eJournals Colloquia Germanica 44/3

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/121
2011
443

Of Oil and Operetta: Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930)

121
2011
John E. Davidson
cg4430349
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. Koselleck, Reinhart. Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973. Kreimeier, Klaus. The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1999. Kuhle Wampe - Oder wem gehört die Welt? Dir. Slatan Dudow. filmedition suhrkamp/ absolut Medien, 1932. Kuzniar, Alice. The Queer German Cinema. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Land der Liebe. Dir Reinhold Schünzel. Georg Witt-Film, 1937. Letzte Mann, Der. Dir. Friedrich W. Murnau. Transit Film/ Murnau Stiftung, 1924. Liebeswalzer. Dir. Wilhelm Thiele. Ufa, 1929. Merkl, Christoph Maria. Der holprige Siegeszug des Automobils 1895-1930: Zur Motorisierung des Straßenverkehrs in Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2002. Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. Edition Deutscher Film/ StudioCanal, 1926. M. Dir. Fritz Lang. Nero-Film AG, 1931. Nacht gehört uns, Die. Dir. Carl Froelich. Carl-Froelich-Film GmbH, 1929. Neebe, Reinhard. Großindustrie, Staat und NSDAP 1930-33 - . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. O’Connell, Sean. The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896- 66 1939. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1999. Parks, W. Hays. «‹Precision› and ‹area› bombing: Who did which, and when? » Journal of Strategic Studies 18.1 (1995): 145-74. Prawer, S.S. Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1919-1933. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. Roth, Karl Heinz. «Berlin, Ankara, Baghdad.» Germany and the Middle East, 1871- 1945. Ed. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2004. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1995. 376 John E. Davidson Stokes, Raymond G. «The Oil Industry in Nazi Germany, 1936-1945.» Business History Review 59.2 (Summer 1985): 254-77. -. Opting for Oil: The Political Economy of Technical Change in the West German Chemical Industry, 1945-61. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. Taubner, Richard. Operetta, a Theatrical History. New York: Doubleday, 1983. Und weit und breit keine Tankstelle. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany. Bayerischer Rundfunk. Distributed by International Film Bureau, Chicago, in cooperation with the Goethe Institute, 1974. Vahrenkamp, Richard. The German Autobahn 1920-1945: Hafraba Visions and Mega Projects. Cologne: Josef Eul Verlag, 2010. Viktor und Viktoria. Dir. Reinhold Schünzel. UFA, 1933. Wedel, Michael. «Tanz der Form: Die Tonfilmoperette als populäre Avantgardebewegung? » Populärkultur, Massenmedien, Avantgarde 1919-1933. Ed. Jessica Nitsche and Nadine Werner. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012. 215-38. -. Der deutsche Musikfilm. Archäologie eines Genres 1914-45. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2005. -. Filmgeschichte als Krisengeschichte. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, New York: Verso, 1989.