Table Of Content

FILM & MEDIA W ANTISEMITISM FILM COMEDY E in I N S T IN E I Today many Germans remain nostalgic about “classic” fi lm comedies created N during the 1930s, viewing them as a part of the Nazi era that was not tainted with anti- NAZI GERMANY semitism. In Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany, Valerie Weinstein scrutinizes these comic productions and demonstrates that fi lm comedy, despite its innocent appear- ance, was a critical component in the eff ort to separate “Jews” from “Germans” physically, economically, and artistically. Weinstein highlights how the German propaganda ministry used directives, pre- and post-production censorship, fi nancial incentives, and infl uence over fi lm critics and their judgments to replace Jewish “wit” with a slower, simpler, and more A N direct German “humor” that affi rmed values that the Nazis associated with the Aryan race. T I Th rough contextualized analyses of historical documents and individual fi lms, Weinstein S E reveals how humor, coded hints and traces, absences, and substitutes in Th ird Reich fi lm M I comedy helped spectators imagine an abstract “Jewishness” and a “German” identity and T I community free from the former. As resurgent populist nationalism and overt racism con- S M tinue to grow around the world today, Weinstein’s study helps us rethink racism and prejudice i n in popular culture and reconceptualize the relationships between fi lm humor, national F identity, and race. IL M C O M E D Y I N N VALERIE WEINSTEIN is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and A Z Sexuality Studies and affi liate faculty in German Studies, Judaic Studies, and Film and Media I G Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is editor (with Barbara Hales and Mihaela E R Petrescu) of Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928–1936. M A N Y Cover photograph: SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek iupress.indiana.edu VALERIE WEINSTEIN PRESS ANTISEMITISM IN FILM COMEDY IN NAZI GERMANY A NTISEM ITIS M IN FIL M CO M EDY IN N A ZI GER M A N Y Valerie Weinstein IndIana UnIversIty Press This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2019 by Valerie Weinstein All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-04070-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-04071-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-04073-2 (ebook) 1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Note on Translation xi Introduction: Reconceiving Antisemitism in Third Reich Film Comedy 1 1 Overt and Inferential Antisemitism in Nazi Writings and the Film Trade Press 36 2 Overt Antisemitism, Jewish Difference, and Colonial Whiteness in Early Third Reich Film Comedy: Nur nicht weich werden, Susanne! and Die Blume von Hawaii 61 3 Comic Ersatz: Viktor und Viktoria and Glückskinder 97 4 Wenn wir alle Engel wären as the Model of a Racialized German Humor 127 5 Capitalism, Colonialism, and the White Jew in April! April! and Donogoo Tonka 154 6 Mistaken Identity and the Masked Jew in Robert und Bertram 184 7 Jewish Absence, Epistemic Murk, and the Aesthetics of Cremation in Münchhausen and Die Feuerzangenbowle 213 Conclusion 247 Works Cited 255 Index 275 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In my fantasy of authorship, I squirrel myself away in a tower, write madly and uninterruptedly, and emerge from my solitude with a bril- liant book in hand. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. If I had insisted on going it alone, I would still be locked in that tower, struggling to complete my project. I couldn’t have written Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany without a strong professional and personal support network, and I offer my heartfelt thanks to the institutions and individuals who helped me write this book. The generosity of various entities at my home institution, the Univer- sity of Cincinnati, made Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany possible. I am especially grateful for the substantial support this project has received from the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center. Multiple travel grants to visit archives and attend conferences and a Collections Purchase Grant for Langsam Library to acquire microfilm reels of Third Reich film periodicals put essential resources in my hands. A Taft Center Fellowship gave me a year to think and write and an interdisciplinary community of fellows with whom I could exchange ideas. By inviting Eric Rentschler to campus as my interlocutor for the Taft Symposium, the Taft Center enabled a valuable conversation with him about an early draft of my manuscript. I am so grateful for his careful reading of my early drafts, his generous feedback, and our productive discussions about the project, and I am grateful to the Taft Center for facilitating this conversation. A Faculty Research Grant from the University Research Council also supported my work in its early stages. The Department of German Studies helped me along the way with a semester-long teaching release. The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies provided me a graduate research assistant to help prepare the final manuscript for submission. Many of the librarians and archivists I encountered while doing my research deserve special thanks: Olga Hart and Mark Konecny at Langsam Library; Birgit Scholz and Peter Warnecke at Potsdam Filmmuseum; Ute Klawitter at the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin; Regina Hoffmann, Lisa Roth, and Anett Sawall at Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek/Berlin Filmmu- seum; Renate Göthe and Annika Kaiser in Pressedokumentation at the vii viii | Acknowledgments Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf, Potsdam; Alice Schu- macher of the Naturhistorisches Museum, Wien; and Bettina Erlenkamp at the Deutsche Fotothek, Dresden. William Gillespie, of the Gillespie Collec- tion in Sydney, Australia, has been an important scholarly resource for me ever since he sold me my first two hundred VHS tapes of Third Reich films almost two decades ago. On many occasions, Bill has helped me find rare sources, shared useful information, and scanned images for me from his world-class collection of Third Reich film posters and publications. I value his generous and ongoing professional help and support. I am rich in friends and colleagues whose feedback has enhanced this project. First and foremost, I want to thank my dear friends Ashley Currier and Furaha Norton, who probably have pored over every page of this manuscript more times than they care to count, who have pushed me from the beginning toward more clarity and sophistication in my think- ing and writing, and who have served as devoted mentors and cheerleaders throughout the entire process. My frequent collaborator and close friend, Barbara Hales, has been a constant scholarly interlocutor and professional support for many years. Barbara has been infinitely generous with her time and insights. She and I have had countless inspiring conversations, and she has given me valuable feedback on so many iterations of this project— conference presentations, articles, drafts, and the complete manuscript. Most hearty thanks go to Deb Meem, for her keen eye, and for her selfless gift of time and last-minute help with copy editing the manuscript. I am very grateful to my writing group, which is a source of wisdom, motivation, friendship, and joy, and to everybody who has read and responded to drafts of various parts of my manuscript, including Leslie Adelson, David Bath- rick, Gergana Ivanova, Horst Lange, Biddy Martin, Michelle McGowan, Carolette Norwood, Andrés Pérez-Simón, Mihaela Petrescu, John Pettey, Michal Raucher, Eric Rentschler, Sunnie Rucker-Chang, Jeffrey Timber- lake, Evan Torner, Jim Walker, and Rina Williams. My anonymous peer reviewers at Indiana University Press were much more generous in both their praise and their substantive suggestions than I ever could have anticipated. Their thoughtful and constructive feedback has enhanced the final product. Maura Grady at Ashland University, Brechtje Beuker and Sam Spin- ner at UCLA, and David Weinstein at Wake Forest University all invited me to share my work on this project with audiences at their institutions, who gave me valuable feedback. I have also benefited from conversations with colleagues at professional meetings, particularly the German Studies Acknowledgments | ix Association, the German-Jewish Studies Workshop, and the German Film Institute; also the Ohio German Studies Workshop, the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, and the Popular Culture Association. At the risk of—and with advance apologies for—forgetting important scholarly in- terlocutors, a human failing that seems inevitable to me, I’d like to thank the following colleagues for productive conversations about this project at various stages of its development: Ofer Ashkenazi, Nick Baer, Maya Bar- zilai, Darcy Buerkle, Margarethe Eirenschmalz, Veronika Fuechtner, Mila Ganeva, Sabine Hake, Sara Hall, Anjeana Hans, Laura Heins, Dagmar Herzog, Todd Herzog, Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey, Alexander Maxwell, Rick McCormick, Mihaela Petrescu, Christian Rogowski, Lisa Silverman, Brett Van Hoesen, Cynthia Walk, Kerry Wallach, and Tamara Zwick. Phone calls with Tracey Patton and Jonathan Skolnik when I hit crucial theoretical sticking points helped greatly in moving things along. Janice Frisch at Indiana University Press has been supportive and professional from our first moment of contact on. I am especially grateful for her outstanding selection of peer reviewers, whose complementary approaches enriched this project and expanded its interdisciplinary reach. Thank you also to Maya Bringe, Dave Hulsey, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Steven Moore, and Kate Schramm, who all helped transform my manuscript into the book you have in your hands. Maggie Kane researched rights and permissions, captured images, formatted footnotes, and otherwise helped me prepare the manuscript for publication. West Bancroft stepped in with some last minute logistical and research assistance. Thank you also to Elizabeth Keith, Kent Meloy, and Emmanuel Wilson for help with ac- quiring screen grabs. Finally, none of this would have been possible without family mem- bers’ love and patience and their financial, logistical, and emotional support. Bennett and Marina Kottler and Alex and Naomi Weinstein have my deepest love and gratitude.