes I would like to thank Johannes von Moltke, whose insightful response to the GSA panel where I first presented this paper helped me refine and develop my argument consider- Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 279 ably, and Marc Caplan, for his thoughtful and stimulating engagement with this essay at various stages of its production. 1 As Jelavich notes at the outset of his study of Berlin cabaret, even though Der blaue Engel is a crucial part of today’s conception of Weimar cabaret culture, the club in which l Lola-Lola performs was actually a «‹Tingeltangel,› a third-rate variety show that was a direct precursor of the cabaret» (1). He calls it a «dive,» and compares it to the «sleazy nightclubs» of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories (1). Cabaret not only took place in a more dignified setting, its essential aim was political satire and social critique (1-2). I will therefore refer to the setting and show depicted in Der blaue Engel as l Tingeltangel throughout. 2 For example, Kosta’s recent study teases out various aspects of the film’s embeddedness in contemporary cultural, social, and economic practices. She emphasizes its treatment of cabaret culture, the role of the new woman, and the phenomenon of sex and bodies for sale. Clearly Lola-Lola’s cool eroticism aligns neatly with the experience of the female artist/ performer in late-Weimar culture. 3 In his article on Der blaue Engel and the Yiddish writer Der Nister, whose 1929 story l «Behind a Fence: A Revue» is also an adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat (1905), Marc Caplan convincingly demonstrates how the film continually juxtaposes nationalities, languages, temporalities, musical traditions, and high and low culture (187-89). Neither Kracauer’s «vacuum» (which would suggest an absence of context) nor John Baxter’s claim that the film’s setting is outdated and dislocated is entirely justified. As Caplan argues, «the collision of a seemingly nineteenth-century small-town ambience with the calendar, the ‹jazz› music, and the ‹urban› social disorder of the cabaret indicates the ways in which the film’s setting contributes to the deterritorialization of its narrative: presenting a male protagonist and his female love-interest as embodiments of two different eras in cohabitation and confrontation with one another represents the essential temporal condition of Weimar culture as ‹between› epochs» (188). The film belongs to its moment - late Weimar Berlin - and gains social relevance through its aesthetic practices. 4 Multiple language versions were the most common way of adapting films for foreign countries from about 1929 to 1933, at which point dubbing and subtitles replaced these time-consuming and expensive endeavors. On MLVs in Weimar Germany, see Wahl. For an analysis of Dietrich’s voice in the English version, see Lawrence 83-85. Though her main thesis in comparing the German and English versions of the film relates to the divergent presentations of Lola-Lola’s eroticism and the varying degrees of sympathy that Rath’s character inspires, Patrice Petro offers astute observations about language and speech in her analysis of the film’s English and German versions (264-65). She also points out that there is more than one version of the film in each language (262-63). It is worth noting that the German version is generally assumed to be «authentic» or «original,» though the English version enjoyed a wide release and great popularity in the 1930s in the United States, and was filmed simultaneously (Lawrence 83). 5 The role of vocal training in modernity is worth noting, encompassing as it does spelling bees (which were preceded at one point by pronunciation bees), the teaching of declamation (like penmanship) in schools, the rise of sound recording as such, etc. There is a whole curriculum of obsolete modernization associated with the value of vocal training that Friedrich Kittler would certainly associate with the discourse network of 1900. 6 There is a gender element in all this - becoming a lady, becoming gendered, means being immobilized as an economic subject - about which Shaw’s play finds no resolution. 280 Kata Gellen For Eliza Doolittle the cultivation of the voice is a dead end because it makes her into a lady. 7 For a detailed and astute analysis of the way that Lola-Lola exerts vocal authority at the same time as she practices vocal deception through her song, in the manner of a Homeric siren, see Kosta 126-30. 8 Recent scholarship has highlighted this dimension of the film. See especially chapter 4 («The Seductions of Sound») of Kosta, Willing Seduction. 9 Technically Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (1929) was not entirely silent, since it contained a sound sequence, but Dietrich herself did not do any singing or talking in that film. 10 A comparison of the German text and English translation reveals that the Pygmalion reference does not appear in the original. There Dietrich’s account of Sternberg’s transformation of her is more understated: «Dort sah mich Sternberg zum ersten Mal und traf die Entscheidung, mich aus der Theaterwelt wegzunehmen und mich in die Filmwelt zu verpflanzen, entsprechend seiner Vorstellung und seiner Phantasie» (Nehmt nur 62). r 11 Lawrence (83) and Petro (265) both claim that she is supposed to be British, though Petro curiously cites evidence to the contrary: «American vernacular is […] added to the English-language versions, most always in connection with Lola, who is made to speak such lines as: ‹Hold your horses! › ‹Fold up Your Tent› (for shut up), ‹Patriotic Hokum› (in response to the words of a German song), and ‹Shake a Leg›» (265). 12 The screen test for Der blaue Engel shows Dietrich growing increasingly impatient with l and irritated by the prolonged assessment of her English language skills, which seems justified considering how well she spoke and sang in English. The screen test can be viewed on the KINO-International 2-disc set from 2001. 13 Bronfen aligns Jannings’s performance with the age of silent film and Dietrich’s with the dawn of sound film (10). This is a nice way of pointing out the importance of gesture and expression in Jannings’s acting technique, and yet it overlooks the fact that Jannings’s pedagogy is so centered on speech and voice. 14 Kosta describes The Blue Angel as a «litmus test» for the two main actors’ ability to tranl sition into sound film. Both Jannings and Dietrich were considered to have passed with flying colors, proving not only that their voices were good enough for sound film, but that they could adjust to the challenges of acoustical performance (115-16). Works Cited Baxter, John. «Berlin Year Zero: The Making of The Blue Angel.» Framework 51.1 (2010): 164-89. blaue Engel, Der. Dir. Josef von Sternberg. Perf. Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. UFA, 1930. Blue Angel, The. Dir. Josef von Sternberg. Perf. Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. UFA, 1930. Bronfen, Elisabeth. «Seductive Departures of Marlene Dietrich: Exile and Stardom in The Blue Angel.» New German Critique 89 (2003): 9-31. Caplan, Marc. «The Hermit at the Circus: Der Nister, Yiddish Literature, and German Culture in the Weimar Period.» Studia Rosenthaliana 41 (2008): 173-96. Dietrich, Marlene. My Life. Trans. Salvator Attanasio. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987. Sound Control and Vocal Training in Der blaue Engel 281 -. Nehmt nur mein Leben… Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1979. Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Firda, Richard Arthur. «Literary Origins: Sternberg’s Film The Blue Angel.» Literature/ Film Quarterly 7 (1979): 126-36. Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/ 1900. Trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Koch, Gertrud. «Between Two Worlds: Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930).» l German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations. Ed. Eric Rentschler. New York: Methuen, 1986. 60-72. Kosta, Barbara. Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture. New York: Berghahn, 2012. Kracauer, Siegfried. «The Blue Angel.» Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 630-31. -. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Ed. Leonardo Quaresima. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Lawrence, Amy. «Marlene Dietrich: The Voice as Mask.» Dietrich Icon. Ed. Gerd Gemünden and Mary R. Desjardins. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 79-99. Petro, Patrice. «National Cinemas/ International Film Cultures: The Blue Angel (1930) in Multiple Language Versions.» Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era. Ed. Noah Isenberg. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. 255- 70. Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. London: Penguin, 2000. Wahl, Chris. «Babel’s Business - On Ufa’s Multiple Language Film Versions, 1929- 1933.» The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy. Ed. Christian Rogowski. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. 235-48. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Volker Steenblock Philosophieren mit Filmen ISBN 978-3-7720-8481-2 Language, the Voice and Esperantism in Early German Sound Film: The Case of Niemandsland NANCY P. NENNO C OLLEGE OF C HARLESTON The difference of languages is one of the most fruitful sources of the dissensions and differences among nations, for, of all things that impress a stranger in a foreign land, the language is at once the first and the greatest mark of distinction between him and them; not being able to understand or be understood, we naturally shun the contact of aliens. Dr. Esperanto (Zamenhof, Birth 6) Sight is the sense of definition and the definite, sound is the sense of the personal and individual, it lets experiencers feel that they have agency. (Sinclair 20) As early critics of the new medium of sound film recognized, the introduction of the speaking voice into cinema leads to an experience of both loss and plenitude. On the one hand, the reunion of voice and body promises an experience of wholeness. On the other, the speaking body is indelibly marked by language, and thus with difference, otherness, foreignness. And yet, in 1932, Ufa producer Erich Pommer was announcing: «Tonfilm und Internationalität? So paradox es klingt, ist es Tatsache geworden» (13). In a text that appeared in both German and English, Pommer addressed the problems that sound film, and specifically the speaking voice, had created for cinema’s continued international viability. Die Internationalität der Stummheit konnte doch nicht durch die nationale Begrenztheit der Sprache ausgeglichen werden. Das Wort schien unüberwindliche Grenzen aufzurichten. Das wäre also das Ende des internationalen Films gewesen und damit das Ende des unvergleichlichen Kultur- und Propagandainstrumentes ‹Film› überhaupt. (13) Pommer’s proposed solution to the problem of language: the creation of films with narrative content capable of speaking to all audiences. From the perspective that, ultimately, the basic problems of humanity remained the same and that only the circumstances and the treatment of a topic created variation, Pommer argued that the international potential of cinema lay in the emotional attractiveness of the narrative rather than in identification with the appa- 284 Nancy P. Nenno ratus. 1 That is, the audience should identify with the story being told rather than with the technical apparatus of the sound film (13). Through the creation of foreign language versions (Mehrsprachenversionen) that cast stars familiar to each target audience and were sensitive to cultural differences, the international attraction of silent film had been, according to Pommer, reattained. The multiple language version (MLV), which liberated the speaking cinema from the limits of language, was, he declared, the «Esperanto» of sound film (13-14). Ironically, in the same year as Pommer’s announcement, the multiple language version was clearly on its way out (Vincendeau 33). Even when studios were able to take advantage of multilingual actors such as Lilian Harvey and Marlene Dietrich, shooting two or more language versions of the same film text was an expensive proposition. Where polyglot actors were not available, or when it was deemed advisable to use national stars, the costs rose accordingly. While Hollywood favored shooting foreign language versions after the completion of the English original, in Germany all versions tended to be shot simultaneously (Krützen 134). Even after Paramount established a studio at Joinville outside Paris for the express purpose of cutting costs by using local talent, eventually sharing the expenses with other Hollywood studios, the cost of the MLVs proved prohibitive, ultimately giving way to the process of synchronization, or dubbing (Gomery 83-4). The impetus behind the MLV and the creation of the artificial language Esperanto are similar insofar as both imagine a common humanity that exists despite language differences. However, their strategies are diametrically opposite. In contrast to the MLV, which further consolidated linguistic and cultural boundaries, the artificial language of Esperanto was created to transcend such borders. First published under the name Dr. Esperanto in 1887, Dr. Ludwik L. Zamenhof’s non-national universal language, based primarily on Germanic and Romance languages, was designed to mobilize the commonalities among different communities and languages in the service of mutual understanding. In a letter to Nikolai Borovko from around 1895, Zamenhof credited his experiences growing up Jewish in a multi-ethnic and multilingual community in Czarist Russia with serving as the impetus for his creation of Esperanto: In Bielostok [sic! ] the population consisted of four diverse elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews. Each of these elements speaks a different language and is not on friendly relations with the other elements. In such a city, more than anywhere else, a sensitive soul feels the heavy woe of polyglottism [sic! ] and becomes convinced at each step that the multiplicity of languages is the sole or at least the chief cause which divides human beings and makes of them unfriendly units. I was Language, the Voice and Esperantism 285 educated to be an idealist; I was taught that all men are brothers, and yet on the street and in the market place everything caused me to feel that people did not exist; that there were only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, etc. (Zamenhof, Birth 6) Zamenhof’s declared desire was to craft «an international Language, one that could be adopted by all nations and be the common property of the whole world, without belonging in any way to any existing nationality» in the hopes that then «the whole world would be as one family» (Zamenhof, Attempt 5). In his second film, Niemandsland (1931), Russian-Jewish director Victor d Trivas approached sound film with a similar agenda. 2 His treatment of the First World War locates the central cause of international conflict in language difference. Unlike other antiwar films of the period, however, Trivas was less interested in a realistic depiction of the Great War and more in uncovering the commonalities among the warring factions as a solution to war. In dem Film Niemandsland wollte ich nicht die Greuel des Krieges, sondern seine d grausame Absurdität aufdecken. Daher wollte ich, daß sich dem kollektiven Wahnsinn entrissene Feinde auf einem Fleckchen Erde zwischen den Schützengraben, im Niemandsland (Die Todeszone) von Angesicht zu Angesicht begegnen. So konnte d ich ihre gemeinsame Sprache finden, jene Sprache der einfachen menschlichen Gefühle, die, so glaube ich, die beredteste Anklage gegen den Krieg ist. (Trivas, «No Man’s Land») It is this idea of a «common language of simple human feelings» that transforms enemies into friends, adversaries into allies, which forms the heart of the film’s narrative, echoing the sentiments of the creator of Esperanto in its insistence that language is an artificial barrier to interpersonal, and thus international, understanding. At the same time, much like Pommer, Trivas acknowledged that the storyline itself must also be one that invites identification by a broad range of audiences. This is a point that Trivas underscored in a 1933 interview with Julien J. London, declaring that «[e]in wirklich humanes Thema hätte alle Chancen, einem Film einen internationalen Charakter zu geben» (qtd. in Bock und Jacobsen 6). The goal of this essay is to illuminate the ways in which the extra-cinematic discourse on the complex relationship between language difference, national identification, and international conflict echoes self-reflexively in this early German sound film. I will argue that, in Niemandsland, Trivas employs strategies that explore how sound film can regain the international promise of silent cinema through a calculated use of the linguistically marked voice. The film engages multiple languages - in fact, the same language groups upon which Zamenhof’s artificial language was based - to stage the transcendence of difference and thus reveal the common humanity that is obscured by linguistic difference. The voice is central to the film’s diegesis as the narrative 286 Nancy P. Nenno itself mimics the move from muteness to speech, from dominant monolingualism to pluralistic multilingualism. The role of language in this film - first those of individual nations, then of specific figures, and finally the «common language of simple human feelings» - is ultimately to redraw the battle lines from those between nations to those between the voice of power and the voice of the individual. In the linguistically marked voice, Trivas invokes the plenitude of the body-voice union in sound film, even as he stages a cinematic internationalism reminiscent of silent film. In what might be called an esperantist approach to sound cinema, interpersonal human drama supersedes any external or superficial divisions, including those posed by language difference. In Niemandsland’s esperantist vision of sound film, it is incumbent upon the language of cinema - mise-en-scène, acting, editing, cinematography, and, yes, sound - to illuminate the common humanity of the warring factions. The role accorded the voice in Niemandsland is not, however, exclusively d diegetic; it also operates on a meta-discursive level, thematizing the transition from silent to sound cinema by employing strategies specific to each medium. On the one hand, Trivas draws on his experience working with Russian directors trained in the tradition of Soviet silent film. On the other, he incorporates speech into the fabric of his film as both a narrative device and a cinematic strategy. In contrast to Pommer’s Esperanto for the sound film, Trivas’s esperantist vision includes language diversity and difference as an integral part of its discovery of a common human language. Concerned about the divisiveness of language and its implication for the viability of sound film on the international market, film studios began early on to experiment with a variety of ways to appeal to national audiences, albeit for economic reasons. As Pommer’s statement documents, one solution was the MLV, which gave studios the opportunity to re-internationalize their products by simultaneously, or serially, producing the same film multiple times in different languages (Vincendeau 25-26). Adapted to the needs of different audiences, these multiple versions often required the replacement of monolingual cast members with native speakers, the casting of bior trilingual stars (as in the case of Die Drei f von der Tankstelle, Thiele 1930), or significant alterations to the storyline of a film in order to account for a bilingual actor’s accent (as in the English-language version of Der blaue Engel, von Sternberg 1930) (Gellen in this issue; Krützen 138-42; Wahl, «Babel» 238-42). A less costly alternative to the MLV was the polyglot film (Mehrsprachenfilm) that incorporates two or more languages - either with or without subtitles. 3 Such films of this period employed actors speaking their native tongues, Language, the Voice and Esperantism 287 most commonly French and German, to enhance the authenticity of stories of human relationships in which national borders represent interpersonal rather than international boundaries. As Ginette Vincendeau points out, the most successful of these films «integrate diegetically the inter-lingual apparatus which is their industrial raison d’être» (27) by hinging the story on the narrative necessity of more than one language, while portraying a situation that is easily comprehensible to all audiences. Not surprisingly, then, it was romance - a trope dramatizing the emotional attraction between two individuals - featuring lovers from different nations that seemed to promise a satisfying resolution to the language problem as it staged the power of love to overcome these hurdles. Thus, for example, in the subtitled romantic comedy, Allô Berlin? Ici Paris/ Hallo? Hallo? Hier spricht Berlin, two male telephone operators in Berlin fall in love with two French receptionists over the phone, resulting in a film that Jean Lenauer in Close Up claimed «show[s] once more how a film can be made which can be perfectly understood both by French and German people» (59). A Hollywood version of the Franco-German love affair also appears towards the beginning of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front/ Im Westen nichts Neues (1930). This romance between a German soldier and a French girl received high praise from the film critic at the Sozialistische Monatshefte: In dem Film Im Westen nichts Neues zeigt eine besonders schöne Szene die Liebe eines deutschen Soldaten mit einer Französin. Man sieht eine hübsche Zimmerecke, den Schatten eines Bettes, das Bettende selbst, einen Tisch mit einer brennenden Petroleumlampe und einer halb abgebrochenen Mahlzeit. Man sieht keine Menschen, aber man hört die glückliche und kriegsmüde Stimme des Deutschen, der der Frau deutsche Worte sagt, die sie nicht versteht und französisch mit Worten beantwortet, die er kaum versteht. Wie viel Trauer, wie viel Schönes vermittelt der Ton dadurch, daß er dem Zuhörer das Bild und damit die Seele der Sprecher zu finden überläßt. (Stössinger 506) For Stössinger it is the very sound of the spoken language, the tone of the voice, rather than the information communicated, that carries the emotional meaning of the scene, the promise that human empathy can overcome all obstacles - even language difference. The bilingual film also serves to advance the agenda of films centered on homosocial, transnational narratives, particularly those seeking to mend the French-German rift. Pabst’s proletarian pacifist film, Kameradschaft/ La tragédie de la Mine (1931), also features two subtitled languages - again, French and German - to tell the story of a mining disaster based on a real-life incident in which German rescuers come to the aid of their French comrades. The mine itself straddles the French-German border, and part of the rescue 288 Nancy P. Nenno entails German miners literally dismantling part of the underground border from 1919 (which is then formally re-established in the film’s concluding sequence). In contrast to the bilingual romantic comedies, in Kameradschaft, it is male bonding and solidarity with one’s working-class comrades across national borders, rather than heterosexual romance, that supply the narrative rationale for the use of more than one language in the film. Pabst also exploits the trope of the transnational romance in this film as a warning about the potential dangers of interlingual conflict in a scene early in the film in which three of the German miners visit a French dance bar. One of the miners, Wilderer (Fritz Kampers), invites the beautiful Françoise (Andrée Ducret), the love interest of Émile (Georges Charlia), one of the French miners, to dance. Wilderer: Excusez - une danse? Françoise (to Émile): Qu’est-que il veut? Émile: Danser avec toi. Françoise: Je ne danse plus. Dites à lui en allemand, si tu peux. Émile: Mademoiselle, nicht tanzen. Wilderer: Was allemand? Was allemand? Ich will nur tanzen. Allemand! Ha! Nicht mit einem Allemand, hat sie gesagt. Ein Allemand tanzt eben so gut wie ein Franzose würde. 4 The scene provides an amusing interlude in an otherwise serious film, but it also stages the problem of interlingual miscommunication and dramatizes one of the primary problems of sound cinema. The misunderstanding arises from the homophonic quality of the terms for both the German language (allemand) and a German man (allemand), and although Wilderer assumes Françoise rejects him because he is German, in fact, it is simply that she is unable to communicate with him in his language, just as he does not have command of hers. This scene self-reflexively enacts the predicament of language in sound film and turns it into a narrative device. In these bilingual antiwar films, the focus on language as a source, and sign, of international discord serves the needs of both the storylines and the film industry to solve the problem of multilingualism. Indeed, such a strategy is fitting to films seeking to create a sense of commonality among enemies, to transcend national and linguistic barriers rather than solidify them. The value of maintaining the unity of the actor’s body and the linguistically marked voice is underscored by Chris Wahl, who argues that the polyglot film […] is naturalistic: languages are used in the way they would be used in reality. They define geographical or political borders, «visualise» the different social, personal or cultural levels of the characters and enrich their aura in conjunction with the voice. The complexity and variety of the character network and the intense singularity of Language, the Voice and Esperantism 289 each person which form the centre of the polyglot film render dubbing impossible without destroying the movie […]. Polyglot films must be shown with subtitles (or without any aid) because they are anti-illusionist in the sense that they do not try to hide the diversity of human life behind the mask of a universal language («Discovering» 2). In contrast to the synchronized film, or even the MLV, the polyglot film thus presumably offers the spectator the same unfettered access to the characters and their situations as it does the diegetic figures. Both All Quiet on the Western Front and Westfront 1918 (Pabst 1931) strategically employ the native tongues of their actors to just such effect. In the closing frames of Westfront 1918, a French soldier is laid next to the film’s protagonist, Karl (Gustav Diessl) in a field hospital filled with wounded and dying soldiers of both nationalities. Blindly, the Frenchman picks up the dead Karl’s hand and murmurs, «Moi, camerade. Pas ennemi, pas ennemi.» The audience recognizes the pathos of the French soldier’s tone, and perhaps the words «camarade» and «ennemi» echo as cognates in their own language. The immediacy of the physical gesture coupled with the linguistic utterance serves to invite the audience into the scene to experience the emotion of this moment first-hand. Such films adhere to what Verena Berger and Miya Komori term the central tenet of polyglot cinema, namely «the representation of language diversity as the protagonists experience it» (9). Unlike the handful of polyglot films produced during this transitional period, Victor Trivas’s Niemandsland expands the scope of the term polyglot d from two to five languages. Although Wahl argues that the term polyglot applies to any film in which more than one language plays a significant role in the narrative, in the context of early German sound cinema, the distinction is germane precisely because the majority of these films operate solely along the French-German language axis. Technically the term «polyglot» refers to the use of four or more languages, and the only film of this period to accomplish this task successfully is Niemandsland. In this film, no fewer than five languages (English, French, German, Hebrew, Russian) are heard, all without the aid of subtitles. At the same time as it conforms to many of the conventions of the antiwar film, including the narrative tropes of solidarity, comradeship, and male bonding among the common soldiers, Niemandsland also d expands its representation of the war beyond the French-German conflict to include both interand intra-continental aspects. The basic plot of Niemandsland revolves around five men of different nad tions who are first depicted as civilians experiencing the build-up to war and who ultimately find themselves trapped together in an underground ruin between the fronts. There they discover that, despite their different languages 290 Nancy P. Nenno and national affiliations, they share similar hopes, experiences, feelings. As the critic for Vorwärts wrote: Warum stehen sie sich feindlich gegenüber? Sie sind Arbeiter, Handwerker, Angestellte. Der Krieg hat sie entzweit, wahnsinnig gemacht. Also Krieg dem Kriege! Am Schluß marschieren sie wie ein Symbol für den Kampf um den Frieden vereinigt dem gemeinsamen Feinde Krieg entgegen. (Sch[erret]) Scherret’s use of the verb «entzweien» (to sunder) is significant as it implies a prewar unity or commonality that can be re-established. This theme of unity and division - here a narrative element - is of course also a key aspect of the debates surrounding the introduction of the voice in film. In Niemandsland, Trivas approaches the «talking film» («sprechender Film») in a way that undermines the assumption that sound cinema must necessarily be a national cinema. Unlike films such as Westfront 1918 that exploit the verisimilitude of the medium to engage spectators in the war experience, in Niemandsland the voice - and specifically the voice of a speaking figure - is employed to explore the various roles that sound might play, on both diegetic and cinematic levels. The film opens with five short vignettes that introduce each soldier in his pre-war life. The first character is the Englishman Charlie Brown (Hugh Stephens Douglas), who is awaiting the birth of his child in the next room. He is first presented at the window, gazing out onto central London. He lifts the pane and settles into its frame, half in and half out, poised between the public and the private realms. The next vignette, which focuses on the flirtation between the Frenchman Charles Durant (Georges Péclet) and his soon-to-be girlfriend, also explicitly situates this figure within a national context. The two first meet on a streetcar and then appear at dusk as diminutive silhouettes dominated by the massive form of the Eiffel Tower. With the introduction of the German Emil Köhler (Ernst Busch), the film becomes even more pointed about the intertwining of national identity within the contexts of both private and work spheres. As his young son, his wife, and an apprentice watch, he removes a toy cannon from a drawer and answers his son’s question, «Kann sie schiessen? » by aiming the mouth of the toy directly into the camera’s lens. The playfulness of this gesture acquires a terrifying reality as it introduces the build-up to war that follows. A hard cut from the mouth of the toy cannon introduces a montage first of real cannons, then of bombs, and finally of medals, as a voice-over narrator intones, «Cannons, cannons, cannons, all over the world. / Kanonen, Kanonen, Kanonen, Granaten, Granaten, Granten, Orden, Orden, Orden.» This sequence, in which a voice-over commentator dominates the soundtrack, is one of two sections of the film produced as an MLV, altered to accommodate different target audiences (English, French and German). As such, the sequence Language, the Voice and Esperantism 291 sets the stage for Trivas’s exploration of the voice by beginning with an allknowing, interpretive commentary. The commanding male voice-over narration here strongly resembles the disembodied voice of the documentary with its distinctly pedagogical tone and didactic content. As Mary Anne Doane explains about voice-over commentary: It is its radical otherness with respect to the diegesis which endows this voice with a certain authority. As a form of direct address, it speaks without mediation to the audience, by-passing the «characters» and establishing a complicity between itself and the spectator - together they understand thus place the image. It is precisely because the voice is not localizable, because it cannot be yoked to a body, that it is capable of interpreting the image, producing its truth. (42, emphasis in original) Doane’s point about the total power that the voice-over commentary exercises over the image is highlighted in this sequence that depicts the preparations for war. In its invisible, extra-diegetic state, this voice is a phantasm that invokes the pre-sound film traditions of the lecturer at the magic lantern show or perhaps even the omniscient benshi of Japanese cinema (Nornes 110-19). i Significantly, it is only once the voice of this commentator falls silent that the last two figures, those who are not linked to a specific nation, are introduced to the story. The next sequence depicts the wedding of Lewin (Vladimir Sokoloff), a Jewish tailor in one of the multi-ethnic Eastern European nations (most likely the Hapsburg Empire), who comes to be known only as Irgendwo in der Welt. In contrast to the overtly national contexts of the previous figures, this is a purely private, domestic world. The Hebrew prayers and the exclamations of «Mazel tov» from his guests firmly establish this space as extra-national, even foreign. Although he has not yet been rendered mute by shell shock, Lewin never speaks even in this sequence, as if presaging his voicelessness in the space of no-man’s land and his function as a representative of (international) silent cinema. The last figure, Joe Smile (Louis Douglas), a multilingual African cabaret artist, is the most overtly cosmopolitan as well as the least developed of all the figures. 5 In no-man’s land, he will introduce himself to his companions as an «artiste international» and «un vrai professeur de langue,» but his subjectivity and his history remain elusive. Set in a Parisian cabaret, this expository scene presents the African as a performer with the ability to inhabit multiple identities. Following a quick change of clothes, he emerges on stage to perform a step routine before a transatlantic backdrop depicting representative emblems of the US, France, and Germany. His resistance to - even rejection of - national identification is evident in the text that precedes his step dance. In the English version, he is heard to say that he wants «to get off this boat,» while in the German version he declares, «Ich will den Dampfer verlassen. 292 Nancy P. Nenno Ich geh zu Fuß.» Frantically moving from one side of the stage to the other, caught between the national symbols, he finally reaches for a life preserver, as if seeking shelter and rescue from the coming storm. As Tobias Nagl observes, «Die maritime Symbolwelt selbst, die das Bühnenbild abruft, lässt sich bereits als Ausdruck schwarzer Mobilität lesen: Nach Paul Gilroy stellt das Bild des Schiffs den zentralen Chronotopos des schwarzen Atlantiks dar» (739). The sequencing of Lewin’s and Smile’s stories thus creates the initial link between the diasporic and stateless figures who will carry the supranational vision of the film. Critics at the time noted the strong resemblance to Soviet silent cinema exhibited by this first half of the film, in particular the strategic use of montage and Hanns Eisler’s contrapuntal musical score (Sch[erret]; Krautz 6). Trivas’s debt to the Soviets is evident in the manifesto on sound film that he co-authored with Russian director Fedor Ozep and screenwriter Natan Abramowitsch Sarchi, which appeared in the New Year’s issue of the Film-Kurier in 1930. r As in Eisenstein’s manifesto of 1928, «Statement on Sound Film,» the three demand a non-naturalistic approach to the use of sound in film. However, «Zum neuen Jahr: Protest! » distinguishes itself from its predecessor in its call for «die Auswertung des Tons und der Sprache als Montagematerial, als Material für poetische Gestaltung und Offenbarung der visionellen [sic! ] Welt» (Ozep, Sarchi, Triwas, emphasis added). 6 In demanding that speech, as well as images, be used as building blocks of montage, Trivas calls attention to his understanding of language’s potential to serve as a critical and specifically cinematic element of film, perhaps purely as raw sonic material or even as a sign in itself. This conviction that language may also serve ideological ends is realized in the first part of Niemandsland during the montage depicting the build-up to war. Combined with the images of each nation’s symbol - the crowned, twoheaded eagles of the Russian and the Hapsburg Empires, the German eagle, the French lictor’s fasces - and the text of the statement, each declaration of war is read aloud by a different voice, in its original language. No translation, no voice-over is needed to understand the juxtaposition of images, voices and languages as each echoes and mirrors the others. Similarly, the following montage of soldiers of different nationalities, wearing distinctive uniforms, drilling underscores the sameness of each nation’s actions, highlighting their commonality despite national and linguistic differences. Replacing the omniscient narrator of the voice-over commentary that opens the film are the linguistically marked voices of the nations that, although now part of the diegesis, are still not identified with a visible body. Language, the Voice and Esperantism 293 The linguistically marked, national voice here is literally «acousmatic,» to use Michel Chion’s term, insofar as this is a voice that «has not yet been visualized» and in its invisibility conjures «a special kind of being, a kind of talking and acting shadow to which we attach the name acousmêtre» (21). Describing the powers attributed to the acousmêtre, Chion continues: Everything hangs on whether or not the acousmêtre has been seen. In the case where it remains not-yet-seen, even an insignificant acousmatic voice becomes invested with magical powers as soon as it is involved, however slightly, in the image. The powers are usually malevolent, occasionally tutelary. Being involved in the image means that the voice doesn’t merely speak as an observer (as commentary), but that it bears with the image a relationship of possible inclusion, a relationship of power and possession capable of functioning in both directions; the image may contain the voice, or the voice may contain the image. (23) If talking cinema promised to reunite the body and the voice, in effect endowing the silent body with subjectivity and presence, thus distinguishing the human subject from the silent world of objects, then the acousmatic national voices of the film’s first half only underscore the continued object status of these men. The linguistically marked acousmatic voices that declare war and command the soldiers are indeed magical in their authority for they possess the ultimate power of life and death over the men and families whom they hold in thrall. Significantly, it is the African cabaret artist, that stateless, diasporic figure, who is able to break this spell. His basic grasp of each of the languages spoken in no-man’s land not only empowers him to call the men’s attention to the absurdity of their nationalistic rhetoric but also to bring them to realize and ultimately take control of their own voices over and against the voices of their respective nations. It is the politics of the voice that dominate the film’s second half, which stages the opposition to, and dissolution of, the power accorded these acousmatic national voices. Here, in the space of no-man’s land, the acousmatic national voice gains a body in the figure of each nationally identified soldier. This marks the climax of Trivas’s exploration of the power of the voice, as it moves from a single, dominant, commanding power in the opening sequences to a multitude of competing acousmatic voices, finally ending up situated in the bodies of the men of different nationalities. The locus and the strength of the linguistically marked voice thus follows a meta-narrative progression that ultimately enfranchises the soldiers of different nations and different languages to reject their position as mouthpieces and to assume the status of subjects, rather than objects, of the voice. While there was plenty of praise for the film’s pacifist message on both sides of the Atlantic, it is among the film’s critics that we find reasons to ex- 294 Nancy P. Nenno amine the language politics of the film more closely. On the Left, critics deplored the way in which the film appeared to ignore the origins of the First World War, the political, economic, and imperialist aims that led to the global conflict. Even as the critic for the Rote Fahne extolled Niemandsland for its d revolutionary solution to war, he rebuked the film: «[M]an erfährt nichts über die Ursachen des imperialistischen Krieges» (Lüdeke). And yet, although the film does not specifically examine the role that imperial interests play in the outbreak of the war, there are references to the imperialist nature of the various nations if one examines the film closely. Thus, the declaration of war by the Czarist regime explicitly points to the imperial nature of its identity by naming Nicholas II not only as «emperor and sole ruler of Russia» but also as «Polish Czar,» among other titles. 7 Similarly, the montage of images depicting the pre-war excitement includes symbols associated with many of the empires that dominated the globe at the time: the Ottoman Turk’s mustache, the Japanese umbrella, the American flag, as well as the African uniform of the French Army worn by Joe Smile as he bids his Parisian audience farewell to the strains of the Marseillaise. Essential to staging the men’s recognition of their common humanity is a scene that foregrounds their mutual suspicion, mistrust, and anger. Debating the origins of the war, each nationally identified soldier ventriloquizes the bellicose tones and defensive rhetoric of the acousmatic voices that initiate this more realistic, narrative part of the film. In a scene that recalls Ludwik Zamenhof’s description of multi-ethnic, multilingual Bialystok as a place without individuals, only nationalities, Joe Smile poses the question, «Warum Krieg? Pourquoi? Willst du? Do you want war? Veux-tu la guerre? Oder du? Alors, warum la guerre? » In response, the Frenchman declares that France never wanted war, pointing a finger at the Germans. The German denies the claim that he wanted war, but steadfastly maintains that Germany had been forced to protect itself. At this point, the Englishman joins in, blaming «the German Kaiser who attacked defenseless Belgium.» Smile begins to grin and finally to shake with laughter as the conversation then turns from the European arena to the topic of global domination. Frenchman: Vous voulez les colonies. (directed at the German) German: Kolonien? Natürlich, Kolonien, habt ihr gehört, Neger? Der Franzose will unsere Kolonien! Frenchman: La France n’est pas une colonie. German: Habt ihr nicht schon genug Kolonien? Den ganzen Äquator habt ihr gepachtet und noch ein Stück China dazu. Englishman: You wanted the whole world for your colony. Language, the Voice and Esperantism 295 As the voices grow louder, and the gestures more threatening, Smile jumps up and waves his arms, exclaiming, Hoorah! Already enemies. You make a noise like the shells. And why? You all say the same thing, but in a different language. That’s why you don’t understand each other. How stupid. You have different uniforms, different languages. I understand, but the dumb man, he has no uniform. He can’t speak. We’re all friends to him. Although the men are not actually saying the same thing, each is blaming another for having started the war. The theme of the sameness of the nations - and the men themselves - visualized in the film’s first half is made explicit by a diegetic figure that gives voice to what Trivas identifies as the source of international conflict, namely language difference. The fact that it is the African subaltern who must first translate and finally resolve the political dispute among the men is significant in this context. This particular sequence, in which he berates the men for their narrowness of vision, is exclusively monolingual; he speaks the language of the given MLV. In both its tone and its pedagogical function, this monolingual speech aligns the figure of the African with the documentary-like voice that opens the film, further rendering him a conduit for Trivas’s message. It is important, however, that those debating imperial systems and colonial aims are not those who bear their brunt, as do the African subaltern and the Eastern European Jew. At the end of the sequence, Joe Smile seats himself next to Irgendwo in der Welt and puts an arm around him as he explains that, to the deaf-mute, they are all friends. «Ich auch ausziehe meine Uniform,» he says, and divests himself of any association with a national entity. As an invocation of the «muteness» of silent film, Irgendwo in der Welt becomes endowed with an internationality that eludes the overtly linguistically-circumscribed figures of the Englishman, the Frenchman, and the German. This two-shot visually binds the two stateless (and foreign) bodies, distinguishing them from those who are still uniformed and belligerent. A cutaway scene depicting the displacement of Lewin’s wife from their home serves to remind the spectator that both Jews and Africans have been shaped by their diasporic histories. Moreover, considering the ways in which Trivas is clearly experimenting with the possibility of counteracting the national aspect of sound film, this coupling of Jewish and African bodies might also be read as invoking the very origins of the talking film revolution, namely The Jazz Singer (Crosland, 1927). Irgendwo in der Welt’s diegetic voicelessness is accompanied by the broader gestures and expository close-ups common in silent film that provide access to his emotional world and contrast starkly with the less dramatic and more realistic acting styles of the Englishman, Frenchman and German. Joe Smile, on the other hand, is neither voiceless nor naturalistic, 296 Nancy P. Nenno straddling the two traditions of film performance. As Tobias Nagl points out, contemporary critics celebrated the way in which Douglas was able to «speak» with his body, his dance essentially telling the story of «Lebensläufe, Abenteuer und Schicksale» (Alfred Polgar qtd. in Nagl 734). With his minstrel-like costume in the cabaret, the sweeping gestures, and exaggerated facial expressions, Joe Smile seems to function as a transitional figure between silent and sound cinema, even as he invokes Jackie Robinson/ Rabinowitz of The Jazz Singer - a liminal, transitional figure between Old and New Worlds, r silent and sound film (Rogin 440-42). As innovative as Trivas’s inclusion of positively-valued racial Others may be, the twinning of the figures of the Jew and the African is not unproblematic, for even as they are the heroes of this utopian, esperantist vision of sound cinema, they cannot escape the widespread threatening associations with the foreign, or non-national, body. In particular, the figure of the black African in the film came under heavy fire from the conservative press. A review in the Deutsche Tageszeitung from 11 December 1931 excoriated the film in which «[e]in Jazz-Nigger aus Paris lehrt die Soldaten der weißen Völker den Frieden! » (qtd. in Bock and Jacobsen 27, emphasis in original) With the epithet of «Jazz-Nigger,» the reviewer explicitly recognizes the American identity of the actor Louis Douglas hidden behind the figure of the African subaltern. Moreover, in the early 1930s, the rhetoric of German nationalism still linked the figure of the Jew with the «bastardization» of German culture, whether as putative instigators of the so-called Black Horror on the Rhine (recall that Smile is shown in fez, blousy pants, and short embroidered vest which mark him as belonging to an African unit of the French Army, possibly that of the tirailleurs sénégalais), or of the «invasion» of jazz (Hitler 908; Partsch 62). Even those who praised the film, such as Hans Siemsen, ultimately resorted to racial stereotypes. Writing in Die Welt am Montag, Siemsen gushed: Und es ist einer der schönsten und besten Gedanken dieses schönen Films, daß dieser Neger, dieser Angehörige einer verachteten, «unkultivierten», «minderwertigen» Rasse (infolge seiner Artisten-Internationalität) der Dolmetscher und Vermittler wird zwischen dem Deutschen, dem Franzosen, dem Engländer, die da im r Granattrichter zusammenhocken, keiner des anderen, aber jeder der «Gefangene» des Krieges und der Granaten. Und nicht nur weil er «internationaler» Artist ist, nicht nur weil er von jeder Sprache ein paar Worte stottern kann, ist dieser Neger der gute Geist dieser zusammengeschossenen Insel zwischen den feuerspeienden feindlichen Linien, sondern auch deshalb, weil er, der Neger, keinen Nationalehrgeiz, keinen «Patriotismus» hat, weil er kein Deutscher, kein Franzose, kein Engländer, sondern «nur» ein Neger, nur ein armer, aber vernünftiger kleiner Mensch ist (qtd. in Bock and Jacobsen 26-27, emphasis in original). Language, the Voice and Esperantism 297 The scare quotes around negative terms such as «uncultivated» and «inferior» do not ultimately mitigate the fact that Siemsen continues to identify the African figure with a racial category. Even as he praises the fact that Smile is without a nation and celebrates his simple humanity, the fact that Smile is without any identity except for his race further seems to empty this figure - already a flat character without definition or personal associations - of the agency he appears to command. Much like many of his contemporaries, Siemsen portrays the black body as always already diasporic, not belonging to any nation, always foreign and never at home - a sensibility that also emerges when Smile announces to the men that he has played the Alhambra in London and the Wintergarten in Berlin. In response, the German suggests that perhaps he had seen him there, or perhaps not, since, «Ihr seht ja egal schwarz aus.» And yet, as Nagl has convincingly demonstrated, the figure of the internationally recognized, cosmopolitan African-American performer nonetheless peers out from behind the mask of the African, ultimately undercutting the sense of the figure’s status as national tabula rasa (Nagl 735-45). Joe Smile is not the primitive savage depicted by conservative critics of the French occupation of the Rhine, nor the wild, ahistorical being of a primitivist imagination. Instead, the artistic persona of Louis Douglas, which was so intimately tied to Weimar Jazz culture, and whose accent is clearly American rather than francophone, remains recognizable both visually and aurally. The slippage between African and African American reveals itself on the margins of the film, first in the visual invocation of the United States in Smile’s cabaret routine, then in his distinctly American stage name, and finally in the persona of Douglas himself. As such, on a meta-discursive level, the looming American presence in the transition to sound film emerges in Trivas’s contemplation of the quandary of sound cinema. Although a shadow figure within the film narrative itself, through the indirect invocation of American cinema and the economic conflicts between European cinema and Hollywood (Crafton 418-39; de Grazia 57-62; Gomery 82-90), Hollywood acquires a presence in the film through the African/ American figure of Douglas. As Alice Maurice has argued, the transition to sound in the US is marked by the deployment of black bodies and voices to authenticate the new medium. «The rhetoric around the ‹black voice,›» she argues, «suggests that racial identity must be seen and heard, or more precised ly, that racial identity lies somewhere in the synchronization of sound and image» (33). Douglas’s «speaking body» delivers the motion required of silent cinema, while his voice delivers on the promise of talking cinema to «sound» authentic. Joe Smile’s imperfect command of the languages dominant in noman’s land, although certainly adequate to the diegetic task of impromptu 298 Nancy P. Nenno translator, also resonates with a minstrel tradition of «black» language, thus supporting, aurally, the difference between black and white. In contrast, the silent Eastern European Jew remains a ghostly figure, more comfortable in the dream world of silent film than the real world of the talkie. Despite the fact that both the Eastern European Jew and the African soldier are linked within the narrative as diasporic figures and thus representatives of an internationalist vision of sound cinema, each figure inflects this project in a different way. Ironically, it is the continued reliance upon the primacy of the visual register that separates these two «foreign» bodies even in this film. Although Trivas actively seeks to develop an esperantist approach to sound cinema that effectively mobilizes both its aural and visual modes of expression, the positions accorded the figures marked by the racial sciences of the day as «other» remain nonetheless divided along these two registers. On the one hand, the African soldier is marked as foreign, mobile, and yet still comprehensible in his limited ability to communicate verbally. As a representative of the transition from silent to sound film, his purpose is to appeal to, and communicate with, a variety of national audiences, without necessarily belonging to them. As a result of the associations with the black body that dominated both scientific and popular discourses of the time, the figure of the African can never be fully integrated or become invisible. On the other hand, despite the fact that Irgendwo in der Welt represents a «foreign» element within the body of the nation, his muteness or absence of linguistic marking allows him to pass in a way that remains impossible for the African. The importance of visual kinship is beautifully illustrated when the mute figure of the Eastern European Jew desperately seeks the photo of himself and his bride, without result, at which point the German hands him a picture of his own family. In a lap dissolve, the image of the German’s family briefly transforms into one of Lewin and his wife, giving explicitly cinematic expression to Trivas’s concept of the «language of simple human feelings» by optically erasing the difference between the two «Europeans.» This scene invokes the roots of Esperanto and Ludwik Zamenhof’s dream of the whole world as one family, suggesting that they belong to a particularly European Jewish experience. Both Esperanto and Niemandsland seek to escape the confines of nation d by creating a space outside of this concept, a parallel territory untouched by national identity. And yet, the languages that dominate no-man’s land remain those of European colonial powers that just so happen to also be the main competitors in the global film market as well as the primary bases for Esperanto. As Albert Guérard noted in 1941, «There is a language imperialism which is not identical but parallel with political imperialism. In both cases we establish in our minds a hierarchy of nations and cultures» (176). By focus- Language, the Voice and Esperantism 299 ing primarily on the English, French and German, the film does not, in fact, extend its scope beyond the European theater of the war, or of the transition to sound film. Despite the fact that Joe Smile is portrayed as the cosmopolitan negotiator among nations and the ultimate signifier of humanity, he remains a racialized figure inscribed with the associations of Weimar’s Jazz culture. Unlike the Eastern European Jew, with whom he shares a diasporic history and sensibility, he nevertheless remains visually separated from the white Europeans, just as his putative geographical origin - Africa - is not a country, but a continent. In its single-minded focus on illuminating the destructiveness of national identity and linguistic difference in the creation of world peace and intercultural understanding, the film’s focus on the aural register results in the creation of a blindspot that ultimately redraws the boundaries from those between nations to those between races. As a result, the esperantist vision of the film fails as a result of its deafness to color. Notes 1 «Von der Einsicht ausgehend, daß schließlich und endlich, die Grundprobleme der Menschheit immer dieselben bleiben und nur das Milieu und die Behandlung des Themas Variationen schafft […].» Pommer 13. My translation. 2 Niemandsland (Trivas, 1931). Produced by Anton Resch. Released 10 December 1931; d banned on 22 April 1933. This article relies on four versions of the film: Inkwell Image’s 2001 video release of Maurice Zouary’s restored (but shortened by 27 minutes) version under the American title, Hell on Earth; the original script and a German film version, both available at the Filmmuseum Berlin-Deutsche Kinemathek; and a German version (also shortened by 23 minutes) available through the distributor Reichskino (www.reichskino.com). 3 For example, in Leni Riefenstahl’s Das blaue Licht (1932), the German artist Vigo (Matthias Wiemann), who is obsessed with the beautiful Junta (Riefenstahl), is confronted with a population in the Dolomites whose Italian he does not understand, although he is able, through gesture and facial expression, to communicate with them. 4 The published script of the film, in which this scene is rendered solely in German, provides a rather different text than the one I transcribed from the film version. There, Françoise in fact is anti-German as she intones sotto voce: «Mit einem Deutschen schon gar nicht! » (Vajda, Otten and Lampel 59). 5 This identity, however, also coincides with the popular image of the African American artist in Weimar Germany, of whom Louis Douglas was a prominent example. Audiences in Weimar Germany could hardly have missed the fact that, in addition to his fame six years earlier in the Revue nègre, Douglas had also recently appeared in several German films, alongside, among others, Willy Fritsch, Lilian Harvey, and Heinz Rühmann in the Ufa production, Einbrecher (Hans Schwarz, 1930). (Hopkins 63; Lotz 297-389; r Nagl 737-39) 300 Nancy P. Nenno 6 While Eisenstein does not explicitly address the issue of national or ethnic identity in this text, this wrinkle was surely apparent to him. In the Soviet Union, where agitprop trains «educated» the population of a vast nation of multiple ethnicities and languages through silent film, the introduction of speech threatened to destabilize, even undercut, the power of the image. The pedagogical force of Soviet montage lay in the clashing images on screen and the concept of «inner speech» rather than the interplay of the visual and the aural. His 1928 «Statement on Sound,» co-authored with Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, begins with the acknowledgement that «the ‹silent› [film] has found its voice.» At the same time, at no point does the text refer to specifics on how the voice - and thus language - might work in the «contrapuntal use of sound vis-à-vis the visual fragment of montage.» Nonetheless, the text concludes with the declaration that «[t]he contrapuntal method of structuring a sound film not only does not weaken d the international nature of cinema but gives to it meaning of unparalleled strength and cultural heights. With this method of construction the sound film will not be imprisoned within national markets […] but will provide an even greater opportunity than before of speeding the idea contained in a film throughout the whole globe, preserving its worldwide viability» (Eisenstein et. al., «Statement» 80-81). For further analysis of Soviet approaches to sound, see Christie and Thompson. 7 Many thanks to Meglena Miltcheva for translating this passage from the Russian. Works Cited All Quiet on the Western Front. Dir. Lewis Milestone. RKO-Pathé Studios, 1930. Allô Berlin? Ici Paris/ Hallo? Hallo? Hier spricht Berlin. Dir. Julien Duvivier. Films Sonores Tobis, 1932. Berger, Verena and Miya Komori. «Introduction: Moving Pictures from a Modern Babel.» Polyglot Cinema: Migration and Transcultural Narration in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. 7-12. blaue Engel, Der. Dir. Josef von Sternberg. Universum Film, 1930. blaue Licht, Das. Dir. Leni Riefenstahl. Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion, 1932. Bock, H.M. and W. Jacobsen, eds. FilmMaterialien 9: Victor Trivas. Hamburg-Berlin: CineGraph, 1996. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Christie, Ian. «Soviet Cinema: Making Sense of Sound.» Screen 23.2 (1982): 34-49. Oxford Journals. 3 August 2010. Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926- 66 1931. Vol. 4 of History of the American Cinema. Ed. Charles Harpole. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990. de Grazia, Victoria. «Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European Cinemas, 1920-1960.» The Journal of Modern History 61.1 (March 1989): 53-87. JSTOR. 15 June 2009. Doane, Mary Ann. «The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.» Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 33-50. JSTOR. 2 August 2010. Drei von der Tankstelle, Die. Dir. Wilhelm Thiele. Universum Film, 1930. Einbrecher. Dir. Hanns Schwarz. (Louis Douglas) Universum Film, 1930. Language, the Voice and Esperantism 301 Eisenstein, Sergei, Vselovod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov. «Statement on Sound» (1928). The Eisenstein Reader. Ed. Richard Taylor. Trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell. London: bfi Publishing, 1998. 80-81. Germans and Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange. Ed. Larry A. Greene and Anke Ortlepp. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2011. Gomery, Douglas. «Economic Struggle and Hollywood Imperialism: Europe Converts to Sound.» Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 80-93. Guérard, Albert. «National Language and National Cultures.» The American Scholar 10.2 (Spring 1941): 170-83. JSTOR. 9 February 2013. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Alvin Saunders Johnson. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941. Hopkins, Leroy. «Louis Douglas and the Weimar Reception of Harlemania.» Germans and Americans 50-69. Jazz Singer, The. Dir. Alan Crosland. Warner Brothers, 1927. Kameradschaft. Dir. G.W. Pabst. (Ernst Busch) Nero-Film AG and Gaumont-Franco Film-Aubert, 1931. Krautz, Alfred. «Niemandsland.» Beiträge zur Film und Fernsehwissenschaft: Schriftenreihe der Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR 36 (1989): 5-18. Krützen, Michaela. «‹Esperanto für den Tonfilm›: Die Produktion von Sprachversionen für den frühen Tonfilm-Markt.» Positionen deutscher Filmgeschichte: 100 Jahre Kinematographie: Strukturen, Diskurse, Kontexte. Ed. Michael Schaudig. Diskurs Film 8 (1996): 119-53. Lenauer, Jean. «Three Paris Films.» Close Up 10.1 (March 1933): 54-60. Lotz, Rainer. Black People. Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany. Bonn: Birgit Lotz, 1997. Lüdeke, Heinz. «Niemandsland.» Die Rote Fahne (20 December 1931). Maurice, Alice. «‹Cinema at its Source›: Synchronizing Race and Sound in the Early Talkies.» Camera Obscura 49 (2002): 31-71. Müller, Corinne. Vom Stummfilm zum Tonfilm. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003. Nagl, Tobias. Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino. Munich: text+kritik, 2009. Niemandsland, file 2891. Deutsche Kinemathek, Schriftgutarchiv. Niemandsland. Dir. Victor Trivas. Resco-Filmproduktion, 1931. Nornes, Abé Mark. Cinema Babel. Translating Global Cinema. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2007. Ozep, Sarchi, Triwas [sic], «Zum neuen Jahr: Protest! » Film-Kurier 3 (2 January r 1930). Partsch, Cornelius. Schräge Töne. Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2000. Berger, Verena and Miya Komori, ed. Polyglot Cinema: Migration and Transcultural Narration in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Beiträge zur europäischen Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft.Vol. 2. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2010. Pommer, Erich. «Tonfilm und Internationalität.» Universal Filmlexikon. Berlin: Universal Filmlexikon, 1932. 13-14. Rogin, Michael. «Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice.» Critical Inquiry 18.3 (Spring 1992): 417-53. JSTOR. 15 July 2013. Rogowski, Christian, ed. The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema. Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. 302 Nancy P. Nenno Sch[erret], F. «Ein Film gegen den Krieg.» Vorwärts 10 December 1931. Abendausgabe. Sinclair, Craig. «Audition: Making Sense of/ in the Cinema.» The Velvet Light Trap 51 (Spring 2003): 17-28. Project Muse. 15 July 2013. Stössinger, Felix. «Tonfilm.» Sozialistische Monatshefte 37.73 (11 May 1931): 506-07. Thompson, Kristin. «Early Sound Counterpoint.» Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 115- 40. JSTOR. 2 August 2010. Trivas, Victor. «No Man’s Land.» Bock and Jacobsen 4-5. Vajda, Ladislaus, Karl Otten and Peter Martin Lampel. Kameradschaft/ La tragédie de la mine. Ed. Helga Belach and Hans-Michael Bock. Munich: text und kritik, 1997. Vincendeau, Ginette. «Hollywood Babel.» Screen 2 (1988): 24-39. Wahl, Chris. «Discovering a Genre: The Polyglot Film.» Cinemascope - Independent Film Journal 1 (January-April 2005): 1-8. 26 July 2013. <www.cinemascope.net>. l Wahl, Chris. «Babel’s Business - On Ufa’s Multiple Language Film Versions, 1929- 1933.» Rogowski 235-48. Westfront 1918. Dir. G.W. Pabst. Bavaria Film and Nero Film, 1931. Zamenhof, L. L. The Birth of Esperanto. Extract of a Private Letter to N. Borovko. Trans. Henry W. Hetzel. Fort Lee, NJ: Esperanto Association of North America, 1931. -. Attempt Towards an International Language. Trans. Henry Phillips, Jr. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1889. archive.org. 14 July 2012. Sounds of the City in M and M Emil und die Detektive KATHERINE ROPER S AINT M ARY ’ S C OLLEGE O F C ALIFORNIA Pairing Fritz Lang’s proto-film noir, M, with Gerhard Lamprecht’s film adaptation of Erich Kästner’s popular children’s novel, Emil und die Detektive, might seem unpromising, but several considerations motivate it. 1 Both films are set in Berlin. Both deal with the pursuit of an elusive urban criminal whose unobtrusive visual appearance excludes him from suspicion. Both show how a supposedly powerless underclass succeeds in capturing him. Both show the limitations of a modern urban police force, but also how its increasingly methodical techniques can be effective in dealing with crime. And, important for my concerns as a historian, both premiered in 1931, a year of ever-mounting unemployment, already exceeding 20%, political paralysis after the elections of September 1930 destroyed even the possibility for a parliamentary majority to address the crises, and a proliferation of street demonstrations and political violence. 2 However, we should resist the temptation to interpret late Weimar exclusively in terms of catastrophe. Recent historians remind us instead to recognize how contemporaries’ awareness of crisis could also evoke expectations of renewal (See Fritzsche, «Weimar»; Koselleck; Graf, esp. 350- 80; Föllmer and Graf, esp. 9-44). One occasion for hopefulness about national renewal might be seen in the German film industry’s rapid conversion to sound in the months immediately prior to 1931, for from the earliest years of the republic many had come to see the film industry and its global expansion as a barometer for postwar German stature in the world. 3 Corinna Müller, in her indispensable Vom Stummfilm zum Tonfilm, shows that the transition from silent to sound films in Germany was not «selbstverständlich» (245). At the beginning few thought that silent film would be eclipsed by sound (Rügner 93-95). Prominent German critics argued that sound film, with its «Realitätssuche,» could undermine film’s hard-won identity as art, with its imaginative essence (see Müller 16- 17; Ashkenazi 249-50). Audiences, after initial fascination with the novelty, also seemed reluctant to abandon their familiar cinema experience with silent films. And due to the still primitive state of audio equipment in numerous outlying theaters, which often made dialogue barely understandable, some complained that watching a sound film was more taxing («anstrengend») than 304 Katherine Roper going to the theater (Müller 245-46). Still, once the transition to sound was underway, acceptance did occur, Müller asserts, «ausserordentlich rasch» (245; see also 9-73, 108-85, 395-96). In response to the specter of runaway American dominance over the European film market, in early 1929 the Ufa management decided on a rapid conversion to the production and distribution of sound films, and it soon spurred international agreements among other film companies to overcome threatening patent wars and achieve interchangeability of equipment (Kreimeier 213). To be sure, Ufa’s prospering obscured the economic havoc suffered by smaller companies and the immense economic burdens levied on cinema owners as they converted to the new equipment. By 1931, however, technological innovations permitted the synchronization of different sounds onto a single soundtrack on the filmstock, allowing for a far more complex use of sound than early stationary microphones had accomplished, and almost three-quarters of the cinemas in Germany had converted to sound. Once film companies had built expansive sound studios and theater owners had invested in expensive equipment, it became financially unfeasible to mix the making and showing of silents with sound films. Thus grew widespread hopes for German leadership in the «Siegeszug des Tonfilms.» 4 In what Michael Ryan describes as «a volatile period of transition in German film culture,» Fritz Lang and Gerhard Lamprecht launched their respective forays into sound film. 5 Since conventions in the use of sound were only beginning to develop, both filmmakers were able to experiment with how best to use the new medium. Both were conscious of the challenges of balancing sound and visual images in their films, rather than having one overwhelm the other. Both seemed at times to use sound sparingly, often producing segments that showed their continuing devotion to the visual expressiveness of silent film. A striking contrast between their respective uses of sound, however, lay in Lang’s decision to avoid non-diegetic music and in Lamprecht’s profuse use of such music to convey meaning in scenes that were devoid of dialogue or other noises. Their choices created vastly differing «sounds of the city» that accentuated differences between the ominous tone of M and the M inspiriting atmosphere of Emil. Although neither film explicitly depicts the worsening economic and political upheavals that we usually associate with 1931, contemporary reviews emphasized that cinema audiences saw each as «ein Zeitbild,» which one critic described as «ein Spiegelbild von Tageserlebnissen» (Aros). Indeed, both films abound with details of everyday life and social interactions, but both the «Tageserlebnisse» they portray and the Berlin in which they unfold differ profoundly. M shows darkened studio shots of a city terrorized by mass me- M dia reports of a serial child murderer, which evoked to spectators sensational Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 305 accounts of real serial killers («Serienmörder»), such as Fritz Haarmann, Karl Großmann, and, most recently, Peter Kürten. Those reports had gripped newspaper readers throughout Germany (Lang, «Mein Film» 5; Kaes, M 30- M 33). It depicts myriad responses to the citywide crisis, from mothers’ anguish, to citizens’ hysteria and precipitous actions, to the police launching a methodical, but seemingly fruitless search for the killer, and to the underworld mobilizing its own self-interested search. Emil, on the other hand, portrays a modern, bustling Berlin with masses of people going about their business, and, in contrast to M, this film’s crisis concerns not a whole city but an individual boy: Emil’s mother has given him a sum of precious money to deliver to his grandmother, but upon his arrival in Berlin, he discovers that it is gone from his jacket pocket. This film focuses on how Emil and the boys who join forces with him launch an operation to pursue the thief through the city to retrieve the money. It envelops them and their adventures in the environment of Berlin of 1931 through resplendent cinematography of the city and music that conveys not only the boys’ high-spirited energy, but infuses it into the city as well. Eric Rentschler recently suggested that we can gain new insights by putting films from differing genres into dialogue with one another (50). Responding to his invitation, I argue that M and M Emil, taken together with their darkened versus sunny urban depictions, directly remind both viewers and historical inquirers of evocative moments of the metropolis of 1931, which, when processed according to individual historical antennae, offered either new perspectives on Weimar Germany or welcome escapes from its daily travails. «Sounds of the city» in this context extend beyond an attempt simply to catalog sounds of the urban landscape transcribed onto a film’s soundtrack; rather, they involve «listening» to the city that the filmmakers’ mixing of sound, image, and ideas produces. Listening with our minds, as well as our ears and eyes, to their creations of the imagination, I argue, enriches our understanding of Weimar society. Their city - and also the interplay between their respective choices about how to portray it - alerts us to ever-proliferating interpretive possibilities, social insights, ideological perspectives, and cultural discourses that viewers in Weimar Germany connected with. Lang’s use of sound has received considerable scholarly attention, but as Tom Gunning notes, «although M’s innovative use of sound forms one of the clichés of film history, this universal acknowledgement cannot render its power banal» (Gunning 165; see also Kaes, M 9-13 and Brockmann 115-19). Indeed, the abundant discussion offers an invaluable trove of ideas by which to consider what constitutes distinctive sounds of the city in the film. A significant starting point lies in Anton Kaes’s comment that, «[It] has rightly 306 Katherine Roper been called a ‹silent film with sound,›» but even the long, seemingly silent segments contain notable choices about the use of sound that help viewers to connect with what is happening in the film. 6 The striking sequence near the beginning, for instance, shows a mother’s loving preparations for her daughter’s lunch, with sparse sounds of the soft ticking and chiming of the kitchen cuckoo clock marking the build-up of Elsie not coming home. Her rising anxiety about Elsie is evoked by silent shots of her peering over the empty stairwell, from the apartment window, and into the attic, where only a few scattered pieces of laundry hang, interspersed with her increasingly alarmed calls: «Elsie? » Even more ominous are the silent shots that dramatize Elsie’s absence: the untouched table setting, her ball tumbling into the grass, her balloon floating haphazardly against overhead street wires, followed by a black screen. Yet, it is the sound of newspaper boys shouting «Extra! » that confirms her fate. Lang later explained that he had no intention of depicting the murder but wanted to leave it to the audience’s imagination, and he insisted that sound would contribute. «Damals kam ich auch zu der Erkenntnis, daß man Ton als dramaturgisches Element nicht nur verwenden kann, sondern unbedingt sollte.» 7 These scenes show how sound became such a dramaturgical element when interspersed with deliberate silence. Several striking street scenes also occur in silence, without the traffic noise and other ambient sound that will soon become conventional. For instance, one relatively long segment shows, with unexpected silence, the stealthy convergence of police vans and marching officers in a darkened narrow street; it visually narrates an action organized with military precision to launch a raid on an underworld pub. So uncomfortable with this segment were the restorers of a 1960 version of M, that they added traffic sounds and music (reproduced in M, Disc 2). In a 1963 interview, however, Lang stressed that the omission of sound here was intentional (Bareither 195). Clearly also intentional was the sudden breaking of the silence by a piercing police whistle followed by a loud shout, «Die Bullen! » - two distinct sounds to signify the beginning of the raid. With that, the scene is suddenly transformed into visual turbulence and a cacophony of shouting voices of people trying to escape the round-up. Lang’s moving from total silence for the police approach to the aural and visual turbulence of the panicked crowd (signifying two distinct sounds of the city) is separated by the shrill whistle and isolated shout: the intricate preparations behind a police action and a multi-layered portrayal of police relations with the populace. Far more frequently than the injections of carefully-chosen sound into silences, however, the sounds of Lang’s city are made by humans, whose many utterances serve widely varying dramaturgical functions: a peculiar whistle by the killer, a hysteria that breaks out through- Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 307 out the city, aural - and visual - instruction about modern police techniques, cross-cutting dialogue that shows parallels in two organized searches for the killer by Berlin’s police department and its underworld groups, and a tumultuous kangaroo court staged when the underworld captures the murderer. The instances of city voices/ sounds, not unexpectedly, convey a metropolis in which inhabitants cannot be reduced to uniformity but also which left spectators grappling with questions whose answers rested with their own radically differing experiences: a populace is panicked by the killings and erupts into wild accusations toward each other, or, conversely, acts as a responsible citizenry (the film seems to incline toward the former); the police are ineffectual in their methods or, conversely, meticulous (critics differ sharply here); the urban criminals are motivated by self-interest, or, conversely, their ultimate goal is to bring him to justice through their «trial,» or they simply become a lynch mob (all possibilities are in the film). «Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder,» reads Lang’s original subtitle for the film, and in portraying the many dimensions of the city’s search, he uses sound in multifarious ways to compound the complexities of visual narrative that were already hallmarks of his films: by sharp interruptions of sound to the dramatic build-up of a silent segment; by a multitude of voices comprising the city’s response to the presence of an unknown murderer; by didactic narrations of an inventory of police methods; by off-screen voices (or other sounds) whose origin may or may not be clear; by cross-cutting of dialogue linking action in different locations; and, in the last moments of the film, three succinct sentences enunciated in three rapid shifts of location that will leave spectators pondering where the film’s resolution lies. For attentive spectators who exited the cinema onto the streets of Weimar Germany (and critiques suggest that audiences were extremely attentive), it was «ein nachdenklicher Film, der von Anfang bis zu Ende interessiert […] hat» (Aros) and one that would inspire, confirm, or provoke a wide array of perspectives on the surrounding society. The key sound in M is the musical fragment that ultimately leads to the M identification and capture of the killer: an eerie whistling in the street of a theme from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt. 8 Audiences first hear it in a scene that shows a nondescript middle-aged man (played by Peter Lorre) leading a little girl to a blind balloon seller from whom he buys a cheery doll-like balloon to present her - or is it, as Gunning suggests, «a grotesque humanoid shape» (171)? Through the sporadic repetition of the whistled theme, the audience comes to recognize it as a sign of the killer’s compulsion, and a subsequent hearing of it allows the balloon seller to identify the child abductor. 9 What Lang intended to be a clumsily whistled fragment to forestall any supposition of musicality on the part of the killer, was nevertheless so striking that 308 Katherine Roper one film-music historian listed the Grieg theme as one of the nine «erwähnenswerten Tonfilmpartituren» of 1931 (Bareither 196; Thiel 142-43). Still more prevalent than the killer’s whistling of the Grieg theme is the multitude of voices that reveal the rising terror and popular hysteria of the city’s inhabitants (the prominent Berlin accent of such voices clearly identifies the city even though the film does not explicitly name it). 10 Siegfried Kracauer observes, «Lang’s imaginative use of sound to intensify dread and terror is unparalleled in the history of the talkies.» 11 The opening scene has a washerwoman on a tenement balcony, screaming at children below, who are playing a grisly game about the killings, and, of course, in the following scenes we hear the frantic calls of Elsie’s terrified mother. The next shots lead into a montage of popular hysteria as citizens process the news. Newsboys shouting, «Extra! » become, in Gunning’s words, «the voice of the city, a carefully orchestrated mounting chorus of news vendors, their diverse voices competing with each other and with car horns,» with people quickly grabbing copies (175). Another shot shows a crowd gathered around a Litfaßsäule plastered with a poster of the latest news, and people at the back, straining to see, shout for someone to read it. The apparent reading aloud of the poster, however, proves to be an early instance of Lang’s technique of overlapping one sound in two different scenes. As the voice continues, a cut takes us to a Kneipe where a group of aging burghers are enjoying the regular encounter of their Stammtisch. The voice proves to be that of one of its members reading a newspaper account to his cronies: «Jeder Mensch auf der Straße kann der Täter sein.» 12 The idea incites a crossfire of accusations about one of them being the murderer, and the gathering breaks up with angry threats of libel suits flying. Subsequent shots on the streets show staid pedestrians transformed into angry mobs. Passersby start screaming, «Murderer! » believing that an accused pickpocket being escorted from a bus by police is the captured killer. Another group crowds around an unprepossessing elderly gentleman who has responded to a child’s question about what time it is and frenziedly accuses him of being the child murderer. Whether such overwrought outcries merely satirize popular behavior or exemplify Lang’s deep-seated suspicion of «the people» remains controverted; indeed, in one critique, Thomas Koebner argues both possibilities in succession (36-37). Alternative interpretations by Tom Gunning of these scenes have proposed an «image of city inhabitants as isolated, atomized individuals under a regime of terror,» or the «fragmentary nature of the citizens of the metropolis, not only mutually suspicious of each other, but each absorbed in their own dramas and reactions to the crisis» or the «anonymity and disintegration of social space» (174, 176). Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 309 A counterpoint to the hysteria of the populace is found in the visual and aural representations of a modern and highly professional urban police force, which Lang has already introduced in the sequence where the police converge for the raid. The key scene, in which Lang employs another inventive interplay of sound and image, involves a phone conversation between the police commissioner («Polizeipräsident»), who is overseeing the search for the killer, and an angry minister, who demands repeatedly that the police need to achieve «das Resultat» in finding the killer. From his end, the police commissioner patiently but emphatically lists the unremitting efforts of his men, while the camera roams through city spaces, providing a visual compendium of the rationalized police procedures he is describing: shots of men searching bushes at a site of one of the killings, retrieving a bonbon wrapper; a huge slide of an enlarged fingerprint retrieved from the paper; city maps pored over to find out where the wrapper might have originated; interviews with a succession of candy shopkeepers. 13 A brief interruption to the description has a graphologist dictating a letter to his secretary about the evidence that shows the perpetrator had to be extremely deranged. The minister on the phone is not impressed, but his visibly impatient gestures communicate to spectators the impossible situation his men are confronting. A different police method for searching for the killer rests on the idea that he might be immersed in the underworld society, and this supposition - implausible as it is - allows the police to launch a raid on a lowlife establishment. As noted above, in this tumultuous scene we «hear» both aurally and visually a sound of the city that reveals the cynical, stormy, and ultimately submissive relationship of the underworld to the police. After the officers force the clamorous crowd back down the stairs into the basement pub, the crowd’s angry shouts turn to ridicule when they recognize the figure of Kriminalkommissar Karl Lohmann descending from the shadows. 14 They begin a sing-song chant: «Lohmann, der dicke Lohmann,» but Lohmann’s paternalistic, «Na, na Kinder» quickly reveals the kind of familiar relationship the police have with the underworld, and the sound of the pub clientele addressing Lohmann as «Herr Kommissar,» along with his self-evident use of Du in return, leaves no doubt as to the hierarchy of authority here. Sitting down at a processing table, he brings order to the room as he examines each person’s identity papers, shrewdly rejecting the many forgeries. Almost all who pass by are dismissed with «Alex,» i.e., they are to be sent to the police headquarters on Alexanderplatz for further processing. 15 Interspersed into Lohmann’s ongoing inspection is a silent visual collage that inventories a vast array of confiscated weapons and stolen goods being arranged on tables by the police (yet another depiction of police techniques). The crowd’s raucous taunts have long since 310 Katherine Roper yielded to grudgingly obedient silence - a transition that offers a vivid display of the police’s authority when they are in immediate contact with a group of criminal suspects. The portrayal of the police and their methods sparked considerable discussion. Kracauer notes that the film’s «pictorial reports on current police procedures are inserted in such a skillful way that they appear to be part of the action» (219), and Kaes suggests that the film displays procedures from the popular 1926 police exhibition in Berlin (M 35; see also Lang, M «Mein Film» 5-6). Others have asserted that the film shows the ineffectualness of the police, whose search leads into countless blind alleys and false directions. 16 The film, however, does demonstrate, as the Polizeipräsident argues on the phone to the minister, the extraordinary difficulty of tracking down a criminal in a city of four million, and, it should also be remembered, police methods do eventually lead to their identifying the killer. But it is the group introduced in the raid scene that gets to him first. Far from being the obsequious bunch being processed by the police in the bar, the underworld is shown to constitute a highly organized and efficient business. The scene opens with four professional criminals pacing in an apartment, anxiously awaiting the arrival of their Chef for a meeting of the representaf tives of the various specialties (pickpockets, burglars, card sharks, con artists). Here again, sounds of the city include silent segments, such as one that follows after a man asks for the time on the phone and then systematically lays out and synchronizes his stolen watches on the table. As they nervously await their overdue leader, they complain about the intensifying pressures by the Bullen: «Deinem Beruf kannste nit mehr nachjehen, weil de dauern über’n Kriminaler stolperst» (Lang, M. Protokoll 39). After a tense waiting l time, Schränker, the Chef, arrives, and after angrily ordering the shades to be ff drawn, he convenes the meeting. The real problem, he tells his confederates, is that «Ein Aussenseiter verdirbt uns das Geschäft.» They need to launch a search for the killer, he asserts, to get the police off their backs (Schränker here clearly endorses the idea of the ineffectualness of police), and he proceeds to work out how they should organize the search. As the meeting unfolds, Lang launches a new exploration of voiceovers and images. The scene begins by showing the smoke-filled meeting around the dining table of the apartment, but in mid-sentence Schränker’s speech and gesture merge into that of another speaker and, spectators soon learn, another meeting. Members of the police ministry sit at their own conference table, also beneath clouds of smoke, hammering out their new possibilities for the search. Using both visual and aural cross-cutting between the two settings, Lang is portraying, in the cynical words of critic Rudolf Arnheim «representatives of two solid bourgeois professions who earn their daily bread through Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 311 the commission and obstruction of punishable offenses» (qtd. in Brockmann 121). In neither interviews nor writings did Lang accede to such an interpretation, but the segment leaves no doubt regarding his conviction about parallels between the two groups, who both see themselves as professionals attempting to solve the seemingly intractable problem of finding the child murderer. Kaes builds a convincing argument that memories of World War I and Germans’ experience of total mobilization pervaded Weimar society, and in his discussion of M, he specifically emphasizes its legacy in these two meetings. 17 The plans concocted in both the gangster and the police meetings involve not only their identical goal of capturing the murderer but also of organizing their action to mobilize for a war against this enemy. After the far-reaching experiences of wartime mobilization, «military technology,» in the words of Fritzsche, «had evolved into a ‹second nature› which would fundamentally reshape postwar Europe» («Landscape» 38). Although the underworld group and the police devise radically differing approaches to finding the killer, both create detailed plans and a command structure that suggest the «second-nature» of military-style organization to which Fritzsche refers. In this case, of course, each organizational plan is tailored to the conditions of the big city, rather than the goals of wartime mobilization. The police meeting, focusing on the hand-scrawled letter sent to the press by the killer, decides they must seek someone with a history of derangement. A collage of shots (many of them silent) shows the layers of organization: canvassing hospitals and mental asylums for names of patients released in the last five years; consolidating the stacks of information and producing a typed list with addresses of each; dividing up the names and assigning detectives to check out each person for possible clues. Karl Lohmann is in charge of the operation, and subsequent close-ups show names being scratched off the lists and scenes of Lohmann reading reports and discussing the progress of the operation with one of the detectives. All of this organization involves processes that resemble command techniques from the war. Similarly, the gangsters, having decided to organize a citywide surveillance network using the union of beggars, launch their own conscription-like process in the headquarters of the beggars’ organization with close-ups of lists of beggars’ names being coordinated with a city map and shots of each beggar approaching the table to be assigned to a district. Each operation leads to an unobtrusive man named Hans Beckert, whom spectators have long known to be the killer. Lang later declared that he deliberately chose Peter Lorre to portray the murderer because his ordinary appearance so much challenged what Lang called «the famous Lombroso image of a murderer,» who people thought could be recognized by anatomical features such as «big eyebrows, big shoulders.» 18 Noteworthy is that both 312 Katherine Roper groups eventually identify the killer as a man of obvious insanity, with the police finding him by tracking the rambling letter to the room of the man who scrawled it and the underworld identifying him by his compulsive whistling of Grieg’s theme. The police list leads a detective to visit Beckert’s room and pick up material clues that Lohmann eventually puts together with other evidence they have collected. The balloon seller recognizes the distinctive whistle, and his shouts mobilize the underworld network on the street. Despite each group’s differing method, the sound and camera suggest that they simultaneously identify Beckert: adjoining shots has each leader exclaiming that they are finally on the trail of the killer. The beggars’ pursuit is launched with the branding of the iconic identifying chalk «M» on Beckert’s coat. 19 Instantly abandoning the little girl he was targeting, the now-frantic Beckert hastens through the streets. He is followed by a succession of streetwise pursuers, each of whom hands him off to the next with a sharp whistle. When a passing fire engine (with siren sounding) cuts off the beggars’ view, he disappears, but they are certain (and the camera confirms this) that he has ducked into an office building. Informed by phone, Schränker organizes his men to go after him. As the camera narrates the gangsters’ practiced skills in trashing the office building to carry out their search (not unlike the narration of police methods during Lohmann’s phone report), sounds of the city are, like so many others in this film, mostly visual. The most important literal sound is the faint tapping of Beckert trying to shape a nail to open a door, which allows them to discover him hiding in an attic. A cut takes us to the police waiting in Beckert’s darkened room for their man to come home. Were it not for the office building operation by the underworld, they would have captured him that night, but at the cost of one more victim. One member of the gang opines that Beckert should be handed over to the police, but Schränker disabuses him of the idea, asserting that only they themselves can enact justice (their original motivation for the search - getting the police off their backs - has now been eclipsed). The climactic scene of underworld justice takes place in the cavernous basement of an abandoned Schnappsfabrik. 20 The scene is preceded by Lohmann’s interrogation of Franz, the one man whom police captured from the underworld operation in the office building and who has divulged to the astonished detective that they have caught the child murderer. With a dialogue overlay of Franz describing where they have taken him, a succession of shots shows the ruined exterior and empty interior of the huge factory building. The dialogue breaks off, and a cut takes us to a dimly lit industrial stairway; with a sudden burst of noise, three men haul a screaming Beckert out from a locked door and shove him down another stairway. He wheels around, wide eyed, as he sees where he is; Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 313 in complete silence the camera pans over scores of underworld people, there to witness the «trial.» In this 14-minute segment voices explode into multilevels of exchange. From the people, there is attentiveness, jeering laughter, and murderous rage. From Beckert, there are first frenzied protests that they have no right to try him, and then his haunting monologue, in which he narrates the voices in his head and his compulsion to kill. 21 From the presiding Schränker, we hear repeated insistence that a compulsive killer must be eliminated (mental treatment under Paragraph 51 only insures that he will be back later to kill). And from a disheveled defender, who in imitation of regular judicial procedures is supposed to give the trial some legitimacy: a fervent argument against executing a sick man (some spectators saw this as a powerful argument against the death penalty, which was under debate in Germany). Film critics in their newspaper accounts also noted another kind of sound of the city during this scene: cheers and whistles from the audience at the film’s premiere, whose rowdy interjections echoed to strident Weimar debates about the insanity defense of Paragraph 51 and the death penalty, which attests to the vociferous involvement that Weimar filmgoers often displayed. 22 The anger of the crowd reaches a crescendo, and, screaming, they surge forward, about to tear Beckert limb from limb. But suddenly they stop - total silence - and, in unison, staring forward, raise their hands up, which even Schränker, after a brief hesitation, does as well. Cut to a shot of the cowering Beckert, as an authoritative hand grasps his shoulder and a somber voice intones: «Im Namen des Gesetzes.» The next scene opens with five robed justices seating themselves at the bench; the presiding judge proclaims, «Im Namen des Volkes.» Cut to three women in mourning garb; the weeping mother of the murdered Elsie intones, «Davon werden unsere Kinder auch nicht wieder lebendig. Man muss eben noch besser auf die Kinder acht geben. [black screen, as in the opening moment of the film] Ihr! » Some interpret the brevity of the courtroom scene as a distrustful allusion to Weimar justice. 23 In an interview, Lang was non-committal, insisting that he and the scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou (his wife at the time), wanted only to portray the ugliest imaginable crime. And the mother’s admonition embodied their intent (Bareither, 183, 194; Lang, «Mein Film» 6). Clearly, the film invokes many issues of contemporary German society and opens many interpretive questions. Moreover, the complexities compound themselves when we try to assess possible effects of the film on audiences, remembering that the cheering or whistling attested to spectators’ interaction with the film 24 and to their hearing from it differing sounds of the city: hysterical burghers (or, conversely, burghers called to be attentive to their children’s safety); an indefatigable police force (or, conversely, one hobbled by 314 Katherine Roper dead-end efforts); sympathy with a killer driven by insanity (or, conversely, a conviction that all humans are responsible for their acts); an argument against the death penalty (or, conversely, an argument for it as essential punishment); weakness of the authority of law (or, conversely, its majesty). Lang’s portrayals of the underworld open still more possible interpretations for the spectator. Were they criminals merely trying to lessen intrusive police raids? Or professionals whose skills capture the killer? A crowd committed to bringing the killer to justice? Or, simply, a lynch mob? Was their «court» an attempt to carry out real justice? Or, conversely, a blatantly illegal imitation of the legitimate judicial system? The film’s portrayals offer support for any of these perceptions. And an essential component is Lang’s use of sound - multifarious voices from a wide range of people, reliance on silence at key junctures, cautious recourse to film noises, his cross-cutting of dialogue and image - all contribute to the film’s «open case.» 25 Confronting the questions raised by M’s treatment of such themes impels historians to continue to expand their horizons beyond what Peter Fritzsche describes as the «excessive focus on the fate of the Republic» and «the anguished wanderers among the postwar ruins to which we continue to be introduced in even the best syntheses» («Weimar» 639). In a more open exploration of Weimar history, he continues, «What historians are left with is not one single Weimar story, but multiple versions» (647). My own decision to leave open the questions raised in the film is grounded in my conviction that this approach better allows us to hear and see M as an intricate M Zeitbild that d begins to hint at the tangled complexities its spectators confronted both during the film and when they left the cinema doors. Emil und die Detektive, in contrast to M, touches upon few Weimar controversies, and it offers a mostly optimistic Zeitbild, replete with abundant images of contemporary society, particularly of Berlin, in 1931. As mentioned earlier, a band of children organizes a pursuit of the man who stole 140 marks from Emil, and their mobilization becomes a lively adventure with serious purpose. Rather than showing the ‹Weltstadt der Krise› that the popular press touted, 26 and in contrast to Lang’s film-noir depiction of darkened urban neighborhoods, Lamprecht depicts the site of the children’s adventure as a sunny Berlin whose streets teem with traffic and pedestrians. In so doing, his film radiates an optimistic perspective on the future of Germany - despite the children’s urgency about the theft. The film, which premiered at the Ufa-Theater Kurfürstendamm on 2 December 1931, was greeted with almost universal enthusiasm: «Wenn wir aus dem Kino kommen,» wrote one critic, «so haben Emil [and his comrades] uns Skeptikern wieder ein Stück Glauben an unsere Gegenwart und an un- Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 315 sere Zukunft geschenkt» (M.Sp.). A significant component of its success was composer Allan Gray’s expressive musical score, which becomes the film’s most prominent sound of the city. In contrast to Lang’s decision against using non-diegetic music, Lamprecht made music into a central dramaturgical element. The lively rhythms, the interweaving of musical foreboding with sparkling harmonies, and the many instrumental variations give vitality to what Kracauer calls a «neat and unpretentious documentary shots of Berlin street scenes» and convey the light-hearted tone to the children’s adventure that Kästner’s novel demands (Kracauer 225; on the novel, see Roper, «Emil»). The experience of having studied in Berlin with the pioneering composer Arnold Schoenberg while supporting himself by writing cabaret music enabled Gray to create an energetic musical score that exemplified reassuring promise about urban modernity (see Rotthaler; Crook). This inventive interaction between sound and image suggests close collaboration between Lamprecht and Gray to produce magical scenes of the children moving through Berlin streets. Not surprisingly, Wolfgang Thiel lists Gray’s score among nine «erwähnenswerten Tonfilmpartituren» for 1931, from the 155 sound films released that year (142-43). Emil’s first sounds of the city occur when the boy from Neustadt gets on the train to Berlin and enters a compartment filled with strangers. The sounds that Lamprecht used to begin this segment soon became conventional: hissing steam, a long train whistle, the accelerating roar of turning wheels, and, at a later stop, the conductor’s «Einsteigen, bitte.» As Emil’s train ride continues, however, music supplants the train noises, and it now epitomizes the forward motion to the city: an accelerating rhythm in the lower strings replaces the noise of the rotating wheels, and woodwinds replace the train whistle. 27 A new musical theme of foreboding appears, however, at first intertwined with the exciting musical anticipation of the big city. Preceding it is a visual sequence that begins as Emil surveys his fellow passengers. In the camera’s vignettes of each, they appear to be a cross-section of burghers, and Emil’s polite gestures suggest his eagerness to be part of the brief, anonymous encounters that typify social life outside of Neustadt. But an ominous fellow passenger gains Emil’s attention, after the camera pans toward a raised newspaper in an opposite seat, and it is lowered to reveal the darting gaze of a man reacting to Emil’s comment that in Berlin he will have «etwas Geschäftliches zu erledigen» (i.e., delivering the money to his grandmother). The leering man makes Emil still more uncomfortable when he unleashes a barrage of tall tales about how things work in the big city - until admonished by fellow passengers to stop talking foolishness. After the next stop, Emil and the sly stranger suddenly are alone in the compartment. Ominous tones of music 316 Katherine Roper intensify visual signs of Emil’s aversion. He is worried enough to retreat to the restroom, where he pins the money inside his jacket pocket in a close-up shot accompanied by a four-note descending horn phrase, identified in the printed transcript of Billie Wilder’s screenplay as the Geldmotiv, which will recur later in the film (Emil Drehbuch 45). 28 When the man foists a drugged bonbon on Emil, a mounting sequence of minor chords in the deep winds, followed by a string version of the Geldmotiv, mixes with a descending twonote phrase by lower horns, then trilling winds that intensify the excitement, followed by a discordant piano. As the camera depicts Emil’s blurring vision, a sudden slowing of the music portrays his succumbing to the drug. Lamprecht’s filmic portrayal of Emil’s subsequent frightening dream has been aptly described by Helga Schütz as, «entfesselte Stummfilmszenerien, in denen alles vorkommt, was es so an Schrecknissen in Emils Welt gibt» (11). The music, however, intensifies the visual terror of the scene. A fantastical filmic montage shows the compartment bench stretching absurdly to several times its length and then contracting, and the now crazily leering man going through wild contortions with his legs, chewing frantically on the rim of his hat, blowing clouds of smoke from a two-foot flame thrower. During the visual chaos, the music rises with a conglomeration of woodwinds, syncopating percussives and strident incursions of other instruments. Through the smoke of the flame thrower, the camera focuses on the compartment’s emergency brake high above, with Emil rising in terror through the air to grasp onto it (of course, the train does not stop). Suddenly, however, Emil is outside, floating through the sky clinging to a parachute-like umbrella toward the iconic traffic tower at Potsdamer Platz; he lurches around the tower, cringing when from the traffic platform the dreaded hometown constable angrily stretches out a gigantic hand (in close-up) to try to catch him. With a roll of snare drums the music reaches a climax as plumes of smoke swirl from the traffic tower around Emil. This nonsensical and chaotic world, besieged with fire, smoke, and threatening authority, along with increasingly agitated music, is the film’s most ominous foreboding of calamity. Lamprecht and Gray created this portrayal as a version of Kästner’s dream scene in the novel, and the images and sound suggest terrors of the city experienced by many newcomers to Berlin. 29 But the smoke, the fury, and crashing music may also allude to forebodings of wider catastrophe lurking beneath the sunny Berlin of this film or, more likely, to remembered images of the war. Emil snaps awake to find himself lying on the floor, and like the decelerating train the triumphal music that introduces the first scenes of Berlin also slows with the arrival at another Berlin icon, Bahnhof Zoo. The compartment Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 317 is empty, and Emil discovers that his money is gone. What follows is a succession of shots that narrates Emil’s pursuit of the thief via tram to an observation spot across the street from Café Josty (where the thief enjoys a late breakfast). Similarly, Gray’s succession of accompanying musical segments «narrates» a vibrant metropolis that surrounds Emil; interwoven passages suggest both his frantic determination not to lose sight of the thief and his simultaneous awe at the passing cityscape. The scene, moreover, offers a fine instance of the layers of «Tageserlebnissen» that occur throughout the film: in this case, an inventory of Berlin sights that surround both inhabitants and visitors; a cross section of Berlin inhabitants going about their everyday lives (on the train platform, in the tram car, on the streets), and the unfolding crisis of a young boy suddenly cast into the middle of the teeming city. As Emil first dashes through the platform crowds and onto the street, he crouches into a creeping motion to avoid being seen by the thief; pulsating beats by strings beneath the sliding phrases by woodwinds lend rhythm to his movements. As the thief settles into a Strassenbahn and Emil enters the back of the car, strident tones by horns declare a new phase to the pursuit (Kästner 203). The tram sets in motion, and a refrain that seems to epitomize a lively urban tempo launches a scene that might aptly be titled, «Das war also Berlin,» which the novel’s Emil had time to think to himself despite his anxiety about keeping the thief in sight. 30 In the film, despite his new worry about having no money for a tram ticket, Emil is also looking at sights as the tram passes Bahnhof Zoo, Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, rows of multi-storied buildings atop an array of businesses, and a swarming procession of all manners of conveyances and people. Inside the tram the camera interjects shots of the thief, who appears to be a supremely confident burgher sitting erectly in his black suit and stiff collar with his hands resting on his walking cane, and gazing matter-of-factly out the window. At the tram’s first stop an abrupt cutoff of the «urban tempo» melody and the opening of a new one seem to celebrate Emil’s ingenuity in moving away from the approaching conductor to the back car while still keeping the thief in sight. A momentary shot of the street sign Trautenau-Str. and Kaiserallee establishes the tram’s arrival at the thief’s immediate destination, and, as he alights, the original refrain resumes (beginning a climactic rise toward the end of the segment) and accompanies his striding into the well-known Café Josty. As with his settling into the tram, a preliminary musical resolution occurs here when the man sits down at the café. Crashing cymbals and horns build to the scene’s real resolution after Emil scrambles off the tram, maneuvers across the traffic-clogged street, and hides behind a kiosk to keep him in sight and decide what to do next, alone and without money, in this metropolis. 31 318 Katherine Roper Beeps from a horn startle Emil, and he turns around to see a boy holding a bulb horn. Their first encounter begins badly, with the boy commenting on Emil’s dumb dress suit. His unintended insult accentuates the chasm between small-town and metropolitan identities, initiating a sound of the city that will recur. 32 Emil, however, soon is telling the boy, Gustav, about his pursuit of the thief (cut to the café where the thief is lustily eating a soft-cooked egg and drinking a beer). Gustav becomes excited: «Mensch, das ist ja wie im Kino! » He announces to Emil that he will get reinforcements. A magnificently choreographed sequence follows, in which Gustav, dashes through Berlin streets and gathers an ever-growing number of boys from their play. The boys’ gazelle-like skipping conforms perfectly to Gray’s dance-like music, transforming what might otherwise have been a prosaic sequence into a charming youthful adventure. 33 Charming, also, are the adult passersby who stare in bemusement as the boys run past recognizable street locations, such as the entrance to the Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn station. As the boys run up to the kiosk where Emil is waiting, the music builds to a triumphal climax, resolves into a tonal conclusion, and then is silenced. Gustav announces their arrival with his trademark beeps, and when he asks what he thinks of the assembled gang, a surprised Emil exclaims, «Kolossal! » Sounds of the city here are youthful excitement and camaraderie - far removed from the eeriness of Beckert’s whistling. 34 To be sure, the eagerness of the boys inspired not only young spectators, but also older ones, including an enthusiastic Fritz Olimsky, who further expressed hopes for its international acclaim: «Kurz einer jener seltenen Filme, die eine ganze große Freude sind, und denen man die weiteste Verbreitung auch im Ausland wünschen möchte, denn schließlich wird hier ein Stückchen echtesten Deutschtums verkörpert.» Indeed, most contemporary critiques expressed enthusiasm that rested in two contentions: Emil offered a momentary escape from the cares of the day, or Emil offered an inspiring hope for the German future (See M. Sp.). l A new tenor emerges, however, when the boys retreat to a nearby lot to hold a Kriegsrat, and, just as the creation of a command system and the mobilization of soldiers were sanctioned and necessary in war, so the boys’ war council established a military-like hierarchy and created its organization of the group to get Emil’s money back. The military-laden dialogue begins when Gustav first leaves to seek Verstärkung, and, returning with the group to the kiosk, commands, «Das Ganze halt! » Such language next proliferates when the boys move to a lot and, standing up on a piece of abandoned equipment that resembles a caisson, a self-appointed leader (whom Gustav identifies in a whisper to Emil as «unser Generalstabchef») issues a barrage of orders. He first informs Emil he is abgelöst at the kiosk by two Stafetten (cut to two Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 319 boys peering across the street). He then goes through stages of organizing the group for action: collecting Betriebskapital, naming five detectives to carry out the Verfolgung and relegating the other disappointed boys to Bereitschaftsdienst. He orders one boy to man a Depeschendienst at his parents’ telephone. He orders all to disperse to their posts and await further Befehle, and then, «Marsch! » Despite the reluctance of those left out of the action, they do shout the established password: «Parole Emil! » The scene portrays the leader’s power and the others’ unquestioning submission. 35 Military terminology also abounds through the rest of the operation, when they follow the thief to the modest Hotel Biedermann and set up their Hauptquartier in a r fenced off vacant lot to begin the Belagerung, when Emil’s cousin Pony Hütchen arrives with Verproviantierung. The boy at the Depeschendienst is notified, «Der Feind hat [Zimmer] Nummer 9,» which shows the boys’ notion of themselves as an army mobilizing for action against the enemy. As the boys disperse to go home for the night (all except Emil, who, disguised as a bell boy, makes several unsuccessful attempts to find the money in the man’s room), the leader orders all to appear sharply at 8: 00 a.m. for Alarmbereitschaft. As in M, with the scenes of organization by the police and the underworld, military thinking is pervasive; memories of mobilization fill the language, even among children who did not experience it. 36 The best-known scene of the film - and one that has provoked controversy - begins the next morning outside the hotel. Emil is amazed to discover that overnight the operation has attracted a crowd of hundreds of boys, who shout vigorously «Parole Emil! » 37 When the thief walks out of the hotel, they march after him, spontaneously making a spectacle of one who wants to be an anonymous, respectable burgher. A brisk, bouncy march music starts up, in time with his swinging cane and striding past the modest shops of the neighborhood. Signaling that this is more than the self-confident stride of a proud burgher, the march theme is interspersed with sudden stops, tocks from castanet-like clappers, high pitched sliding whistles, and syncopations. When the man catches sight of the boys marching behind him, he becomes visibly nervous, and humorous injections in the music make light of his growing unease and the boys’ growing delight in that. He makes a sudden turnabout and strides toward the group, but they, too, turn and advance away from him; he quickly wheels back to get away from them and attempts to continue a perusal of shop windows; but the boys dash after him and begin to shout. The camera, tracking the group at eye level from the middle of the street, now includes Pony (the only girl in the crowd) proudly pedaling her bicycle alongside the running boys. As the chase accelerates, the march theme swells into the full orchestra, but the crescendo of the boys’ shouts begins to drown some of it 320 Katherine Roper out. The climactic birds-eye shot shows two streams of running boys converging behind him, and the thief now breaks into a terrified run. Trumpets blare, cymbals crash, and the orchestra sounds a decisive ending chord just as the man lurches into a neighborhood bank. Emil also enters. When asked to prove that the 100-mark note now being presented has been stolen, he tells of the pinpricks he made while pinning it to his jacket. The bank official presses an alarm pedal, and when the thief dashes out of the bank, the crowd of children, still screaming, mob him and allow the police to wade through and lead the still upright, dignified-looking man to an open police car. Some recent critics have denounced this scene as a pogrom-like chase, and a freeze-frame look at the thief’s terrified face lends credence. 38 Others, however, have argued more convincingly that it shows seemingly powerless children prevailing over someone more powerful - a respectable-looking adult. 39 Both Kästner’s novel and the film support the idea of determined children bringing a criminal to justice. The last scenes suggest a completely optimistic view of Weimar Germany in 1931: an efficient police system takes over; they identify the man as a wanted bank robber (involving shots surveying police methods, not unlike M); the police commissioner tells the boys that the criminal’s capture involves a 1,000-mark reward. Headlines roll from the presses, featuring Emil’s photo on the front page - an instance radically different from the «Extra» headlines in M, but similarly exemplifying what Gunning characterized as «a city hungry for and inundated by information» (176). Triumphal band music accompanies the rolling headlines, and when the camera cross-cuts to the homecoming, it proves to be the diegetic music of a small-town celebration. Lamprecht’s ending, which departs from the novel’s homely scene in the grandmother’s kitchen, shows a plane landing in Emil’s hometown, where townspeople cheer him and his comrades. The airplane’s arrival increases Emil’s modes of transportation in the film to four: train, tram, taxi, and airplane - not to mention the boys’ running through Berlin streets, but it is music, not machine sounds (except for the first train segment), that accompany all of them. All of these elements contribute to a Zeitbild of the d Großstadt - one that, to be sure, contradicts the more pervasive Zeitbild of a city wracked d by political and economic crises. Kracauer refers to Emil as among the few Weimar films with a «faint sugl gestion of democratic mentality» and also one of the few that portray Berlin as a city «in which civil liberties flourish» (224, 225). Indeed, the crowded Berlin streets are calm, and civil liberties can be discerned in portrayals of a responsive police force, responsible bank personnel, and a vigorous press. Moreover, an important element of the book’s and the film’s popularity is that Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 321 mobilization occurs from below. But the militaristic hierarchy in the boys’ organization does raise questions about a «democratic mentality.» More problematically, any interpretation of the film’s democratic inclinations must also consider its being shown in Germany until 1937, with only the banned author’s name removed (Dahlke 283). Some of the virtues it exemplified, such as the boys’ camaraderie, the militaristic hierarchy, and pursuit of the «outsider,» were not necessarily anathema to ideals of the Volksgemeinschaft, or possibly, as Fritzsche suggests, «the idea of mobilization rather than the particular aims […] constitutes the common ground between [the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich]» («Weimar» 652). The question of what constitutes the children’s triumph is complicated as well. Does it lie in the resourcefulness of these German boys and their determination to achieve justice, as critics were wont to commend? Or is it due to their imitation of practices they see daily in adult society (especially the military dimension), which the film deftly portrayed? 40 Kästner’s novel and the film offer both possibilities. The film is, however, unequivocal about Emil becoming a hero of the urban culture, as the bestowing of reward money, the front-page photo, and his homecoming by plane attest. These final elements become ebullient sounds of the city and, as such suggest, as one critic put it, «endlich einmal ein Wirklichkeitsmärchen ... vielmehr mit Jungens, die sich die neue Zeit ihrer Phantasie dienstbar machen» («Emil»). What do our two films, taken together, suggest about sounds of the city? As we have seen, Lang and Lamprecht took differing approaches to using the new medium as a central element in depicting the city. Lang not only invoked a melange of voices from disparate groups in the society to build such a multifaceted response to the crisis of the child killings, but he complicated these in intricate ways with his cross-cutting of dialogue, his superimposition of narrative over visual montages and his use of carefully-chosen individual sounds (such as the whistling of the «Peer Gynt» theme) to create tension or convey a psychological state. Lamprecht’s less intricate use of sound nevertheless produces a rich complex of sounds of the city. Most prominent is Gray’s dynamic and expressive music and his creative use of such a wide range of instruments, rhythms, and tonalities to bring the cityscape and the boys’ movement through it to life. The dialogues among the boys also reflect many influences of their experiences with the city, and their interactions with the bank official and the police detectives at the end suggest their awareness of the adult institutions that await them (even as enthusiastic critics praise the film for offering a young generation hope in desperate times). Lamprecht’s sounds of the city, finally, contain interactions between aural and visual images, everyday inhabitants, and a narrative of children making use of the city’s rich possibili- 322 Katherine Roper ties for organizing for an important action, all coming together in a Zeitbild that so many spectators saw and appreciated. In short, in vastly differing ways and tones, both filmmakers used sound - and often, silence - to support and complement their visual portrayals of the metropolis. (This is by no means unique to these two films; historians of Weimar Germany should join their film studies colleagues in giving attention to the widest possible spectrum of films now accessible). Despite our knowledge of what awaits Germany, these films remind us that in 1931 contemporaries could see - in addition to unemployment lines, political violence, emergency political decrees, and even frightening crime - that the metropolis offered positive possibilities for the future (Zukunftsvorstellungen). 41 These are evident when an Emil critic enl thuses, «Sieht so die künftige Generation aus, werden so unsere Nachfolger leben und handeln, dann braucht uns vor der Zukunft nicht bange zu sein» («Emil»). Ofer Ashkenazi’s suggestions about popular films of these years seem particularly apt to Emil: they «celebrated the conspicuous richness of Weimar urban culture, in which incompatible aspirations and beliefs existed simultaneously, without a definite criterion that would establish unambiguous truth» (263-64). Due to Lang’s dark depictions of the dire crises radiating from the child killings, possibilities of a positive future may at first seem more limited in M, but they do include a society successfully mobilizing to catch a murderer; institutions halting a lynch mob and exercising judicial authority; and a plea for citizens to pay more attention to the younger generation. As noted above, the closing appeal by Elsie’s mother for greater watchfulness of the children has been interpreted by some as distrust of the state (e.g., Kaes, M 75), but the M mother’s direct appeal to the spectators might also be seen as the film’s plea for a more rational and less hysterical populace. These two films and their sounds of the city leave the prospects for the future much more open than many histories of Weimar Germany suggest; Detlev Peukert, for instance, declares in his compelling history of Weimar Germany that with the onset of the world economic crisis in late 1929 and the elections of September 1930 in which Nazi representation quadrupled, the republic effectively came to an end (249). Yet, a consideration of portrayals of the city and its sound in M and M Emil should remind us to persist in trying to l deal with «the richness of Weimar urban culture,» even in such a dire year as 1931. Even as we continue to investigate the demise of the Weimar Republic, we must remember that in 1931 few Germans had fixated on that possibility, and many anticipated a host of other possibilities. As we have seen, M and M Emil embed their respective crises in a context of such possibilities, displayl ing rich Zeitbilder that I have called sounds of the city in recognition of this r Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 323 volume’s focus on sound cinema. Obviously, looking from the perspective beyond 1933, we know that Weimar Germany did not have a future, and the abundant array of Zukunftsvorstellungen evident not only in these films but also throughout Weimar society (see especially Graf 112-78) will thus collide with a calamitous historical reality. Knowing of the future that awaited Germans in 1931, perhaps, then, we should give the last word here to Erich Kästner - not the author of Emil, but the author of Fabian, a novel that depicts looming catastrophes in the Berlin of the early 1930s. Peukert chooses a sentence from it as the epigraph for the last section of his history, «Total Crisis, 1930-1933»: «We’re living a makeshift life; the crisis will never end» (247). Notes 1 Joe Hembus and Christa Bachmann are the only authors I have encountered who compare the two films, and our respective lists of parallels overlap, although their list has some slightly different emphases (48). 2 For an overview of the impact of the world economic crisis in Germany, see Peukert 247-57. On intensifying political crises, see Mommsen 357-98. As to mounting street violence, even a brief glance at one week of Berlin headlines in 1931 shows a society of marching legions organized for warfare against perceived internal and external enemies: national socialists attacking Jewish-looking passersby, communists raiding a Nazi pub, thousands converging to promote Germanness abroad, violent clashes between communists and social democrats who had been planning to hold a meeting of collaboration, a demonstration advocating a housing settlement to relieve Berlin’s unemployed, and the Reichswehr band organizing a mass meeting to collect Winterhilfe for unemployed veterans. I take these headlines from a cross-section of Berlin newspapers from the randomly chosen week of September 10-16, 1931 about halfway between the premieres of the two films. 3 An early postwar expression of hopefulness about how the ascendancy of the German film industry brought international respect for Germany: «In den letzten Monaten hat die deutsche Filmindustrie einen Weg eingeschlagen, der jeden Freund der deutschen Kinematographie mit Freude erfüllt. Über die theoretischen Auseinandersetzungen wegen der zur Bekämpfung der drohenden Auslandsgefahr zu ergreifenden Mittel und Mittelchen hinweg sind bei uns Filmwerke erstanden, die uns beweisen, daß in der deutschen Filmindustrie eine Arbeitskraft, ein Können steckt, das uns zu den besten Hoffnungen bezüglich der Auslandskonkurrenz und der Eroberung des Weltmarktes berechtigt» (Liebert 46). And, for 1931: «Die deutschen Filme waren in der ganzen Welt geschätzt, von Millionen von Ausländern gesehen. Von den zehn besten Filmen der Welt im Jahr 1930 waren laut einer Statistik vier deutsche! » (Wendtland 179). 4 Kreimeier 216. There are conflicting interpretations of when sound film took hold in Germany: Müller sees 1930 as the crucial year, explaining in passing that she did not analyze M because by May 1931 it was a «vergleichsweise späte[r] Tonfilm» (12, 21). M Ashkenazi comments that by the fall of 1930 «more than 90 percent of German productions involved sound recording, but the span of years in his subtitle suggests a longer transition (250). For a good overview of the development of new sound technologies 324 Katherine Roper through many media and an assessment of intermedial influences, see Weitz 207-50 and Ryan. 5 Ryan 275. Actually, Emil was Lamprecht’s second sound film, but the first, l Zweierlei Moral (premiered 5 January 1931) was dismissed as a «mißlungenen Film, weil [das] l Drehbuch aus nichtssagenden Dialogen und mißratenen Möglichkeiten besteht» (Wendtland 4). 6 Kaes, M 19. Gunning aptly characterizes it as «a hinge between Lang’s silent cinema and M sound cinema» (164). See also Ryan 269-70. 7 Bareither 195. A similar assertion about sound as dramaturgy occurs in a 1975 interview with Lang (M, Disc 2). 8 The theme is from «In the Throne of the Mountain God.» Kaes offers an explanation of the historical context of a dramatic production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in 1928 that might have inspired Lang’s choice of this theme (20-21). The whistling was done by Lang himself on the soundtrack. 9 Ashkenazi emphasizes: «the complete break between sounds and visual images function as the main means of identifying the killer»; his whistling «identifies an obvious insanity» (259). Brockmann describes the theme as «part of his own private soundtrack» (114). Gunning offers a fine exposition about how this compulsion is portrayed in the sequences of Beckert looking in shop windows and approaching little girls (188-92). 10 Ashkenazi suggests the use of dialect is a «discourse of identity formation in the modern world»; further, «the vernacular dialogue explores the national distinctiveness of the speaking protagonists» (258, 261). 11 Kracauer 220. On signs of public hysteria in response to actual serial murderers during this time, see Kaes, M 32-34. M 12 Ryan writes that there is debate about the voice, that some think it might be a radio newscaster reading (271). But I find the «kiosk» voice merging into the reading of the article at the Stammtisch to be a clear instance of Lang’s extending an at-first unknown voice into that of the visible reader at the table. 13 Gunning 177-81. Critic Rudolf Arnheim, who expressed early skepticism about sound film, in that it would undermine film as an artistic medium, expressed approval of this scene because the superimposed «lecture» of the Polizeipräsident on the phone was not presented as a simple merging of sound and film in a setting (70). 14 Scholars have debated whether Lohmann was based on the well-known Berlin police commissioner Ernst Gennat, and as with most of his responses to questions about influences or meanings, Lang was ambiguous, but in interviews he did frequently mention his close relations with «Alex,» the police presidium on Alexanderplatz (Bareither 195; Kaes, M 31-33; Herzog 296). M 15 Still another use of whistling occurs during the police raid, when Lohmann softly whistles while preparing to examine each person. As Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler interpret it, it suggests that the people are like his children; he knows their tricks; there is a working relationship between the criminals and the police (M, Disc 1, Audio Commentary). During this sequence, the film presents some police interviews in the district around the pub, and in one of them, a pubkeeper, played by the down-to-earth Rosa Valetti, correctly warns about outraged members of the underworld subjecting a captured child killer to their own mob justice. 16 Burch 24. Herzog’s long section entitled, «‹A City Tracks a Murderer›: Methods of Criminal Investigation,» despite the title, suggests the methods are depicted as ineffectual (294-303). Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 325 17 See Kaes, M 38-46, and, more comprehensively, Kaes, M Shell Shock, especially Chapter 1: «The War at Home.» On militarism in Weimar films and society, see also Roper, Fridericus. As Gunning emphasizes, this cross-cutting sequence of the two meetings is only one of many in the film (167). 18 Bareither 199. Cesare Lombroso, a nineteenth-century criminologist, argued that criminals could be identified by physiological characteristics. 19 The close-up of the chalked M scrawled by the pursuer on his hand is probably actually Lang’s hand; he claimed his hand appeared in each of his films. See Gunning, xii, 1-4. 20 The dialogue mentions that it went bankrupt in the inflation (i.e., 1923); this is the film’s only explicit reference to Germany’s economic crises. 21 «One of the finest performances in sound cinema and an extraordinary example of writing for the new ‹talkie› by Thea von Harbou» (qtd. in Gunning 194). Brockmann emphasizes the sound of the voices in Beckert’s head (124). 22 For instance, a scathing comment about the spectator noise from the nationalist Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung: «Hier an dieser Stelle, wo tatsächlich eine natürliche, spontane Volksäußerung, die jeder Unvoreingenommene täglich auf der Straße beobachten kann, zum Ausdruck kam, fühlten sich die Gegner der Todesstrafe bemüßigt, ihren Protest durch Pfiffe und Zurufe kundzutun» (Werner). 23 Kaes argues that the «real» courtroom scene is so brief that «it also challenges this institution’s power and effectiveness» and that the mothers’ last words about protecting our children «betray the public lack of trust in the state’s power to protect its citizens» (M 75). Bareither, on the other hand, quotes from a 1948 letter by Lang to a Princeton film professor regarding the court scene: «the picture argues strongly for the maintenance of democratic procedure without ifs or buts» (186). 24 «The film shows how both sides break the law in their pursuit of the murderer. The city like Germany itself under Heinrich Brüning in 1931 was no longer governed by the rule of law, but swayed by the pressure of mobilized masses» (Kaes, M 53). Korte grounds M his helpful approach to film reception in such a notion of an interactive process. As he affirms, a host of factors influence how a film will be seen: psychological and sociological variables, concrete living conditions, personal and political perspectives, the whole social and historical context - all affect the way a film is received (40-41; his schema on 43 offers a particularly useful list of components for considering reception). 25 Herzog. Gunning comments: «It is precisely the manner in which the film is pre-Nazi that makes it so complex» (198). Or, as Koebner put it after surveying the many unresolved issues: «Das Dilemma bleibt unaufgelöst» (38). 26 In 1932 an article in a popular magazine urged that a new Berlin tourist guide should lead visitors to locations of the «Weltstadt in der Krise» such as welfare offices, empty new buildings, lines of unemployed, etc. (qtd. in Föllmer and Graf 9). None of these things are visible in Emil. 27 Nora Alter notes that in Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) the train accelerates «in sync with the music,» but this was before the synchronization of sound and visual on the film that developed a short time later. The musical score by Edmund Meisel was played either by a live orchestra or by a simultaneously playing sound recording. As Alter makes clear, this is «technically a silent film,» and she «hears» its real symphony in terms of its visual rhythms, changing tempos, and structures (193, 211, 208). 28 Samuel Wilder received the nickname Billie from his mother, by which he became known in the Weimar era. After emigrating to the US, he became Billy Wilder. 29 The novel offers a different but also urban-oriented dream sequence (Kästner 193-97). 326 Katherine Roper 30 Fritzsche reminds us of Berlin «as an image of movement ‹tempo, tempo,›» and «restless energy,» and Gray’s accelerating score conveys this («Landscape» 35). Gray’s music and Lamprecht’s shots show an exuberant modern metropolis, which many critics praised far removed from a Berlin that other contemporaries criticized as «emptiness» and «‹money streets›» (Fritzsche, «Historical» 146-47). 31 Both the novel and the film emphasize that in order to keep the thief in sight, Emil had to spring off the train at Bahnhof Zoo, rather than at Bahnhof Friedrichstraße, where his grandmother and cousin were waiting to meet him. 32 Ashkenazi comments on clothes as cultural identity, and this moment shows the chasm between the small-town and metropolitan boys (262). 33 Although Rügner does not treat Emil, he emphasizes the need for collaboration between the director and composer during the whole process and laments that too often film music became relegated to simple accompaniment of an already-finished film (90). 34 The novel states what the camera can only attempt to show, Emil’s reaction to his new comrades: «Emil war direkt glücklich, daß ihm das Geld gestohlen worden war» (Kästner 220). Fritzsche notes that many remembered the war as «ebullience of comradeship and fraternity» despite the disastrous consequences of industrialized warfare; some of that is reflected here («Landscape» 38). 35 Some critics did indeed question the idea that Emil promoted democracy. This scene is l likely an instance of the «patriarchal tendencies» Kracauer criticized in the film (225). See also Canetti 304-12. 36 As Peukert emphasizes, «Uniform, militarized behaviour spread from the radical fringes of politics to what had previously been the middle ground, and by the start of the 1930s had established itself as the dominant style of a political culture fractured along political lines. The outward style became universal» (163). See also note 18 above. It should be stressed that Kästner was a strong critic of what he saw as the pervasive militarism, as numerous poems like «Kennst Du das Land wo die Kanonen blühen? » make clear. 37 «Höhepunkt: Ein Bauplatztor öffnet sich, und drinnen stehen sonnenüberflutet, hunderte von Kindern. Entschlossen, solidarisch. Masse aus Schwachen geformt, jetzt dem Feinde überlegen. ... Es gab riesigen Applaus» (Herzberg). 38 From one such critique: «Der renommierte Film der Vor-Hitler-Zeit offenbart schlagend die Nähe bürgerliche, scheinbar unverdächtiger ‹Law and order›-Vorstellungen zum Faschismus […] Tatsächlich hat die Filmhandlung ihr Modell ebenso im Judenpogrom wie in der demokratischen Detektivarbeit […] Feind aller aber ist der Außenseiter, der Gesetzesbrecher mit der undeutlichen Physiognomie und dem polnischen Namen» (Grafe). See also Bäumler 154. 39 «Die ‹Hetzjagd› ist eine Notmaßnahme der an sich Schwächeren, die sich anders nicht zu helfen wissen und nur durch Einigkeit stark sind» (Tornow 29). 40 Kästner was critical of how dangerous adult behavior could be imitated by children in their play, as a series of satirical poems dealing with children’s «Nachahmungsbetrieb» makes clear. Especially pointed was Kästner’s feuilleton article that quoted the children’s explanation of their game of «Hinrichtung,» which had led to the death of a playmate: «Wir haben es nur wie die Erwachsenen gemacht.» Kästner also had long vilified what he saw as Germany’s militarism, and he was especially critical of a society that taught its children «stramm deutsch und militärisch zu marschieren» (See Roper, Emil 57-58, esp. l n25 and 60, esp. n32). 41 See Graf 13. And Peukert reminded us, «That there are no entirely hopeless situations in history was shown by 1923» (75). Indeed, he argued, 1931 could be interpreted as Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 327 considerably less desperate than 1923, after which Germany did enter a period of relative stabilization. See also, Fritzsche: «Again and again, feelings of insecurity and discontinuity, and the sense that the future was an unknown and dangerous destination, mingled with a heady opportunism about new possibilities and new conquests. The promiscuity of German politics in the 1920s and 1930s derived from precisely this complementarity of crisis and renovation» («Landscape» 42). Works Cited Alter, Nora M. «Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927): City, Image, Sound.» Isenberg 193-215. Arnheim, Rudolf. «Tonfilm mit Gewalt.» Rudolf Arnheim: Kritiken und Aufsätze zum Film. Ed. Helmut H. Diederichs. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977. 70-72. Aros. «Zweimal ‹M›.» Film-Echo 18 May 1931. Ashkenazi, Ofer. «‹A New Era of Peace and Understanding›: The Integration of Sound Film into German Popular Cinema, 1929-1932.» The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy. Ed. Christian Rogowski. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. 249-67. Bareither, Christoph, and Urs Büttner, eds. Fritz Lang: «M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder». Texte und Kontexte. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Bäumler, Marianne. Die aufgeräumte Wirklichkeit des Erich Kästner. Cologne: Prometh Verlag, 1984. Brockmann, Stephen. A Critical History of German Film. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Burch, Noel. «Fritz Lang: German Period.» In and Out of Synch: The Awakening of a Cine-Dreamer. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Scolar Press, 1991. 20-30. Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart. New York: Viking Press, 1962. Crook, Steve. «Allan Gray, Composer.» Internet Movie Database. IMDb.com, Inc. 13 June 2013. Dahlke, Günter, and Günter Karl, eds. Deutsche Spielfilme von den Anfängen bis 1933: Ein Filmführer. Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1993. Emil und die Detektive. Dir. Gerhard Lamprecht. Ufa, 1931. DVD from <www.germanwarfilms.com>. «Emil und die Detektive.» Der Film. 5 December 1931. Föllmer, Moritz. Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Föllmer, Moritz, and Rüdiger Graf, eds. Die «Krise» der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005. Fritzsche, Peter. «Did Weimar Fail? » Journal of Modern History 68 (September 1996): 629-56. -. «Historical Time and Future Experience in Postwar Germany.» Ordnungen in der Krise: Zur politischen Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands, 1900-1933. Ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007. 141-64. -. «Landscape of Danger, Landscape of Design: Crisis and Modernism in Weimar Germany.» Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Repub- 328 Katherine Roper lic, Eds. Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. 29-46. Graf, Rüdiger. Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918-1933. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008. Grafe, Frieda, and Enno Patalas. «Filmtips.» Die Zeit 24 April 1970. Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Hembus, Joe, and Christa Bachmann. Klassiker des deutschen Tonfilms: 1930-1960. Munich: Goldmann, 1983. Herzberg, Georg. «Emil und die Detektive» Film-Kurier 3 Dec. 1931. r Herzog, Todd. «Fritz Lang’s M: An Open Case.» Isenberg 2913-09. Isenberg, Noah, ed. Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Kaes, Anton. M. London: British Film Institute, 2000. -. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. Kästner, Erich. «Emil und Die Detektive.» Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 6. Romane für Kinder. Zurich: Atrium Verlag, 1959. 159-265. Koebner,Thomas. «Verwandlungen: Fritz Langs ‹M› restauriert im Kino.» film-dienst (Dec. 1996): 36-38. Korte, Helmut. Der Spielfilm und das Ende der Weimarer Republik: Ein rezeptionshistorischer Versuch. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Koselleck, Reinhart. «Crisis.» Trans. Michaela W. Richter. Journal of the History of Ideas 67.2 (April 2006): 358-400. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. 1947. Princeton: U of Princeton P, 1971. Kreimeier, Klaus. Die Ufa Story: Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns. Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1992. Lang, Fritz. M. Protokoll: Protokolliert nach dem Original des Films von Gero Gandert und Ulrich Gregor; mit einem Interview des Regisseurs von Gero Gandert. Hamburg: Schröder, 1963. -. «Mein Film ‹M› - ein Tatsachenbericht.» Die Filmwoche 20 May 1931, 5-6. Reprinted in Bareither, 183-84. Liebert, Artur. «Madame Dubarry.» Der Film 38 (20 Sept. 1919): 46. M. Dir. Fritz Lang. 1931. Criterion Collection, 2004. M. Sp. «‹Emil und die Detektive› im Film.» Neue Leipziger Zeitung 28 Dec. 1931. Mommsen, Hans. The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. Trans. Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996. Müller, Corinna. Vom Stummfilm zum Tonfilm. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003. Olimsky, Fritz. «Emil und die Detektive.» Berliner Börsen-Zeitung 4 Dec. 1931: 3. Peukert, Detlev J.K. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. Trans. Richard Deveson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Rentschler, Eric. «The Situation Is Hopeless but Not Desperate: Ufa’s Early Sound- Film Musicals.» Weimar Cinema, 1919-1933: Daydreams and Nightmares. Ed. Laurence Kardish. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. 44-59. Roper, Katherine. «Emil und die Detektive: Lektionen für die Weimarer Republik? » Trans. Catherine Nichols. Erich Kästner Jahrbuch. Ed. Gerhard Fischer. Vol.4. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. 49-64. Sounds of the City in M and Emil und die Detektive 329 -. «Fridericus Films in Weimar Society: Potsdamismus in a Democracy.» German Studies Review 26.3 (October 2003): 493-514. Rotthaler, Viktor. «Der Komponist: Allan Gray.» In: Wilder, Billie. Emil und die Detektive: Drehbuch von Billie Wilder frei nach dem Roman von Erich Kästner zu Gerhard Lamprechts Film von 1931. Series FILMtext. Eds. Helga Belach and Hans- Michael Bock. Munich: Verlag edition text + kritik, 1998. 176-78. Rügner, Ulrich. Filmmusik in Deutschland zwischen 1924 und 1934. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1988. Ryan, Michael P. «Fritz Lang’s Radio Aesthetic: M. Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder.» German Studies Review 36.2 (May 2013): 259-79. Schütz, Helga. «Das Böse trägt einen steifen Hut.» In: Wilder, Billie. Emil und die Detektive: Drehbuch von Billie Wilder frei nach dem Roman von Erich Kästner zu Gerhard Lamprechts Film von 1931. Series FILMtex.t Eds. Helga Belach and Hans- Michael Bock. Munich: Verlag edition text + kritik, 1998. 9-23. Thiel, Wolfgang. Filmmusik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1981. Tornow, Ingo. Erich Kästner und der Film. Munich: Filmland Presse, 1989. Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Wendtland, Karlheinz. Geliebter Kintopp: Jahrgang 1929 und 1930. Berlin: Verlag Medium Film, 1990. -. Geliebter Kintopp: Jahrgang 1931. Berlin: Verlag Medium Film, 1991. Werner, B.E. «Fritz Langs M.» Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 12 May 1931. Groß- Berlin ed. Wilder, Billie. Emil und die Detektive: Drehbuch von Billie Wilder frei nach dem Roman von Erich Kästner zu Gerhard Lamprechts Film von 1931. Series FILMtext. Eds. Helga Belach and Hans-Michael Bock. Munich: Verlag edition text + kritik, 1998. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Christian Niemeyer Die dunklen Seiten der Jugendbewegung Vom Wandervogel zur Hitlerjugend 2013, 272 Seiten €[D] 29,99/ SFr 40,10 ISBN 978-3-7720-8488-1 Die zentrale Ausgangsthese dieser detektivisch angelegten, spannend zu lesenden Arbeit lautet, dass die in diesem Zeitraum dominierende Quellenedition von Werner Kindt als Indiz für ein erinnerungspolitisch aktives Kartell zur e exionsabwehr gelesen werden muss, dem durch die NS-Zeit schwer belastete, der Jugendbewegung entstammende Historiker angehörten. Gegen diese Tendenzen sucht der Verfasser die wahren Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Steglitzer Wandervogel und der Hitlerjugend aufzudecken. Die Ergebnisse, dargeboten unter der provokanten Leitfrage nach einer Erziehung vor Auschwitz r und festgemacht an zentralen völkischen Ideologemen wie Antisemitismus und Antislawismus, sind aufrüttelnd, schockierend und zerstören endgültig den Mythos, den Jugendbewegungsveteranen jahrzehntelang und wider besseres Wissen verbreitet haben. Strange Bedfellows: The Politics of Sound in Ludwig Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht (1932) CHRISTIAN ROGOWSKI A MHERST C OLLEGE In the Reichstag elections of 31 July 1932 the National Socialists for the first time became the most powerful party in Weimar Germany. The Nazis, whose explicit aim was to destroy the Weimar Republic, had made it into the very center of German parliamentary democracy. Yet, for the time being, they had failed to achieve an absolute majority, nor were they in a position to co-opt suitable coalition partners. The resulting governmental stalemate and political chaos perpetuated the climate of intimidation and the brutal street violence that had tainted the election campaign. 1 In the words of historian James M. Diehl, «The presidential elections in March and the Reichstag elections in July turned the nation’s streets into battlefields» (287). Deeply concerned, inveterate diarist Victor Klemperer asked himself in his journals on 7 August 1932 about the implications of the near-triumph of Nazism for Jewish-born Germans like himself: «Hitler ante portas - oder wer sonst? Und was wird aus mir, dem jüdischen Professor? » (758). On 1 August 1932, the day after the elections that prompted such anxieties, filming began in Ufa’s Babelsberg studios of Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht, a lighthearted musical comedy that is largely the product of German-Jewish talent: it was directed by Ludwig Berger (born Ludwig Bamberger) and produced by Erich Pommer. Based on a script by Robert Liebmann (and Hungarian Hans/ János Székely), it features music by Werner Richard Heymann with lyrics by Robert Gilbert (born David Robert Winterfeld) and includes cameo performances by Russian-born singer Leo Monosson (on-screen) and the Comedian Harmonists (off-screen), half of whose six members were Jewish. The film casually registers the presence of people of Jewish descent in the Weimar Republic without seeming to dwell on it: at one point, for instance, a seven-branch menorah briefly appears in the background as one of the characters, Herr Generaldirektor Krüger, played by Jewish comedian Julius Falkenstein, answers the phone in his study. What, one may ask, does a humorous boy-meets-girl story, as charming as it is harmless, have to do with anxieties over the survival of the Weimar Republic, and - one might add - with the status of its Jewish population? 332 Christian Rogowski The premise of Berger’s musical comedy directly addresses the contemporary economic crisis: unbeknownst to each other, the two young people who will end up as lovers - Grete (Käthe von Nagy), a manicurist who works regular daytime hours, and Hans (Willy Fritsch), a waiter who works the late shift as a temp waiter at a nightclub - share the same bed, which they rent on a rotating basis from an elderly widow, because neither can afford more adequate accommodations. Many sound film comedies of the late Weimar period acknowledge the economic struggle of making ends meet and fear of losing one’s job on account of the Great Depression (von Thüna; Prokasky). Yet Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht also subtly hints at more general, sociopolitical issues that concerned audiences at the time regarding the survival of democratic ideals in the Weimar Republic through a subtext that, as I will show, is largely established through a sophisticated and critically reflected use of sound. In what follows, I argue that Berger’s use of sound lends this musical comedy a political significance that coalesces on three levels: first, political issues emerge as a subtext in the film’s ironically refracted, self-referential sound track; second, the juxtaposition of the main storyline with that of a film-within-the-film has inherent sociopolitical implications; and third, the blurring of the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic music carries its own political message. It has to be remembered, though, that sound, in Berger’s film, becomes political precisely by not appearing to be political. 2 After outlining the particular aesthetic parameters within which Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht operates, I focus on one episode in particular, the two protagonists’ trip to Potsdam, to highlight how the three aspects listed above are intricately and inseparably intertwined in this realistic fairytale. Spanning twelve minutes out of a total of about ninety minutes, this protracted episode puts Berger’s ostensibly apolitical and escapist film in the service of an enlightened liberal pragmatism at a time when increasing socioeconomic and political tensions threatened to unhinge the Weimar Republic. The Potsdam episode, it will become evident, is not only a vehicle for comedic effects but acts as a reminder of the importance of enlightened political values. The transition to sound from silent film in Weimar Cinema spawned a veritable wave of films that highlighted the tension between sound and image, an «autothematische Welle im frühen Tonfilm» (Schweinitz 373). Storylines were often set in the world of film production, for instance in the crime thriller, Der Schuß im Tonfilmatelier (dir. Alfred Zeisler, 1930), or the farcical comedy, r Das Kabinett des Dr. Larifari (dir. Robert Wohlmuth, 1930). Frequently, fantasies i of socioeconomic advancement and erotic wish fulfillment were couched in aspirations to movie stardom, in films such as Die Gräfin von Monte Christo (dir. Karl Hartl, 1932) or Die verliebte Firma (dir. Max Ophüls, 1932). In- The Politics of Sound in Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht 333 deed, by 1932, critics complained that self-referentiality in film had become somewhat commonplace. 3 Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht offers an interesting twist in that it shifts the focus to the exhibition and reception of films, away from their production. After the opening credits, the screen goes dark and we hear an impatient voice, shouting «Anfangen! » from off-screen, followed by a view of the inside of a projection booth. Here, projectionist Helmut (Friedrich Gnaß) turns a knob to start a boisterous march tune at high volume. The camera meanders to find Helmut’s colleague, outlined as a silhouette behind the movie screen, holding a loudspeaker in one hand, the other cupped near his mouth, shouting in dismay: «Leiser, Helmut! Du machst mir ja den Lautsprecher kaputt! » Unfazed, Helmut turns the volume down a few notches before calmly unwrapping and digging into his sandwich. Structurally, the opening sequence of Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht involves us, i.e., the film’s audience, in an elaborate guessing game as to the exact status of the images we see and the sounds we hear. Thematically, the opening sequence highlights the question of getting the sound just right. Contemporary critics already registered their approval that Berger’s comedy differed refreshingly from conventional cliché-ridden filmic fare. Rudolf Arnheim, writing for the left-liberal Die Weltbühne, tongue firmly in cheek, noted that Erich Pommer’s production unit represented a kind of «kulturbolschewistische Renommierzelle der Ufa.» 4 In Arnheim’s assessment, Berger’s film mercifully respects the intelligence of its audience and subtly advances a liberal agenda, by taking a refreshing twist on the comedic motif of mistaken identities. As a result, the film achieves a skillful balance between meeting commercial expectations and maintaining a critical edge: Hier werden, wenn schon kaum der Wahrheit so doch den großstädtischen Spöttern Zugeständnisse gemacht. Deshalb zeigt der Film Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht nicht den plumpen Aufstieg des Armen zum Reichtum, sondern sehr geschickt dient hier der Reichtum zwei Halbproletariern - dem Reichtum genügend benachbart, um einander irrtümlich für Lebeleute halten zu können - als eine Art Maskenverleih. Sie sind und werden nicht reich, aber sie sehen eine Weile so aus, und darauf kommts dem Kinobesitzer ja an. (Arnheim 848) Arnheim suggests that, by highlighting the gap between the bleak reality of the lives of its characters and the fantasies of socioeconomic success offered by the commercial film industry, Berger’s film offers a rare and welcome critique of the film industry’s commodification of viewers’ dreams and aspirations. Indeed, in the context of self-referential early sound film, Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht occupies a special position: as Sabine Hake has noted, the film may very well be «one of the first to thematize the new technology from the perspective of reception» (Hake 60). Its romantic storyline involves two people 334 Christian Rogowski whose dreams, aspirations, and ideas about life are heavily impacted by their moviegoing and their exposure to other new media, such as the radio and the gramophone, to the point where the line between media-generated fantasies and the characters’ real experiences blurs. Berger’s creative use of sound helps highlight the convergence of the real and the fantastic in what, quite paradoxically, becomes a realistic cinematic fairytale. Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht premiered on 18 November 1932 at Hamburg’s Ufa-Palast, the largest cinema in continental Europe. It opened in Berlin at the Gloria-Palast on 29 November, garnering generally positive reviews in both cities: «Es gibt wieder einmal einen Film, den man gesehen haben muß,» one reviewer proclaimed. 5 Critics were near unanimous in their praise for the smart and sophisticated manner in which the film played with comedic conventions and brought refreshing perspectives to a genre that had gone stale, how the clever premise (the shared bed) helped make «ein famoses, zugkräftiges, glänzendes Lustspiel» (Aros). Even critics who could not warm up to the film’s charm, like Heinrich Braune, writing for the Social Democratic Hamburger Echo, had to concede that the film was «äußerst geschickt komponiert,» noting in particular how the film-within-the-film device distinguished Berger’s film from standard comedic fare: Nachdem man lange genug phantasievolle Wunschträume auf ernst inszeniert hat, man denke an Erik Charells Der Kongreß tanzt, nimmt man jetzt auf den Widerstand Rücksicht, der sich gegen derartige Unwirklichkeiten immer mehr verfestigte. Man versucht nun, die nicht so romantische Wirklichkeit mit solchen, der Wirklichkeit entrückenden Wunschträumen zu verbinden. (112) From the outset, Berger’s film depicts a world saturated with sounds beyond an individual’s control. To a large extent, it is economic hardship that shapes the main characters’ desires, aspirations, and perceptions: neither protagonist is able to afford her or his own private space but is forced into a makeshift arrangement with the landlady, widow Seidelbast (Amanda Lindner). When Grete and Hans meet, they misjudge one another based on visual appearance: he sees her get into a limousine - she is being picked up for a private manicure assignment - and assumes that she is the daughter of a wealthy businessman; she mistakes the fact that he is out and about early in the morning in a tailcoat - he is returning from his shift at the nightclub - for a sign that he is a rich playboy. The main characters are thus involved in a game of misrecognition based on misreading visual clues. We viewers are privy to information that helps us recognize these mistakes, and our position of privilege vis-à-vis the characters is the source of much of the filmic pleasure - very much in line with comedic convention. On the level of sound, however, an altogether different story emerges: the room shared by Grete and Hans is located in an inner-city tenement com- The Politics of Sound in Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht 335 plex, whose street front is taken up by a small movie theater. This proximity allows the filmmakers to introduce a variety of self-referential dialogues and devices. For instance, all day the noises coming from the storefront cinema travel through the courtyard and permeate the lives of the residents. The constant penetration of external noise (including music) in the characters’ spaces can be read along lines proposed by Ofer Ashkenazi with regard to early sound film, as a symptom of the erosion of the bourgeois private sphere during times of extreme economic crisis: Widow Seidelbast, who waxes nostalgically of the better days she has seen as a former «member of the Court Theater of Lippe-Detmold,» is clinging to notions of bourgeois respectability in her meticulously kept household, even as she is forced to rent out a room in her apartment, located in a lessthan-desirable neighborhood. Grete and Hans, as characters without job security, may aspire to the status of middle-class employees, but they both clearly have failed to secure their own protective space. The omnipresence of sound in the world of these three characters indicates that the Great Depression has bereft the individual of any kind of private refuge to which he or she can withdraw (Ashkenazi 251). The film’s theme of mistaken identity is intimately linked with economic and political issues. There are frequent references in the dialog to money, status, and social fears: Hans, we hear, is behind in his rent even for his modest accommodation; Grete has to defend herself against sexual harassment from the male clients in the manicure salon, for fear of losing her job. The main song, «Wenn ich sonntags in mein Kino geh,» underscores the discrepancy between the glamorous fantasy worlds depicted on screen and the mundane, often difficult circumstances of everyday life. The song acknowledges the audience’s desires but also articulates a resigned sense that the viewers’ actual reality will not allow for the wish-fulfillment the screen provides: Wenn ich sonntags in mein Kino geh und im Film die feinen Leute seh, denk ich immer wieder: Könnt ich mal, ach könnt ich mal genauso glücklich sein! Alle Tage Sekt und Kaviar, und ein Auto und ein Schloß sogar! […] Träum ich noch am Montag früh: Einmal leben so wie die - doch zu sowas kommt man nie! Grete seems to have adjusted well to the less than ideal circumstances of her life. As she brushes her teeth and gets ready to work, the tune wafts up through the courtyard into her room, and she cheerfully starts to sing along, despite the re- 336 Christian Rogowski alization that «Grau ist die Woche, die ich montags überschau/ auch die nächste Woche wieder ist genau so flau/ Man hat vom Leben fast nichts! » For her, the song’s promise of «ein kleiner Schimmer des Lichts» seems to be enough. Hans, on the other hand, reacts with considerable anger to the music as he tries to go to sleep, interjecting his cynical comments into the lines sung by the Comedian Harmonists: «Wenn ich sonntags in mein Kino geh» (Hans: «Ooch noch sonntags! ? ! »)/ «und im Film die feinen Leute seh» (Hans: «Sind ja auch schon pleite! ») […]/ «denk ich immer wieder: Könnt ich mal, ach könnt ich mal genauso glücklich sein! » (Hans: «Ach könnt ich mal den elenden Leierkasten kaputt schlagen! ») before yelling «Ruhe! » while climbing into bed. 6 Of course, such «interactions» between the characters of the main narrative and a song supposedly lodged in the film-within-the-film breaks with the logic of realism (of getting the sound just right for a given setting), since the audio track makes no adjustment in volume or in sound quality for the spatial distance or the walls separating the movie theater and widow Seidelbast’s apartment. Throughout the film, Berger plays upon the fact that most moviegoers do not consciously make a distinction between the two levels upon which sound works in film - as diegetic sound emanating from identifiable sources within the world depicted on screen and as non-diegetic sound emanating from outside the fictional world. Berger engages the film audience (as viewers and listeners) in a perceptual cat-and-mouse game: much as the film’s plot line about mistaken identities makes it clear that we can never be quite certain about what we see, the soundtrack subtly suggests that we can never be quite certain about what we hear, either. Sound in Berger’s film is carefully calibrated to straddle the divide between reality and fiction - as is evident in the constant crosscutting between the story of Grete and Hans and excerpts from the fictional film, All dies ist dein! . The movie theater is near the entrance to the tenement complex, and Hans is friends with Helmut, the projectionist, giving him access to the projection booth (despite the «Eingang verboten» sign). This narrative conceit lodges the fictional film within the main diegesis and allows the musical soundtrack freely to float back and forth between the two levels. Time and again, music from the fictional film is heard where it does not belong, i.e., outside of the storefront movie theater, which would make it, strictly speaking, non-diegetic. Yet more often than not, a source within the diegetic reality is identified for what we initially assumed to be non-diegetic music - the radio, the gramophone, and live performers such as the itinerant street musicians that appear in the tenement courtyard, or Leo Monosson, who performs on the stage of the nightclub. Dies alles ist dein! , produced by the aptly named «Bombastik-Film A.-G.,» as its credits inform us, is a vehicle for two fictional stars, «Vera Veranda» and The Politics of Sound in Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht 337 «Tito da Capo.» The two appear in overblown scenes, set in gigantic rooms overflowing with flowers, as a glamorous lady and her crooning beau, with armies of liveried servants and chambermaids gyrating around them, not unlike the spectacular Ausstattungsrevuen championed on Berlin’s stages by the likes of Erik Charell, Hermann Haller, and James Klein - and their on-screen equivalent, the so-called Tonfilmoperetten (cf. Jansen; Wedel). In his review for Film-Kurier, Willy Haas summed up the critical gist of this dramaturgical gesture, echoing many of Rudolf Arnheim’s sentiments: Den beiden ärmlichen, aber braven Menschen wird entgegengestellt ein Kintoppfilm mit Heldentenor, mit einer schmetternden falschen Gitta Alpar, mit unzähligen Pagen, Zofen und galonierten Dienern. […] Der Kintopp als soziales Narkotikum tritt gewissermaßen in Figura auf. […] Eine außerordentlich gute Idee. Sie zu fassen zeugt von sozialem Gewissen. Ihre Ausführung aber zeugt von geschäftlicher Begabung. 7 Ernst Jäger likewise singled out Berger’s masterful handling of the film-withinthe-film motif as a comedic device: «Eine der witzigsten Filmsuiten, die je geschaffen wurde, nur der René Clair-Opernparodie zu vergleichen. Sie stammt von Ludwig Berger, der in diesen ironischen Partien des Films auch dem Schlagerunwesen (mitten beim Schlagerkreieren! ) ein herzhaftes Wort sagt» (Jäger). Indeed, Berger’s light touch displays many affinities with the work of French filmmaker René Clair, who had used off-screen sound in intriguing ways in his 1931 musical comedy Le Million. Like Clair, Berger employs visual irony, fluid camera movement, and a clever manipulation of diegetic and non-diegetic sound to charming effect. Critic Hermann Sinsheimer zeroed in on the sophisticated manner in which Berger’s film differed from standard comedic fare: it seemingly follows yet also parodies genre conventions, since the use of a sound film within a sound film anchors the music within the diegetic world of the story by realistically identifying the source from which the music emanates: «[D]er Tonfilm braucht Musik und Schlagergesang (warum er das immer wieder und unter allen Umständen braucht, wissen die Götter, die Verleiher und, zur Not, auch das Publikum), diese Musik und Singerei bezieht der Tonfilm diesmal vom Tonfilm im Tonfilm» (Sinsheimer). The main target of Berger’s parody is the Tonfilmoperette, the genre launched by Ufa’s producer Erich Pommer (who also produced Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht) in two distinctive variants: «Berger ironisiert zwei Prototypen der Ufa-Filmoperette: Einmal das soziale Aufstiegsmärchen, wie es 1930 Die Drei von der Tankstelle begründeten - zum anderen die prunkvolle Ausstattungsoperette, zumeist im historischen Kostüm, wie sie Der Kongreß tanzt verkörperte.» 8 The fictional Tonfilmoperette-within-the-film is first introduced in shots that show the screen inside the movie theater. Throughout, Berger’s film al- 338 Christian Rogowski ternates between images that show the fictional film audience looking at the screen and shots from that film-within-the-film that occupy the entire screen for us, the actual audience of Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht: time and again, the film-within-the-film is, as it were, allowed to take over. When the tuxedoed beau is finally united with his operetta diva in Dies alles ist dein! - she has kept ! him waiting for considerable screen time during seemingly endless, schmaltzy incantations of «Wenn du nicht kommst, dann haben die Rosen umsonst geblüht» - their meeting leads to a rapturous duet. Multiple cross-cuts juxtapose the bathos of the fictional film with the mundane worries of the characters in the main story. In his projection booth, Helmut laconically remarks, «Ich hab auch mal ne Braut gehabt. Aber gesungen haben wir nie zusammen …,» before tackling yet another sandwich. Meanwhile, Grete concocts a ruse, feigning to leave the salon for a private manicure assignment with Herr Krüger, while actually trying to meet with Hans. And Hans startles Herr Krüger with a phone call, seeking to find out why Grete is late for their rendezvous. The gulf between the pseudo-ecstatic wish fulfillment of the fictional characters and the mundane worries of Hans and Grete could not be wider. The fictional film may promise that «All this is yours! ,» but the juxtaposition ultimately exposes this fantasy as empty (cf. Müller 405).Yet Berger’s film acknowledges that the very contemplation of such a promise, however illusory, is a source of pleasure, both for Hans and Grete and for us the audience. Much of the film’s viewing pleasure, Kurt Pinthus noted in his review, is predicated on the knowing bond that the film establishes between the screen and the viewer: «Das Publikum versteht den Spaß und lacht und applaudiert. […] aber eigentlich ist der Hauptfilm gerade ein solcher, über den sich die Parodie lustig macht. Dieser Film spottet seiner selbst […] und weiß doch sehr wohl: wie und warum» (Pinthus). Even the primary narrative’s supposed diegetic reality is held in ironic suspension, as its fairytale elements highlighted by the characters’ archetypal names undercut the real-life storyline: here, a «Hans» indeed meets a «Grete.» Ultimately, nothing in Berger’s film is stable on an epistemological level, as an ironic playfulness permeates the film in its entirety. One of the most interesting deployments of the potentially destabilizing (and pleasurable) use of sound occurs during the episode that takes Grete and Hans on an outing to Potsdam. The episode stands out in a variety of ways. It seems to fly in the face of the realist tone of much of the rest of the film; throughout, we hear that the two protagonists are struggling to make ends meet financially, yet here we see them splurging on a twenty-five kilometer taxi ride from central Berlin - a trip with a presumably astronomical cost. 9 In dramaturgical terms, the episode marks the one occasion during which the two protagonists literally try to escape their drab everyday lives, by leaving The Politics of Sound in Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht 339 the harsh economic realities of Berlin for the gentler, nostalgic environs of the eighteenth-century palace of Sans Souci. Finally, there is a profound irony undercutting the entire episode, since the outing takes place under false pretenses: each assumes that the other owns a car but has not brought it to the rendezvous. Grete innocently suggests that they take a taxi to somewhere far off, spontaneously suggesting «Potsdam! » - and Hans does not dare acknowledge that a ride to Potsdam is way beyond his means. 10 The symbolic significance of this flight into a supposedly nicer world is duly noted: despite the fact that neither Hans nor Grete have specified where they wish to go in Potsdam, the taxi driver drops them off at a highly significant location, namely in front of the famous windmill of Sans Souci. 11 The setting evokes a historical anecdote that became a popular legend: between 1745 and 1747, the «miller of Sans Souci,» Johann Wilhelm Grävenitz, was involved in a dispute with King Frederick the Great over his plans to build a summer palace near his windmill at Potsdam. Legend has it that Frederick wanted to have the mill removed out of concern that it would spoil his view and that he would find its noise disturbing. When confronted with the threat that the absolute ruler could have the mill removed by force, the miller is said to have responded that the King could of course do that easily, were it not for the existence of the legal system: «Gut gesagt, allergnädigster Herr, wenn nur das Hofgericht in Berlin nicht wäre» (Hebel 662). Impressed by the miller’s faith in the rule of law, a system that pertains to all residents of a state, regardless of status, and that the King himself had set up, Frederick is said to have ceded to the miller and allowed him to stay. Widely associated with the image of Frederick the Great as a tolerant, wise and benevolent ruler, the legend of the «miller of Sans Souci» revolves around concepts of civil courage, the rule of law, and enlightened reason. Here, the notion of a constitutional Rechtsstaat had clearly won out over the authoritarian Prussian Obrigkeitsstaat. The beginning of the Potsdam episode becomes a subtle yet highly politically charged gesture: visually, the film suggests that to the characters - and to the filmmakers - Potsdam and the windmill are synonymous. Without making a direct verbal reference, the film thus takes sides with constitutionality and evokes the memory of an enlightened rule of law. The shot of the mill briefly occupies the screen, yet Hans and Grete remain preoccupied with their own concerns. Their arrival at Potsdam is marked by the sound of what seem to be bells (possibly diegetic) and the faint music of wind chimes (possibly non-diegetic), underscoring the magical atmosphere. Looking down a path lined with trees, Grete marvels at the magnificent park outside the palace of Sans Souci and asks Hans whether he knows what these French words mean. With a lump in his throat, as he hands over his last bank bill to pay the 340 Christian Rogowski driver, Hans sighs: yes, he does know that it means «ohne Sorge,» the irony being that his own financial situation is now anything but «worry-free.» The ruse continues to the very end of the episode, when Hans resorts to pretending that he has lost his wallet to explain the fact that he can’t pay the return taxi fare and the couple has to take the suburban train back to the center of Berlin. 12 Filmically, the Potsdam episode marks a seeming shift to a different genre. The camera shows the inscription Sans Souci on the top of the palace façade and proceeds to tilt down, as we hear a voiceover that for a moment suggests that we are now watching a documentary. A male voice, bland and mechanical in delivery, recites historical dates and architectural information that seem to come from a drab Ufa Kulturfilm, if it weren’t for the heavy Berlin accent and the suggestion of bored routine. Cut to reveal the figure of a bearded elderly man (played by seasoned comedian Eugen Rex). It is the tour guide, inside the palace, who continues his recitation to a group of visitors as the image and sound track begin to drift apart: instead of being shown the supposedly noteworthy aspects of the palace’s interior, our initial focus is directed to the visitors’ feet as they scurry to don the felt slippers they have to wear to protect the precious parquet floors. Again there is a delay, until the camera moves upward to show us what the tour guide has been talking about. Yet that gaze is quickly withdrawn, as the guide’s voice turns somewhat embarrassed, mentioning that the gilded reliefs feature slightly risqué subject matter. We see the guide’s face struggling to find the right words before settling for a suitably neutral formulation - he hesitantly calls them «gewissermaßen bacchantische Szenen.» At Potsdam, Hans and Grete may seem to have attained what the main song promised them - «ein Auto und ein Schloß sogar» - in the mundane guise of a horrendously expensive taxi ride and a boring guided tour. Grete and Hans cannot completely immerse themselves in a historical fantasy, but have to precariously shuffle along in fluffy slippers that constantly come off, enduring the dry recitations of a tour guide listlessly going through the motions. The irony intensifies, attaining more and more political significance. In the library room, the tour guide makes a point of noting that Frederick the Great’s extensive collection comprises only books written in French: «2200 Bände, von antiken griechischen Schriftstellern und auch von französischen, alles in französischer Sprache, ja.» The distracted, somewhat embarrassed fashion, in which the guide hints at Frederick’s Francophilia twice in the same sentence, effectively debunks the myth of the Prussian king as German national hero. Instead of presenting Frederick as a great military leader and a source of German national pride, as Weimar Germany’s political Right was wont to do, the guide associates the king with an enlightened cosmopolitan intellectual elite. This association, however, The Politics of Sound in Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht 341 is undercut by the guide’s bored and disinterested delivery. Pointing to a signed copy of a philosophical work, the guide notes laconically, «Hier ist sogar eine gewissermaßen eigenhändige Widmung von Voltaire, na ja.» The tour continues into the king’s music room, where his famous flute is displayed in a glass case on top of a fortepiano. The guide makes an explicit association between the object and a famous instance of visual mythmaking: «Ursprünglich stand der Flügel in der Mitte des Raumes, so wie ihn Menzel auf seinem berühmten Gemälde ‹Das Flötenkonzert von Sanssouci› gemalt hat.» The film underscores the discrepancy between the current scene and Adolph Menzel’s painterly idyll of 1852 (which, ironically, had become an icon of authenticity, evoking the «real» atmosphere at Frederick’s eighteenthcentury court) by having the tour group crowd the screen and block our view. The guide’s dry narration continues, «Hier steht sein Notenpult. Und hier haben wir nun seine Flöte, sozusagen sein Originalinstrument.» At this point the audio track again splits from the visual track, as we are unable to see the cherished objects that have become quasi-religious relics, part and parcel of a veritable patriotic personality cult that the guide acknowledges but to which he clearly does not subscribe: «Das alles hat er nun gewissermaßen persönlich in der Hand gehabt.» The guide’s strange speech mannerisms (for instance, his excessive, and illogical, use of «sozusagen» or «gewissermaßen» - either it is Frederick’s original flute or it isn’t; he either held it in his hands or didn’t) add to the debunking of the myths associated with what for many had become a place of nationalistic hero worship. As the tour continues, the guide takes the group through the «Marmorsaal, in dem die berühmte Tafelrunde stattzufinden pflegte» - again obliquely invoking Frederick the Great, as well as another Menzel painting (of 1850), which shows the Francophile Prussian king enjoying conversation with leading Enlightenment intellectuals of his day, including Voltaire. By now, Hans and Grete have altogether lost interest in the guide’s monotonous recitation; Hans ventures to kiss Grete’s hands, and they lose contact with the rest of the group. As they fall behind, they get locked up in Frederick’s music room, but this place of romantic escape turns out to be a prison of sorts. After several futile and increasingly agitated attempts to open various doors, they resign themselves to the situation and settle into their new intimacy, sitting down, embracing, and exchanging a kiss. Grete notes: «Im Kino finge jetzt sicher Musik an! ,» then explains to a perplexed Hans: «Ja wenn, wenn es schön wird, fängt da immer Musik an! » And, miraculously, we begin to hear the faint strains of a flute playing. The filmmakers appear to have responded to Grete’s sentiments by obligingly providing the suitable romantic, apparently non-diegetic musical accompaniment. Grete’s surprised question, «Wer spielt denn hier Flöte? » is quickly dismissed 342 Christian Rogowski by the skeptical Hans in a deadpan remark, «Wer soll schon in Sans Souci Flöte spielen? » Yet the music continues and grows louder. By now, the multiple levels of irony underpinning this scene have become palpable: of course, most contemporary viewers would associate the flute music we hear not only with the palace’s historical occupant, King Frederick the Great, but also with Das Flötenkonzert von Sanssouci, the first sound film in the successful Preußenfilme franchise, featuring Otto Gebühr. The Ufa production, directed by Gustav Ucicky under the aegis of executive producer Günther Stapenhorst, presented a very different picture of the legendary monarch, one that led to politically motivated disturbances when it premiered in Berlin on 19 December 1930. Two weeks earlier, Nazis had staged riots in protest of the German screenings of the American film, All Quiet on the Western Front (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1930), based on the famous pacifist novel, Im Westen nichts Neues (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque. Now Ucicky’s film became the target of left-wing agitation, on account of its revisionist and militaristic glorification of the Prussian king. According to Helmut Regel, the film «stilisiert einen Friedrich, dem als Mann des Friedens in fast tragischem Widerspruch böswillige Feinde den Krieg aufzwingen» (128), playing into the hands of revisionists who indulged in fantasies of revenge for the defeat in the First World War. The threat to a beleaguered Prussia, Frederick explicitly notes in Ucicky’s film, emanates from «Versailles» - a claim of French belligerence that resonated strongly with Weimar Germany’s conservatives and völkisch extreme Right that sought to topple the «Diktat von Versailles,» the hated provisions of the Versailles Treaty of 1919. Ucicky’s glorifying portrayal of Frederick as military genius and national hero met with the approval of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who expressed his hopes that the ensuing «Kinokampf» over films such as Im Westen nichts Neues and Das Flötenkonzert von Sanssouci would shake things up at Ufa, where, as he put it, «es i von Juden nur so wimmelt» (qtd. in Töteberg 277). As the music continues during the Potsdam episode in Berger’s film, we half expect to encounter a scene like the famous visual reconstruction in Ucicky’s film of the «Flötenkonzert» in Menzel’s painting. And, indeed, the camera begins to move in search of where the music is coming from. It pushes toward a window, behind which we begin to make out the contours of a man playing the flute - who turns out to be the tour guide practicing by himself in the evening. An agitated man knocks at the window pane, and the idyllic scene comes to an abrupt halt: we quickly realize that the musical interlude was not (quite) the wish fulfillment usually provided by the non-diegetic sound track of a romantic musical comedy. Rather, the musical magic is revealed to be nothing more than the sounds of an amateur musician. Yet, ever so subtly, the associa- The Politics of Sound in Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht 343 tion of non-diegetic music and wish fulfillment in genre films was evoked as well, since alongside the flute we heard the faint, almost imperceptible sounds of a harpsichord - even though the man is revealed to be alone. With such clever and subtle play upon audience expectations, Berger’s film, as Eric Rentschler has rightly noted, places his protagonists in a situation in which «[t]he reality of their world (and this film) reminds them (and us) of other films» (56). Not only of other films, I would add, but also of various political subtexts: in the summer of 1932, when Hans Székely and Robert Liebmann were working on the script for Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht, the Social Democratic Prussian government was ousted in a right-wing coup known as the «Preußenschlag» (20 July 1932). Invoking the emergency statutes of the Weimar constitution, Reich President Hindenburg dismissed the entire Prussian administration and placed control of Germany’s largest federal state in the hands of Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen, a monarchist with an at best ambivalent attitude towards the political pluralism of the Weimar Republic. The pretext had been the Prussian police’s handling of what became known as the «Altonaer Blutsonntag»: on 17 July 1932, some 7,000 SA and SS members staged a deliberate provocation of the Communists, when they marched into one of their strongholds, Altona - then an independent city just outside of Hamburg and part of Prussia. The police’s bungled efforts to curb the violent clashes that ensued resulted in the some sixteen deaths, including innocent bystanders who were killed by ricocheting bullets (Schirmann). Von Papen’s coup dismantled one of the most important pillars of Weimar constitutionalism, the autonomy of Prussia, where the Social Democrats ruled. On 26 July 1932, the «Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens» (C.V.) held a meeting in Berlin to protest the anti-Semitic agitation that ensued from the dismantling of due legal procedures and the collapse of civic order, a «Kundgebung gegen judenfeindlichen Terror und Entrechtung.» 13 The destruction of the democratically elected, left-leaning Prussian government, a major political force in Weimar Germany’s largest and most populous state, left the Republic vulnerable to the onslaught of the Right: as noted above, the Reichstag elections of 31 July 1932 turned the NSDAP into the country’s largest party, garnering 37.2% of the vote and 230 seats in the parliament. Throughout the final years of the Weimar Republic, the rise of the National Socialists was accompanied by increases in anti-Semitic violence. One of the most notorious events occurred in the fall of 1931, on Rosh Hashana (12 September) in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg, home of many upper-middle-class assimilated Jews. That evening, SA members marched along Kurfürstendamm, shouting «Juda, verrecke! » und «Schlagt die Juden tot! » before attacking people streaming out of the synagogue on Fasanenstraße as 344 Christian Rogowski well as anyone else whom they deemed Jewish-looking (Hecht 236). Political tensions and anti-Semitic agitation continued through the next year, during the filming of Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht, between August and November 1932. Throughout Germany, synagogues and Jewish graveyards were defiled and Germans of Jewish descent were increasingly subjected to harassment or violent attacks by Nazi thugs. An annual report of the Jewish Central- Verein, issued in December 1932, notes a drastic increase in the work of the «Rechtsschutzstelle des Central-Vereins» and gives an overview of the frenetic «massenpolitische Aufklärungsarbeit» that the organization found necessary to combat anti-Semitic agitation and the erosion of legal protection for Germany’s Jewish citizens («Was tut der C.V.? » 355). One of the most dramatic events that occurred as part of the «Preußenschlag» was the public arrest of Bernhard Weiß, the vice-president of Berlin’s police forces. A trained lawyer, Weiß had become the first non-baptized Jew to hold a major office in the Prussian executive, and distinguished himself as one of the most well-known and staunchest defenders of Weimar constitutionalism, using every legal device to stem the rising tide of Nazism. That made him a target for Joseph Goebbels, who conducted an extended smear campaign against «Isidor» (as he called Weiß to draw attention to Weiß’s Jewishness), in a series of articles in the Nazi paper Der Angriff and the vituperative f Buch Isidor (1928), which combined libelous denunciations with anti-Semitic carr toons. Over the years, Weiß had successfully sued Goebbels over sixty times (Bering). On 20 July 1932, Weiß was arrested when he refused to recognize the takeover of Prussia’s administration by the Reich as legitimate. The general turmoil of 1932 included public protests in Berlin against increases in rents and cuts in unemployment benefits, continued street battles between Nazis and Communists, as well as a general strike of Berlin’s transportation workers (the BVG) in early November (Kerbs and Stahr). As a result, «by 1932 Germany was in a state of virtual civil war» (Diehl 287). With escalating acts of violence against Germans of Jewish descent, the collapse of constitutionality in Prussia, and the arrest of a prominent Jewish-German defender of the rule of law, there were very good reasons for Berger and his collaborators (most of them of Jewish descent) during the filming of Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht in the summer and fall of 1932 to be worried about Prussia - including concerns over economic security, constitutional democracy, and enlightened reason in general, and the status of Germany’s Jews in particular. After his return from his near four-year sojourn in Hollywood in the spring of 1931, Ludwig Berger found Germany profoundly changed. As he put it in his memoirs, The Politics of Sound in Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht 345 Deutschland war wie vom Erdboden verschwunden. Kommunistische Umtriebe und eine furchtbare Art von Revolver-Nationalismus […]. Es war 1931. Während der Premiere von «Im Westen nichts Neues» liefen weiße Mäuse durchs Publikum und Tränengasbomben explodierten. Und die Regierung? Sie tat nichts. Europa, das zur Toleranz bestimmt war, ist schon damals an Herzschwäche gestorben. (Berger, Wir sind 278) d Between 1931 and the summer of 1933, Berger lived in his comfortable apartment at Carmerstraße 16, in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, around the corner from Steinplatz, some three doors down from Bernhard Weiß’s residence at Steinplatz 3, and about two blocks away from the Synagogue on Fasanenstraße. During the final months of the Weimar Republic, Berger, appalled by the erosion of civic culture and public discourse, gathered a small circle of like-minded friends around himself for weekly meetings at his Charlottenburg apartment to discuss the political situation and to uphold the values of liberal humanism: «[…] und dann versuchten wir mit vereinten Kräften eine möglichst gültige Definition des Begriffes der Humanität zu schaffen, gewissermaßen als Mauer im Sturm der Zeit» (Berger, «Der Film» 13). In this context, the Potsdam episode in Berger’s romantic comedy takes on a decidedly political significance: through humor and irony, the episode employs sound in defense of liberal enlightened rationality, offering a subtle critique of the irrational, nationalistic mythmaking that propelled the country into increasingly violent spasms of anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, and anti- Semitic violence. In sending its protagonists to the capital of a different, nonauthoritarian Prussia, invoking the «miller of Sans Souci» legend and the image of Frederick the Great as cosmopolitan ruler, Berger’s film appeals to humanistic ideals of the rule of law, civic order, and a pluralistic democratic society. It exudes a liberal, enlightened spirit, with its light touch and through subtle allusion and gentle suggestion. With its witty, coolly sardonic dialogues, its playful juxtaposition of filmic realities with a «film-within-the-film,» and its repeated unmasking of seemingly non-diegetic music as part of the diegesis, Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht trains its audience to be enlightened viewers. While the film acknowledges the «reality of desire,» to quote Sabine Hake (61), it also ultimately reaffirms the distinction between filmic fantasy and actual everyday life. Towards the end of the film, Hans and Grete are shown inside the movie theater, enjoying the presentation of the film-within-the-film. As he tries to sneak a kiss from her, the lights go on, and the word «Ende» appears on the (fictional) screen, as people are shown to file out of the movie theater. Even as Hans and Grete seem to experience their own private happy ending, realizing that, in a sense, they have been bedfellows all along, they come to learn that the cautionary message of the film’s main song, «Einmal leben so wie die - doch zu 346 Christian Rogowski sowas kommt man nie! » still applies: the couple may be experiencing a cinematic boy-meets-girl fairytale, but at the end of the day, they find themselves - just like the audience - faced with the task of remaining vigilant about the seductive power of make-believe. Unmasking and acknowledging the filmic illusion as a «soziales Narkotikum» (Haas), Berger’s film places Hans and Grete firmly in the real world, reminding them that they need to keep their eyes, and their ears, open. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but also eminently political: within just over two months of the film’s release, the Weimar Republic fell prey to the very nationalistic myths and irrational fantasies that Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht, through subtle humor and gentle irony, sought to debunk. Notes This research was supported by a grant from the Amherst College Faculty Research Award Program, funded by H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life. 1 Violent clashes, primarily between Nazis and Communists, had resulted in nearly 100 deaths and over 1,000 injured in the month prior to the July 1932 election. After the election, violence continued, including politically motivated beatings and murder (Eyck 502). 2 Like many films of the early sound era, Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht was produced in multiple language versions for the international market, in this case an English one, entitled, Early to Bed, and a French one, À moi le jour, à toi la nuit (co-directed by Claude Heymann), with alternate casts. My reading of the film is based on the German version. See Wahl for a discussion of the differences between the three language versions (Wahl 59-66). 3 Hans Wollenberg, in his reviews of Berger’s film, includes the laconic note, «Film im Film ist gegenwärtig, nebenbei, verdächtig en vogue» (Hawa). 4 To appreciate the sardonic irony in Arnheim’s remarks, one has to remember that Ufa had, since 1927, been under the control of right-wing media mogul and politician, Alfred Hugenberg (Kreimeier 158). 5 kr., «Großer Erfolg des neuen Films im Gloria-Palast. Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht»; see also the quotations from press reviews featured in the full-page ad for the film in Film-Kurier 285 from 3 December 1932. r 6 Later, Hans’s prediction seems to have come true: we discover a «Kuckuck» (the colloquial term for a «Pfändungsmarke,» or bailiff’s seal, indicating bankruptcy) at Herr Generaldirektor Krüger’s place, indicating that even «feine Leute» such as the ostensibly wealthy Jewish businessman are «ja auch schon pleite.» 7 The reference here is to the extravagant filmic vehicles for Hungarian operetta diva, Gitta Alpár, such as Gitta entdeckt ihr Herz (premiered 5 April 1932) and Die - oder keine (premiered 26 September 1932), both directed by Carl Froelich. Other operetta stars who appeared in filmic musical spectacles of the period include soprano Marta Eggerth and tenors Jan Kiepura and Richard Tauber. 8 Gehler and Kasten 18. In this special issue of Colloquia Germanica, Davidson argues that the assessment of Die Drei von der Tankstelle as a social mobility tale is inadequate. 9 The point is reinforced later on: at Café Viktoria, where Hans is shown working in the afternoon, a colleague asks why Hans, as a tired nightclub waiter, would take on extra The Politics of Sound in Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht 347 hours during daytime. Hans laconically remarks, twice: «Mensch, weißt du, was ein Taxi nach Sans Souci kostet…? » 10 Potsdam, of course, is also the location of the Ufa studios at Babelsberg, where Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht was filmed, subtly suggesting that Grete and Hans are escaping into a kind of filmic fantasy, the world of make-believe projected by the film-within-the-film. 11 The mill is located to the west of Sans Souci palace, an unlikely destination for a taxi coming from Berlin: the taxi would presumably approach the palace through downtown Potsdam and head for the main entrance of the palace grounds, the «Grünes Gitter» to the south-east of the palace. 12 A review of the French version singles out the sophisticated humor of this episode: «la visite de Sans-Souci à Potsdam est d’une drôlerie spirituelle.» «À moi le jour, à toi la nuit.» 13 See the ad in C.V.-Zeitung 22 July 1932: 413. Works Cited «À moi le jour, à toi la nuit.» Cinématographie française 24 Dec. 1932: 199. Arnheim, Rudolf. «Filmnotizen.» Die Weltbühne 49 (1932): 847-48. Aros. «Er bei Tag und sie bei Nacht. Filmkritische Bemerkungen.» Beilage zum «Montag» 5 Dec. 1932: N. pag. Ashkenazi, Ofer. «‹A New Era of Peace and Understanding›: The Integration of Sound-Film into German Popular Cinema, 1929-1932.» The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema. Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy. Ed. Christian Rogowski. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. 249-67. Berger, Ludwig. Wir sind vom gleichen Stoff, aus dem die Träume sind. Summe eines Lebens. Tübingen: R. Wunderlich, 1953. -. «Der Film - bevor er war. Betrachtungen über das spezifisch Filmische.» Hamburger Filmgespräche II. Hamburg: Hamburger Gesellschaft für Filmkunde, 1965. 13-22. Bering, Dietz. «Isidor - Geschichte einer Hetzjagd.» Die Zeit 14 Aug. 1981: N. pag. Braune, Heinrich. «Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht.» Hamburger Echo 19 Nov. 1932: N. pag. Diehl, James M. Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1977. Eyck, Erich. Geschichte der Weimarer Republik. Zweiter Band: Von der Konferenz von Locarno bis zu Hitlers Machtübernahme. 2nd ed. Erlenbach-Zürich, Stuttgart: Eugen Rentsch, 1956. Gehler, Friedrich and Ullrich Kasten. «Ludwig Berger. Der Romantiker des deutschen Films. Aus der Geschichte des deutschen Films. Teil XIII.» n.p., 26 Apr. 1982. Nachlaß Ludwig Berger, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, folder 2852. Haas, Willy. «Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht.» Film-Kurier 29 Nov. 1932: N. pag. Hake, Sabine. «Provocations of the Disembodied Voice: Song and the Transition to Sound in Berger’s Day and Night.» Peripheral Visions. The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema. Ed. Kenneth S. Calhoon. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 55-71. Hawa [= Hans Wollenberg]. «Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht.» Lichtbild-Bühne 29 Nov. 1932: N. pag. Hebel, Johann Peter. «König Friedrich und sein Nachbar.» (1811) Die Kalendergeschichten. Sämtliche Erzählungen aus dem Rheinländischen Hausfreund. Ed. Harald Zils. Munich: Hanser, 1998. 661-62. 348 Christian Rogowski Hecht, Cornelia. Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik. Bonn: Dietz, 2003. Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht. Dir. Ludwig Berger. Ufa, 1932. Jäger, Ernst. «‹Ist das nicht romantisch? › Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht. Gloriapalast.» 12-Uhr-Blatt n.d. Nachlaß Ludwig Berger, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, folder 2960. Jansen, Wolfgang. Glanzrevuen der Zwanziger Jahre. Berlin: Hentrich, 1987. Kerbs, Diethart and Henrick Stahr, eds. Berlin 1932. Das letzte Jahr der ersten deutschen Republik. Politik, Symbole, Medien. Berlin: Hentrich, 1992. Klemperer, Victor. Leben sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum. Tagebücher 1925- 1932. Berlin: Aufbau, 1996. kr. «Großer Erfolg des neuen Films im Gloria-Palast. Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht.» N.p., n.d. Nachlaß Ludwig Berger, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, folder 2960. Kreimeier, Klaus. The Ufa Story. A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company 1918- 1945. Trans. Robert and Rita Kimber. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Müller, Corinna. «Tonfilm: Neuer Realismus? Zum Beispiel Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht.» Diesseits der ‹Dämonischen Leinwand.› Ed. Thomas Koebner, Norbert Grob and Bernd Kiefer. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2003. 393-408. Pinthus, Kurt. «… spottet seiner selbst, aber amüsant. Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht im Gloria-Palast.» N.p., n.d. Nachlaß Ludwig Berger, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, folder 2960. Prokasky, Judith. «Krise. Die späte Weimarer Republik im Spiegel der Tonfilmoperette.» ‹Wenn ich sonntags in mein Kino geh›: Ton - Film - Musik 1929-1933. Ed. Rainer Rother. Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 2007. 58-79. Rentschler, Eric. «The Situation is Hopeless but Not Desperate: UFA’s Early Sound- Film Musicals.» Weimar Cinema, 1919-1933. Ed. Laurence Kardish. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. 44-59. Schirmann, Léon. Altonaer Blutsonntag 17. Juli 1932. Dichtungen und Wahrheit. Hamburg: Ergebnisse, 1994. Schöning, Jörg, ed. Die deutsche Filmkomödie vor 1945. Cinefest: 1. Internationales Festival des deutschen Film-Erbes. Hamburg: CineGraph, 2004. Schweinitz, Jörg. «‹Wie im Kino.› Die autothematische Welle im frühen Tonfilm. Figurationen des Selbstreflexiven.» Diesseits der ‹Dämonischen Leinwand.› Ed. Thomas Koebner, Norbert Grob and Bernd Kiefer. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2003. 372- 93. Sinsheimer, Hermann. «Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht.» Berliner Tageblatt (Abendausgabe) 30 Nov. 1932: N. pag. Thüna, Ulrich von. «Die deutsche Filmkomödie der Depressionsjahre.» Photokina- Katalog. Cologne: Messe- und Ausstellungsgesellschaft, 1980. 317-21. Töteberg, Michael. «Prügelei im Parkett. Das Flötenkonzert von Sanssouci.» Das Ufa- Buch. Kunst und Krisen. Stars und Regisseure. Wirtschaft und Politik. Ed. Hans-Michael Bock and Michael Töteberg. Frankfurt a.M.: Zweitausendeins, 1992. 276-78. Wahl, Chris. «Das Sprechen der Filme. Über verbale Sprache im Spielfilm.» Diss. Ruhr Universität Bochum, 2003. «Was tut der C.V.? Kurzbericht über das Jahr 1932.» C.V. Zeitung 30 Dec. 1932: 535-36. Wedel, Michael. Der deutsche Musikfilm. Archäologie eines Genres 1914-1945. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2007. Of Oil and Operetta: Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930) JOHN E. DAVIDSON T HE O HIO S TATE U NIVERSITY Klopfendes Herz und der Motor ein Schlag! Lachendes Ziel, lachender Start und eine herrliche Fahrt. (from «Ein Freund», sung in Die Drei von der Tankstelle) One of the most popular comedies of late Weimar, Die Drei von der Tankstelle (dir. Wilhelm Thiele, 1930) provided viewers with a little bit of everything: delightfully clever song-and-dance bits, romantic duets with the new Lieblingspärchen of Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch, slapstick humor, witty dialogue, and a respite from the surrounding economic disaster. As befits an operetta, the film attends more to the emerging potentials of sound cinema, as well as to stage-like qualities such as lighting and theatrical song-and-dance blocking, than to more strictly filmic properties such as editing and montage. This is perhaps the reason in general, as Thomas Elsaesser reports, that contemporary critics often applied «Operette» to film as a derisive term (330). Yet, Michael Wedel points out that in self-consciously making this a «Tonfilmoperette,» Thiele avails himself of the expanding possibilities of this «new product of UFA» to make Tankstelle not just a send-up of Weimar society but a prototype that unites popular and avant-garde elements (see «Tanz der Form»). The criticism of Thiele’s film as a German variation on Hollywood «Erzählkino» that is conservatively escapist in the framework of the Great Depression is unwarranted and misguided, Wedel claims, if one approaches the film through its «formal-aesthetic,» «technical-aesthetic,» and «culturalhistorical» aspects («Tanz der Form» 215). Wedel’s masterful elucidation of the tension between the operetta’s form and classical Hollywood narrative, as well as of Tobis-Klangfilm’s Lichtton as the only adequate technical vehicle for this music-film form, is convincing; however, in his reading, the social impact of cinematic sounds and images has been replaced entirely by a restricted sense of cultural advance from operetta to Tonfilmoperette. In revisiting Tankstelle to take Wedel’s formalistic analysis a step further, this essay explores the manner in which Thiele incorporates and comments on broader aspects of a society that, as Siegfried Kracauer famously put it, dreamt of itself as fully and perfectly integrated even in the face of hard evidence that it can never be so. Paying particular attention to the musical num- 350 John E. Davidson bers, we will find that a kind of collateral damage is done along the way to the abstract regimentation and gender specificity of the chorus line, that mainstay of the mass ornament. Beyond that, I will show that this impertinence in Tankstelle is subject to at least one more turn of the screw. It becomes an announcement for the vertically integrated, supposedly classless, hierarchical, corporatist structures of work that will dovetail eventually with the National Socialist state. This tension between playful critique and political complicity in Thiele’s project can be described as a variation on the «double negative» that Elsaesser discovers in the «Operettenfilm.» The form displays a natural engagement with the coming of sound: It is as if sound, rather than adding a layer of «reality,» was turning action into speech-acts, but in contrast to a speech-act like «I promise» binding the speaker to his utterance, the operetta - true to its «inversive» relation to (bourgeois) norms - assigns a particular role to the spectator, namely that of an accomplice, with all the ambivalence inherent in such a notion of complicity. (352) Because of its inherent concern with musical properties, the operetta in sound film not only pulls the rug out from the discourses of true love by showing its lyrical utterances to be delivered by infinitely replaceable figures, but it also evinces a reflexivity that expands to become an advertisement for its technical developments. 1 The complicity at work in and around Tankstelle is more complex than a mere formal and technical reflexivity, or even a textual-political positioning of the audience, would admit. It stems from the manner in which the film culls contemporary economic and cultural currents for its musical material. 2 By reclaiming the form of the operetta but shifting the emphasis away from its generally archaic settings and keeping its focus on the work of automobilizing the present, Tankstelle envisions a kind of Volksgemeinschaft that is imagined through the economic, technical, and discursive impulses of integration that have been gaining momentum throughout the Weimar Republic. This film, then, points the way from the crisis years down the road to the rule of the National Socialists, but not through its political valences. Rather, it contains a similar vision of total synthesis with the «new» generators of wealth like the auto and oil industries fueling an integrated society on the move but supposedly devoid of class. And so, the «future past» of this film may not have been lost: rather, it may simply have chosen one route among many to come to pass. The notion of the future past is borrowed from Reinhart Koselleck by Wedel in his wonderful study of Filmgeschichte als Krisengeschichte (14). Crisis, he claims, can be seen «in seiner singulären Besonderheit» marking change and rupture, but it also must show continuity, «um unterschiedliche, parallel zu Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 351 beobachtende Verlaufsformen auf verschiedenen historischen Bedeutungsebenen reflektieren zu können» (16). Given the uneven distribution of their effects, one might say that the crisis of crises is that they are neither singular nor unified - that, when experienced from some social positions, they are not crises at all. So, the designation of crisis is a unifying gesture rooted both in the polyvalent historical moment studied and in the incision made by the historian from a particular moment (12-13). Thus, to focus on «fueling the crisis years» does not mean that we can only attend to the treatment of the Great Depression in this Tonfilmoperette; we must understand how it establishes a contemporary space looking backwards and forwards that invites a reading of Tankstelle that might be called symptomatic. Seen with the benefit of the film historian’s hindsight, the question becomes not just what a close reading of Tankstelle exposes about its textual politics as a precursor of the Nazi era. True, the two canisters of the pump at this station are operated on the one hand by eternally boyish male heroes, like those who populate proto-Nazi genres such as Bergand Abenteuerfilme, and on the other hand by slightly condescending cultural elites who, like the Fähmel family described by Heinrich Böll in Billard um halb Zehn, felt that their laughter would provide a distance and kind of resistance that ultimately never materialized. Elsaesser writes aptly of a «transparent duplicity» in such films that is worth «locating in the vicinity of Peter Sloterdijk’s ‹enlightened false consciousnesses› of Weimar culture» (336). In the classic critique of symptomatic readings for such works, Slavoj Žižek writes that «cynical reason, with all its ironic detachment, leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures social reality itself,» which makes uncovering ideological blind spots in such texts no longer meaningful because they are «no longer meant […] to be taken seriously» (30). Of course, a film like Tankstelle was never meant to be taken seriously, and from the beginning it replaced «ironic» with «fun-loving» detachment; however, that open embrace of its lack of seriousness might afford us a symptomatic reading that is of use nonetheless. Here I want to stress a secondary meaning of the term «symptomatic,» one describing a manifestation of illness that may have the characteristics of a certain disease but that finds its roots in another cause (a medical example would be «symptomatic epilepsy» that results from somatic brain damage). As we consider the reclamation of a kind of symptomatic reading of replacement and displacement in Thiele’s film, I want to keep this question in mind: Do the symptoms of political foreshadowing have other causes? While the cynicism of Tankstelle may have been unwitting, the integration of the automobile and its industrial counterparts into a parodic project aimed 352 John E. Davidson at restoring balance to a fragmented society was not. Thiele and the film’s composer, Werner Heymann, had released the very popular musical film Liebeswalzer in 1929, which was staged in part around autos and an automor bile plant. 3 Richard Gilbert, the lyricist for Tankstelle and one of the most sought-after artists in Weimar, was the son of Jean Gilbert (both last names assumed), a composer and lyricist who worked with prominent leftists and wrote an operetta for the stage called Autoliebchen in 1922 (see Taubner). Thiele’s Tankstelle expands this quirky niche in the entertainment world, at the same time fostering the naturalizing of the automobile and the economic crisis through the vertical integration of domains discursively associated with the idle Luxusgeschöpf and the working f Gebrauchsgegenstand. Examining one of the first German blockbusters, which makes the economic collapse the catalyst of its narrative, we will see that this Tonfilmoperette’s generic requirements fuel the crisis years not just by denying them, but by participating in the industrial and discursive processes of replacement and displacement that both caused and profited from them. The stock market crash of 1929 induced a radical loss of wealth that proceeded differently than the inflationary meltdown of the immediate post- WWI years. On the surface, the singularity of event, cause, and consequence seem sufficient to call it a crisis in our context, but a bit more contextualization troubles this singularity. Because of the difference in time zones, the USA’s «Black Thursday» of 24 October 1929 does not have an impact on Germany’s markets until «Black Friday,» 25 October. The Weimar Republic had already seen frightening fluctuations at the Berlin stock exchange right in the heart of its golden era of stability two years earlier, and «Black Friday» was already in use to describe 13 May 1927. Sometime before that, «Black Friday» was used in the USA to refer to the market drop on 24 September 1869, a shudder which pointed to the world economic collapse that would arrive in 1873 (ushering in the «long» as opposed to the «great» depression). A characteristic of these repeating economic crises, we see, is that many immediate contemporaries seem to lack imagination in naming and taming their cyclical movements. Not all, of course, lack such imagination, and for those who have it, crisis equals opportunity. To provide some points of reference for Thiele’s gas-station film in the oil industry’s actions during the Weimar crises, one could begin with the Elwerath company, founded in 1869 to extract iron ore, which blossomed through the lean Wilhelmine years and then turned to oil exploration in 1920, not long after the post-WWI crisis began. Another example would be Hugo Stinnes, who helped to provide the funding to ground the Hugenberg-Konzern media giant in 1916 and to co-opt the labor unions in 1918 with the Stinnes-Legien Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 353 Fig. 1: First Station in Hannover, 1922 agreement. Stinnes became known as the «Inflationskönig» because of his ability to profit in the crisis years of 1920-23, and in 1923 his Montan- und Oelwerke AG was a leader in industrial vertical integration. 4 Another company developing the vertically integrated model was OLEX (Aktiengesellschaft für österreichische und ungarische Mineralölprodukte). Started primarily as a company brokering lighting fuels to the German and Austrian railway, OLEX opened its first gas station at the height of the crisis in 1922 in Hannover and by 1923 had a branded network of them. This caused DAPAG (Deutsche-Amerikanische Petroleum AG), the most important subsidiary of Standard Oil in Germany, to begin to develop its own chain (Kockel 28-31). I.G. Farben, founded in 1906 on the model of Standard Oil, was another vertically integrated company to get into the business, beginning synthetic fuel production in 1926 based on the Bergius-Pier method (Hughes). In 1927 it expanded its Leuna plant, which would come to dominate the world’s synthetic production. The Montan- und Oelwerke AG was reincorporated into the Deutsche Gasolin AG in 1926, which generated a chain of gas stations that were soon contracted to deliver I.G. Farben’s «Leuna» synthetic fuel. The alternate Fischer-Tropsch synthesizing system, which could use lower-grade base materials than Bergius-Pier, was favored by Alfred Vögler, one of the 354 John E. Davidson most important economic personalities in Weimar following the death of his mentor, Stinnes. In 1926 he became chief executive of Germany’s Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG (VSt) and continued for years to be a voice for autarky, especially in the area of fuels. In mentioning Vögler, Titus Kockel adds that «dessen Rolle als Spiritus Rector des Dritten Reiches, Förderer und väterlicher Freund Hitlers bislang wenig gewürdigt ist» (35). 5 In 1927 the long-established Elwerath company opened a refinery in Berlin-Lichtenberg that was to implement «German» techniques of crude conversion, but despite the booming economy it had to close the plant as of 1928 because of technical problems; however, it got back into the business of refining in 1930, when it joined with PREUSSAG (Preußische Bergwerks- und Hütten-Aktiengesellschaft) to expand in this area at a time when the next crisis was in full swing. This brief account, while in no way exhaustive, reminds us that what have come to be seen as periods of crisis (or of stabilization and growth) are hardly uniform when one looks at the arena that provides Thiele’s film its entrepreneurial tropes and corporate models. At the risk of taking us too far afield, it is useful to remember that maneuverings to secure domination of Middle Eastern oil resources played no small part in the run-up to, prosecution, and consequences of WWI. 6 Around the turn of the century, the German Empire and Deutsche Bank planned the «Baghdad Railway» that was to connect Berlin to Basra in order to exploit the oil reserves of Mesopotamia. Ultimately the British profited most from this, as the German control of this resource was lost through the Treaty of Versailles (see, for example, the account in Roth). Deutsche Bank, it should also be recalled, was a major partner in Ufa early on and in large part facilitated its acquisition by Alfred Hugenberg in 1927, putting much of the country’s largest studio directly at the service of extremely conservative forces. One of the reasons for Ufa’s susceptibility to the takeover was its expensive experiment with the Tri-Ergon Lichtton sound system that culminated in 1925 in a disastrous premiere event (see Kreimeier 178), a failure that helped delay the rise of sound-on-film to dominance and that still resonated when Ufa contracted with Tobis-Klangfilm in 1928. This, finally, brings us back to the domain of sound that is at stake in this special issue of Colloquia Germanica. In what follows I am interested in the way that the new and successful Musikfilm, a form that tends to set its narrative crises very much in the private realm dominated by humor and to interest its audience through the staging of songs, serves as a site where multivalent aspects of historical crisis and non-crisis in late Weimar become audible and visible. The plot of Tankstelle is fairly simple: three wealthy ne’er-do-wells return from a motor trip to Italy to discover that their villa is locked, their posses- Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 355 sions are in receivership, and they are penniless. Willy (Fritsch), Kurt (Oskar Karlweis), and Hans (Heinz Rühmann) sell their last remaining possession, their car, and open a gas station, the «Kuckuck Tankstelle,» on an open stretch of road near Berlin, where, after a slow start, business begins to boom. Unbeknownst to the others, each of the three falls for one of their steady customers, Lilian (Harvey). Having finally decided on Willy, the flighty girl calls them together at the Kit Kat Klub to explain the situation, which causes Willy, now the most responsible of the lot, to break both with her and his friends. In order to save all these relationships, Lilian secretly schemes with her father, Consul Coßmann (Fritz Kampers), and his fiancée (Olga Tschechowa) to set Willy up as director of a major gas-station concern. After another round of near disasters, true love and business win out, and all is right with the world again. The grand finale takes place in the new corporate offices, reuniting many, but not all of the characters whom we have met along the way. For the three friends, their first gas station’s name is a reminder of their roots and an image of their indomitable spirit. For the audience, it not only keeps one of the film’s running gags going but strikes a visually familiar chord as well, since its exterior seems modeled and photographed like so many of the stations beginning to appear around the country and in advertisements (see Fig. 2). The glass construction was not unusual, although the uncharacteristic openness of the space when the camera enters the interior office is an added cinematic touch. It allows for the brilliantly modern camera work of Franz Planer to be highlighted during the key scene in which Willy and Lilian take refuge together at night from the rain, dance and sing, and fall in love. If there is license taken with this interior space, however, it is unlikely that the audience would have noted it, because very few of them would have ever been on the inside of a gas station. Automobile ownership, though on the rise, was still very low in Germany, and even in 1930 this vehicle had not yet gained complete acceptance, although the number of violent incidents against cars and their owners (not uncommon in the early Weimar years) had dropped drastically (Fraunholz 267-75). It was not until the end of 1920 that fuel, rubber, and oil ceased to be rationed, which precipitated a law issued in 1921 that officially allowed the civilian use of motor vehicles. The number of registered cars in Germany rose roughly 400% between then and 1932 (Disko 34), but during the most active growth period (1925 to 1929) a significant portion of the 250% increase can be attributed to professional firms (Vahrenkamp 17). Indeed, ownership of a personal automobile remained out of reach for almost all laborers and white-collar workers until the 1950s (Disko 122), and the idea that country roads required more gas stations («[…] weit und breit 356 John E. Davidson Fig. 2: Above, a Leuna Affiliate; Below, the Three at their Station keine Tankstelle zu sehen.» «[…] unglaublich, an einer so belebten Straße, wo täglich Hunderte von Autos vorbeifahren! » - as the film puts it) may not have accorded with reality. An extensive census taken in 1929 covering both urban and rural roads showed an average of only 142 cars out of 319 total vehicles Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 357 per day, with the next largest group still consisting of horse-drawn conveyances (67), followed by motorcycles (64), and trucks (46) (Vahrenkamp 17). So, this film’s implication that the automobile was ubiquitous and, hence, that the marketing of fuel directly to private consumers was commercially uncomplicated, belongs as much to the creation of a social imaginary that can accept the necessity of cars as it does to a reflection of late Weimar reality. This discursive trend had its roots in the opportunities offered by another crisis (the inflation period) and carried forward through this one: while German auto production and ownership lagged behind other countries in the 1920s, the early years of the Weimar Republic already saw the discourse of «automobility» increase in the form of fan magazines, novels, and industry expos (Disko 1-2; on background, see also Haubner; on parallels in France, see Ross). As the public’s perception of the car slowly morphed from that of a luxury to a utilitarian item, and as ownership began to expand in the wake of that perceptual shift, one sees the «growing importance of car aesthetics as a corollary to the decline of the ‹social distinction of ownership.›» 7 The film industry in Germany played a contradictory role in this process of acceptance. On the one hand, the preponderance of Weimar works associate the automobile with danger, visual and aural noise, and/ or the aspects of modern society that overwhelm the individual. Even relatively benign depictions, such as the brief appearances of cars near the opening of Der letzte Mann (dir. F.W. Murnau, 1924) and Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1926) give way to the implication that individual transport vehicles are aligned with the soul-crushing aspects of modern life. Films as varied as Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (dir. Walter Ruttmann, 1927), Asphalt (dir. Joe May, 1929), M (dir. Fritz Lang, 1932), M and even Kuhle Wampe (dir. Slatan Dudow, 1932) depict the human as at best irrelevant in, at least endangered by, and possibly even in servitude beneath, a world dominated by cars. On the other hand, the automobile plays an ever greater role in the publicity machinery of the film industry, with stars and starlets increasingly captured in shots with vehicles, either posed or «candid.» The glamour associated with stars and cars is a consistent theme of publications and posters and, while intended to foster the movie rather than automotive industry, it becomes a de facto advertisement for both. So, the appearance of sports cars that Elsaesser notes in Thiele’s Liebeswalzer and Tankstelle is obligatory not so much in terms of the content of Weimar films, but as a selfreinforcing product placement that redefines the aesthetics of distinction in automobility. Thiele and Heymann’s works depart markedly from the association of motor vehicles with danger (see, for example, Carl Froelich’s Die Nacht gehört uns, 1929), and the film-operetta genre helps to smooth the way for a benign 358 John E. Davidson Fig. 3: Top & Middle from Die Drei von der Tankstelle; Bottom a signed publicity picture of Harvey with her own beloved Mercedes Benz. Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 359 Fig. 4: From Motor Montage to Operetta Stage in the Opening Seconds representation. Sound is a key component here, for instance, when automotive noise is first replaced by singing in a car, and then later displaced altogether into a comical leitmotif - a clown’s horn blowing four notes in two low-tohigh intervals («doe dee doo dee»). 8 Although this intones non-diegetically throughout the film, over time it will be revealed as the horn in Lilian’s car. It is very different than the first sound heard after the film’s credits, when a grating «ah-oo-ga» car horn squawks over a black screen before the image 360 John E. Davidson opens onto a montage of auto, road, and head-light reflection shots á la Vertov, and tire screeching joins the soundscape. This quickly gives way to the film’s iconic shot of an open motor car with its occupants singing the theme song about the wonders of friendship. 9 Willy drives, while Kurt puts a comradely arm around Hans in the backseat, already indicating which of the three will separate himself as leader and get the girl. (Alice Kuzniar does not mention this film in the Queer German Cinema, but much could be made of it in that vein.) Most interesting to me in this opening is the brief tension between the jarring, even dangerous, sounds of twentieth-century speed underscoring the attitude of automobility in the montage sequence and the nineteenth-century form of the operetta. Like the car, montage is modern and necessary, the form of work for the age to come, yet the sounds that accompany it here make it seem to be on the brink, at odds with the untroubled camaraderie of this song and the ideologically holistic image of the world toward which the narrative of this operetta drives. Montage will be employed at three key points in the film, each accompanied by successively less threatening sounds and seguing more smoothly with the musical piece that follows it. Ultimately, the film will marry these two aspects in a tongue-in-cheek wedding of old ways and new ways that shows them to be not so different after all. However, to get there it will have to perform a number of replacements and displacements that cause any traces of crisis associated with montage to disappear. The prehistory of the crisis that sets this narrative in motion is manifest in the cuckoo: symbol both of the lads’ juvenile and unproductive unworldliness, held over from their aristocratic selves, and of the force that will come to repossess their worldly goods. The representation of «the crisis» occurs when the friends return to find their villa devoid of servants and their belongings marked for receivership with the bailiff’s seal. They phone their barrister, played masterfully by Kurt Gerron, who must invent superlatives («Pleit-issimo») and develop an acrostic mode to communicate with clarity the depths of their destitution: «Bankrott. B wie Bettler, A wie alte Schulden, N wie niemand zahlt, K wie Konkurs […].» The humor here is resolutely acoustic, pointing to both musical scoring (pianissimo (( , fortissimo) and modes of handling spoken communication over distance. This phone call leads into the operetta’s first song-and-dance routine, the «Song to the Bailiff,» which starts with the call, «‹Kuckuck,› ‹Kuckuck,› ruft’s aus dem Wald,» and sees the three friends sit like birds on a perch, swinging their legs. They are quickly joined by the bailiff, who cuts a comically vulture-like figure, and then by a modern chorus line populated by burly movers, amongst whom the three lads dance in an image of willful uncoordination. Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 361 Fig. 5: The Gender-Bending Un-Coordination of «The Song to the Bailiff» This dance deploys the archaic form of the operetta, with its proclivity for (gendered) role reversals, to take aim at Weimar’s coordinated entertainment as the Tiller «Boys» stomp with the repo man in a nineteenth-century arena. The dream of the mass ornament becomes something of a nightmare for these 362 John E. Davidson seemingly aristocratic dandies, but their out-of-synch stepping as they weave in and out of the movers seems just as troubling for the chorus line. This scene also points to a way out for both: the things that had been the basis of these friends’ relationships are removed. Like departing lovers they take leave of armoire, oriental rug, and settee, which fly out as if by magic. This mode of dispossession paves the way for the friends to have «real» relationships (with work and with a woman), and saves the workmen from all that heavy lifting. This could be seen as a critique of archaic luxury, generated by using objects that come from a pre-mass production era in order to prepare the way for a working nation-community of wealth that dances in better coordination than these chorus lines. And, though the miniaturization is not hidden, and the strings are all visible, that is where Tankstelle will eventually take us. In a wild parody of the actual effects of the market crash, the «Song to the Bailiff» ends with the expropriated jumping from a window; however, there is no threat of a suicidal outcome because a willfully stilted cut shows their car catching them to avert disaster, their split-second descent accompanied by the briefest of stop times before the last notes of the song. The two moments in the routine that draw attention to cinematic tricks (the flying furniture and this life-saving editing) may point to a kind of hyper-reflexivity, but the humor of the scene relies on other replacements that will lead to an erasure rather than an exposure of social violence. The male workers replace women dancers in the chorus line here but will eventually themselves be displaced by women and then disappear from the film’s grand finale. Meanwhile, the friends’ ownership of a car becomes key, for only an owner can legally make use of both its utilitarian and abstract qualities. Moments after it saves them physically, it can save them financially: when it runs out of gas on the outskirts of Berlin, it is sold to provide the start-up capital for the Kuckuck Tankstelle. Having offered up its use value to exchange value, their car appears no more. It is replaced by Lilian’s car as a song stage and displaced into the gas station. Lilian’s car appears throughout, but it, too, will leave pieces behind for the operetta’s project of automobilization: first, it provides an image that unites commodity fetishism and sexual desire (see Fig. 3 top); and, second, it gives us the sound that eventually absorbs all the noise of automobility into the comic «doe dee doo dee» that will punctuate nearly every song and scene throughout the rest of the film. As far as the film is concerned, the moment of economic crisis is over when the car catches the boys jumping from the window. 10 Not surprisingly, it has had an effect only briefly, and only on the three friends. The repo men have work, of course, but so does everyone else who might need it in this film. The car is sold without incident (no trouble finding a buyer), customers for the Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 363 station abound, and all the remaining problems in the film are displaced onto relationship troubles and/ or imbalanced gender roles. While a certain amount of compression is to be expected in the operetta genre, and any real address of burning social issues is out of the question, Tankstelle goes out of its way to invoke the crisis and immediately dismiss it. But, it is noteworthy that the friends’ car is not reasserted as a luxury item after the crisis; rather, its glamor is shifted into its utility as a vehicle - a Gebrauchsgegenstand - which is then d further transformed into abstract value and disappears as an object altogether. The narrative built around automobility by Thiele and Co. is no rags-toriches fable - indeed, it is an anti-social-mobility tale about the maintenance of the status quo through a shift of the aristocratic caste into the managerial elite without acknowledging class structure. The model in this reorganization will be corporate, and the prime catalyst will be women. 11 The lads start and end on top, having moved up the «stream» of vertical integration against the current in reverse. Being the owners of a car saves them from «suicide,» but they quickly become consumers without suppliers of gas, so they take on that role, and then move from there to occupy the top office of the producer/ distributor. Vertical integration will provide an armature for social organization here as well, one that denies class distinctions even while sharpening them. These three boys will take the audience along on the drive toward vertically integrated community, which requires that they capitalize on their possibilities of automobility by moving from consuming to selling and then on to distributing gasoline. These transformations will be handled through a discourse of work, and along the way their masculinity will be (re)invented as well. Well, at least it will be for Willy, who alone grasps their new place in the world of working responsibility and shapes himself into the figure of the sovereign individual. Yet, on the other hand, it is Kurt and Hans who give us hints of the mode of modern work and its costs, as they interact with the customers in the gas station’s first days (see Fig. 6, left column). In the second act, montage reappears, now as a marker of modernity, mobility, commercial success, and work as service. The visual editing is accompanied by a sound montage, with Kurt und Hans asking repeatedly, «Womit kann ich dienen? » to which various voices respond with demands for oil, gas, tire service, and water. The scene is punctuated by an increasingly frantic refrain of «bitte sehr, bitte gleich,» and so becomes a composite image of physical overload. While it is possible that the film’s opening seconds of visual montage have some Eisensteinian resonances as Wedel suggests («Tanz der Form» 226), by this point montage assumes the more conventional role as an ellipsis in time and compression of theme. As a result, when montage gives way this second time to the car as a stage for singing, as it did at the outset, the 364 John E. Davidson Fig. 6: Modern Montage Gives Way to the Auto-as-Stage combination of visual and aural montage has been largely domesticated (see Fig. 6, right column). Lilian’s car provides the stage for a song and dance in which a man (Kurt) asks to be taken along by a woman who is at the wheel of her own car. Two themes are accelerated and shifted onto the gender dynamic of the operetta: Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 365 the discourse of wealth versus work and the changing image of the automobile from luxury to a general service item. From here on, each of the men hopes to complete his life by coupling with Lilian, but the multi-sided relationship ends when she calls them to the Kit Kat Klub to explain that she has chosen Willy. Upon learning that she has been leading them all by the nose Fig. 7: Replaceable Girls and Comedian Harmonists Play the Kit Kat Klub 366 John E. Davidson to this point, Willy returns Lilian to her father, Konsul Coßmann, with the complaint that she is merely a «Luxusgeschöpf» who has been poorly raised and contributes nothing. 12 Again this strikes a chord with the contemporary discourse of automobilization, as the industry’s messaging of the day aimed at changing the image of the car from a luxury to an everyday item. The problem of the gendered and useless Luxusgeschöpf is the second horn of the dilemma f that the film will need to resolve before it can reach its finale. When Willy makes his stand, the viewer notes that his comment is at odds with the context in which it is made, where wealth, luxury, and leisure are valorized both in the mise-en-scene and in the actions at the nightclub. Willy’s words raise the idea of value being made and earned, but in this portion of the film value merely is, and it is meant to be visually opulent and sonorously luxurious. A mass-modernist visual aesthetic in the form of a multiplicity of identical girls and objects dominates the club, although the filmmakers eschew montage as a means of constructing it. Analyzing Hollywood examples, Lucy Fischer has convincingly shown that the musical is a privileged place for the dissemination of a vision of «modern style» based on two different variations of Art Deco - the curvaceous and the rectilinear. 13 In Tankstelle one sees this clearly in the women’s rooms of the Konsul’s residence, and the extended sequence in the Kit Kat Klub is particularly telling. It condenses both the curvaceous and rectilinear deco mise-en-scene and framing into a space that also has the Comedian Harmonists performing at the dramatic turning point of the film. The film deploys the biggest attraction of Germany’s musical world in a place that the audience cannot stay for long, because the narrative discord has hit its apex here. As a parallel to the wealth and libertine leisure that we see, the dream of mass plentitude returns in the form of «girls» just at the time when the male lead calls for a retrofitting of female desirability through productivity. The high point of narrative fragmentation is attributed not to the crisis of economy but of personal productivity, gender, and comradeship, and is implanted in the visual and aural registers of the modern musical. The «double negative» inherent in the form is itself set up for parody, as we will see in the staging of the operetta’s finale. As the film enters its final lap, Lilian realizes that she must remake herself to save her marriage plans, a remaking which initiates the choreography of a fully mobilized, vertically integrated society. The final stage for this will be the corporate facility that she and her father establish, where the modern musical’s mass aesthetics of montage enact the erasure of boundaries between the traditional and the new. We are introduced to this new world literally through the window of the big family company and the lens of work. Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 367 Fig. 8: KUTAG über Alles An iris opens on a sign saying «KUTAG,» an acronym that viewers do not yet know, although it is perhaps visually and aurally close enough to NITAG, DAPAG, ÖlHAG, etc. for them to guess. The camera pulls back to show a windowed door, through which workers are visible in motion throughout the courtyard. A cut jumps to the courtyard, where the film’s last instance 368 John E. Davidson of montage shows rapid, joyous, coordinated work by men moving amidst trucks, filmed as ornamental lines in dance. Montage is key here, but nevertheless tightly controlled; the sequence is steadfastly confined to the enclosed arena that its first take introduced. This «stage» is never transgressed by the editing, and every shot is delimited by KUTAG signs, many of which adorn the trucks lined up as massive props regimenting the lines of workers as they come and go. No impulse to escape that space becomes palpable, because belonging to this meld of workmen and machines is safe, comfortable, and beyond question. This is reinforced after several cuts when the camera becomes stationary, and the workers are joined by musicians who play traditional songs. Tame versions of «New Women» in white shirts and dark ties emerge from the offices and take up two uniform lines on either side of the musicians, with the workers and trucks ringed behind them. In the parallel scene earlier, in which the three friends are dispossessed, there is comedy woven throughout the dance routine itself; here the humor is divorced from this ballet of mechanics entirely. Montage is again deployed conventionally, this final time as a mobile ornament of bustle, coordination, and ubiquitous industry conjoining human and mechanical parts. As in its previous two appearances, montage gives way to a staged song that displaces fragmented filming, this time in a proto-image of the Volksgemeinschaft that is cleaner than the uncoordinated gambol of the «Song to the Bailiff.» The workers have been removed from the feminized position they held at the film’s outset, and a modern-girls line has joined them. Distance is created from this routine only by two cutaways. The first shows Kurt’s rudely comic call for quiet («Schnauze! ») so that the executives of the «Kuckuck Tankstelle AG» can work, a call that comes from a second floor window above and beyond the dance, as an eyeline match and reverse shot make clear. The second insert shows Lilian’s car tooling along carrying the two Coßmanns, the fiancée, and a wealth of wedding flowers. This is a doubled bookend shot: it reprises the film’s initial car ride near the end of the film (with a German car replacing an English one - see Fig. 9 top and bottom); and its screen direction answers the corporate trucks from the KUTAG dance with a private vehicle that is owned by the titleholders of the company (see Fig. 9 middle and bottom). Figuratively, the car and trucks mark out a road for vehicular traffic that is the horizontal manifestation of the stream of vertical integration. Lilian demonstratively toots her horn twice, which proves itself to be the leitmotif into which automotive noise has been subsumed. While the workforce performs earnestly in the courtyard, the ownership laughs uproariously at the absurdity of the «doe dee doo dee» sound. Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 369 Fig. 9: «Lachender Start»; «Lachendes End» 370 John E. Davidson From that point on, farce reigns supreme as the film reaches its final stage in the board room of KUTAG, but the workers are left out of it, quite literally, replaced in the finale by chorus girls. It is clear that the upper crust continues to be the butt of some jokes before all are fully absolved and integration is complete, but they can afford it. The operetta, as befits the form, is totally invested in staging the resolution of the love story, which can only occur when gender roles are reestablished: Lilian’s father asserts control by taking charge of his daughter and his fiancée, and Lilian shows that she can work (she types) and obey (she takes dictation, sort of). Willy finally claims d what is rightfully his - possession of Lilian - which he does by saving her from a threatened beating by her father (enacted playfully in a dance line), in essence claiming those rights for himself, although he would never do such a thing to «das süßeste Mädel der Welt» (which became Harvey’s tag line in the press). A double wedding is celebrated, incorporating the unions in KUTAG, and the curtain falls. Lilian and Willy slip out to the front of the proscenium in an attempt to get away from the revelers, only to find that «all these people are still there.» This moment of staged surprise ends when they realize that everyone is waiting for what every real operetta needs: a finale! Fig. 10: Celebrating Marriage and Integration in KUTAG Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 371 There is a doubled reflexivity in the move to the finale, but the dance number itself removes any potentially critical edge. It retreats entirely to the operetta form, giving itself over completely to a single camera filming a stage (see Fig. 10). We note here the complete absence of montage, indeed of anything that would alter the staginess of this final act, a staginess that highlights rectilinearity without traces of the «style moderne.» Several chorus lines of dancers appear, as do all the characters with whom we have spent time except the manual laborers, for their place is taken by the excess of coordinated girls. This modern society on the move embraces its internal hierarchies as a natural occurrence and uses the girl chorus line to stand in for the lower elements of the «classless» society. Thus, all different social strata are represented in this one space, even if not all are shown in this fully integrated society. All the manifestations of the cuckoo reappear here as well, visual and aural: before the wedding, the characters pop up from the desk and out from the curtains to sounds like «Kuckuck, Kuckuck,» in a reprise of a motif from the «Song to the Bailiff»; in the finale, cuckoo-musicians swing in the background, recasting the earlier position of the three friends; the symbol of the bird is everywhere; and, each «D.C. al Coda» returns to the auto-cuckoo leitmotif, «doe dee doo dee.» The repetitive nature of the music and the dance at this point may indicate either that the film has run out of ideas or that a distance has been reestablished that affords an opportunity to laugh at it all. I am reminded here of cultural figures such as Reinhold Schünzel, who mistakenly felt he could laugh with and at those rising to power, but was forced to leave. 14 The figures from Heinrich Böll’s Billard um halb Zehn remain an especially apt reference in this regard as well. Böll traces this tradition of failed cynical superiority back further than the initial political victory of the Nazis and outside of the so-called German-Jewish question that is, in a sense, a subtext for both Schünzel and Thiele. In the particular case of Tankstelle, the apparent tensions between its choice of the (already archaic) operetta as its musical model and the modernization highlighted within its narrative invite consideration of pasts and futures. If crisis is indeed reflected here, then it is to be discovered in the way that crisis is subsumed into a musical form that points both forward and back, culminating in a repetition that itself indicates continuity. And thus, it also points to its present, one not solely determined by crisis in the aftermath of «Black Friday» but also by the rising corporate opportunities of automobility that coursed through the Weimar Republic more generally. If it is true that the idea of «crisis» as a heuristic is as much rooted in historians’ contexts as in the age to which they apply it, then what do the doubled 372 John E. Davidson performances of vertical integration in Die Drei von der Tankstelle show us about our current critical perspective? One response would be that the prohibition against symptomatic readings is itself in crisis, for this kind of textual analysis rewards us by transposing the reverberations of a broad net of historical futures past as they echo through a film. The turn to ever-better-informed formalist analyses of genre and of film-technical possibilities in institutional history keeps us from hearing all the noise resonating through this Tonfilmoperette. Seen from our current position which necessarily reads back through the Nazi era, Thiele and Heymann’s film seems in tune with the coming structures of National Socialism and anticipates intellectuals’ cynical responses to them, but the cause is neither some protofascist attitude of the filmmakers finding unconscious expression nor conspiratorial political aims on the part of the studio heads. Rather, the roots are to be found in the ongoing discursive developments and economic structures fueling automobility, which power the vertical integration of oil and operetta. Notes 1 «Die ästhetische Form kristallisiert sich als Annoncierung der technischen Apparatur, die sie ermöglicht, heraus, indem sie ihre materiellen Eigenschaften als gestaltete in sich aufnimmt, und im steten Rückverweis zur Schau stellt» (Wedel, Musikfilm 251). Here, too, Wedel largely disregards content and discusses Tankstelle almost exclusively within Musikfilm-technical innovations. In different readings, Thomas Koebner and S.S. Prawer place Thiele’s film in the context of the economic crisis and coming genocidal developments: the former finding the film escapist, but forgivably so; the latter finding it mildly subversive. 2 Elsaesser gestures in this direction when he places Tankstelle among the contemporary star-vehicle comedies and multi-language versions of films that were aimed at an internationally focused Weimar cinema: «Sound also profoundly altered the production logic of picture making, so that even before the Nazi takeover in 1933, the German film industry was substantially transformed from a twin-track cinema of ‹artistic film/ prestige production for export› and ‹genre films for home consumption,› to a single-track national/ international mainstream ‹stars-and-genre› entertainment cinema, by dint of economic necessity and technological change even more than political interference» (387). 3 In a section on «Lifestyle Propaganda,» Elsaesser notes the division between the two different worlds that often structures such light films and specifically cites Liebeswalzer’s auto factory and rural countryside as an example (408). 4 Vertical integration generally refers to the extent that a single entity participates in multiple areas of the chain of production and distribution of goods. It is often described using the metaphor of a stream, which is contradictory both in terms of its organic base and its horizontal trajectory: vertical integration indicates a firm’s ownership of upstream suppliers of materials and parts, or downstream purveyors of goods and services, or both. This idea and the cultural and rhetorical tensions within in it will play a role in the essay to follow. Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 373 5 It seems, however, that Vögler did not meet with Hitler personally until the day after the would-be Führer’s address to the Industrieklub on 26 January 1932, when Fritz Thyssen brought him (along with his eventual successor at VSt, Ernst Poensgen) together with Hitler, Göring, and Röhm (Neebe 120). For a readable overview of the prehistory of the oil businesses and politics before the Third Reich, see Stokes, Opting for Oil 1-39; for a l larger history of the German business of mineral oils, see Karlsch and Stokes. 6 Or, for that matter, WWII. I.G. Farben contracted to supply the Nazi state with synthetic fuel in December 1933 (Hughes), and the bombing of the Leuna plant would become a prime goal of the allied air commands (Stokes, «Oil Industry»). Its successful targeting is often cited as an important point in the war (Parks). 7 Disko 12. In thinking about the way that motor vehicles became part of the horizon of expectation and habitual practice in Weimar, as well as the motorcycle’s special role in those developments, Disko leans on the Bourdieu-influenced works of O’Connell and of Merkl. Nevertheless, the move of the automobile «vom Luxusgut zum Gebrauchsgegenstand» is not completed, as Heidrun Edelmann makes clear, until the 1950s. 8 This sound may be an attempt to recall for viewers the signature phrase from the radio hit «I’m Wild about Horns on Automobiles» by Jack Dalton & His Seven Blue Babies (Edison, 1928). According to one enthusiast, Dalton’s «ta ta ta ta» is made by a Spartan «Bugle» horn. 9 Versions of the film’s songs performed by its stars were put out in 1930 on Odeon records (Berlin). The Comedian Harmonists’ versions of the songs from Die Drei von der Tankstelle were released the same year on Electrola (Cologne), with whom the group had had an exclusive contract since their breakthrough in August of 1928. Both of these recordings were on shellac, but a further cross-pollination between oil and entertainment concerns would begin in 1931, when vinyl, a petroleum derivative, was made viable as a synthetic material for higher fidelity records (although it did not come to replace shellac until the war made that material scarce). 1931 also saw the birth of the British EMI Corporation, which carried vertical integration into the music business. 10 It is important to note that the film is not ignorant of broader issues. The phone call between «die drei meschuggenen Musketiere» and the attorney hints ever so briefly at the broader precariousness of the political and economic circumstances. As the latter tries to explain their unpleasant predicament, the boys take turns mocking him through the phone: «Unangenehm? Erdbeben, was? » «Regierungswechsel in Lippe-Detmold? » «Ihre Frau hat ein blondes Kind gekriegt? » The second question seems a reference to the NSDAP advances in late 1929/ early 1930, while the third is a clear, if good-naturedly presented, anti-Semitic joke (spoken by the only Jewish actor among the principals to the famous Jewish cabaret artist). Dr. Kalmus, in turn, relates that they can try to call their banker, but where he is there are «Zellen, aber keine Telefonzellen.» This is the only moment when any of these satellite issues come into the film. A similar phone call scene provides a bookend to this one near the end of the film but has been evacuated of any such content beyond a light jab at the incompetence of the corporation’s new managers. 11 Jennifer Kapczynski argues that the dancer in Weimar sound film often becomes a figure of social mobility. In Tankstelle Harvey does not play a dancer (although her character dances all the time), and she clearly facilitates an integration that works against social mobility. She will stoop to conquer by combining her position as the daughter of ownership with the ethos of the utility of work. Linked with the argument I adduce below about «girls» replacing laborers, women are shown here to be anything but figures of social mobility. 374 John E. Davidson 12 As if the implied viewer needed any convincing that women who have the wheel in their hands cause problems, the Konsul has already been introduced as something of a fop who is bossed about by his daughter and is not the equal of his fiancée. 13 Fischer 2003. Fischer also remarks on the way that musical instruments, especially Steinway pianos, are marketed in this manner during the period, which seems consistent in this sequence and brings yet another instance of (sound) industry into the mix (although for a different firm). Miriam Hansen’s seminal notion of «vernacular modernism» should be mentioned in this context as well. 14 Reinhold Schünzel was a beloved actor, scriptwriter, and director in Weimar, particularly known for his impish comedy and play with sexual mores. He was a steady member of Richard Oswald’s contingent and appeared alongside Conrad Veit in Anders als die Andern (1919), played Tiger Brown in G.W. Pabst’s film of Die 3-Groschen-Oper (1931), and created a slew of films with significant public appeal before the Nazis came to power. Schünzel was bold and arrogant enough to feel that he could wait out the new regime without changing his style, despite his Jewish ancestry and the distasteful, even dangerous nature of his work in the eyes of the authorities. He succeeded for a period (see especially Viktor und Viktoria, 1933; Amphitryon, 1935), but was forced to flee before the final cut and premiere of Land der Liebe in 1937. Although he had contracts to direct in the USA, he never found major success again, and like many unlucky émigrés was forced to endure the ironic discomfiture of playing the likes of Gestapo agents and German generals in Hollywood films. For interesting comments on Schünzel see Ashkenazi; for a passable biopic view Beim nächsten Kuß knall ich ihn nieder (dir. Hansr Christoph Blumenberg, 1996). Works Cited 3-Groschen-Oper, Die. Dir G.W. Pabst. Criterion Collection, 1931. Amphitryon. Dir. Reinhold Schünzel. Transit, 1935. Anders als die Andern. Dir. Richard Oswalt. Edition Filmmuseum, 1919. Ashkenazi, Ofer. «Rethinking the Role of Film in German History: The Jewish Comedies of the Weimar Republic.» Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 14.4 (2010): 569-85. Asphalt. Dir. Joe May. Transit Film/ Murnau Stiftung, 1929. Beim nächsten Kuß knall ich ihn nieder. Dir. Hans-Christoph Blumenberg. Rotwang/ ZDF/ Arte, 1996. Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt. Dir. Walter Ruttmann. Edition Filmmuseum, 1927. Böll, Heinrich. Billard um halb Zehn. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1959. Disko, Sasha. Men, Motorcycles and Modernity: Motorization during the Weimar Republic. Ann Arbor, MI: Proquest, UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2011. Drei von der Tankstelle, Die. Dir. Wilhelm Thiele. Transit Film/ Murnau Stiftung, 1930. Edelmann, Heidrun. Vom Luxusgut zum Gebrauchsgegenstand: Die Geschichte der Verbreitung von Personenkraftwagen in Deutschland. Frankfurt a.M.: VDA, 1989. Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Film and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle 375 Fischer, Lucy. Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Fraunholz, Uwe. Motorphobia: Anti-Automobiler Protest in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Hansen, Miriam. «Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.» Modernism/ Modernity 6.2 (1999): 59-77. Haubner, Barbara. Nervenkitzel und Freizeitvergnügen: Automobilismus in Deutschland 1886- 66 1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Hughes, Thomas Parke. «Technological Momentum in History: Hydrogenation in Germany 1898-1933.» Past and Present 44 (August 1969): 106-32. Kapczynski, Jennifer. «Still Motion: Dance and Stasis in the Weimar Operetta Film.» Seminar 46.3 (September 2010): 293-310. r Karlsch, Rainer and Raymond G. Stokes. Faktor Öl: Die Mineralölwirtschaft in Deutschland 1859-1974. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003. Kracauer, Siegfried. «The Mass Ornament.» The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. 75-89. Koebner, Thomas, ed. Diesseits der dämonischen Leinwand. Neue Perspektiven auf das späte Weimarer Kino. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2003. Kockel, Titus. Deutsche Ölpolitik 1928-1938. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005. 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