Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker

497 Pages·2016·20.76 MB·english

by  Frank Noack

Veit Harlan

Veit
Harlan
tHe life and Work
of a nazi filmmaker
frank noack
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Copyright © 2016 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky,
Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,
Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State
University, Murray State University,
Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky,
University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Noack, Frank, 1961- author.
Title: Veit Harlan / Frank Noack.
Other titles: Veit Harlan. English
Description: Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, [2016] | Series:
Screen classics | Originally published as Veit Harlan: “des Teufels
Regisser” by Bellevill (München) in 2000. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044830 | ISBN 9780813167008 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780813167022 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813167015 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Harlan, Veit, 1899-1964. | Motion picture producers and
directors—Germany—Biography. | National socialism and motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1998.3.H368 N6313 2016 | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044830
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of
American University Presses
contents
Author’s Note vii
Introduction: Individualist in a Totalitarian State 1
Part 1
1. The Father 25
2. The Son 29
3. Youth Culture 35
4. Lights, Camera, Action 45
5. Kunz versus Cohn 52
6. The Interview 64
7. Telling Others How to Act 75
8. Learning the Alphabet 81
9. Prestige 91
10. Politics 103
11. The Girl in the Water 118
12. Adultery 137
Part 2
13. The Trap 153
14. The Catastrophe of Success 172
15. Blood and Soil 193
16. The German Soul 207
17. Frenzy 221
18. Opfergang 229
19. Perseverance 239
Part 3
20. In the Ruins of the Reich 255
21. The Trial 267
22. The Second Trial 275
23. Heimatfilm Noir 285
24. Exile 307
25. Youth Culture Revisited 327
26. Exhaustion 352
Epilogue: “Hitler, Harlan, Honecker” 365
Acknowledgments 375
Appendix: Quotes on Harlan 379
Notes 383
Bibliography 415
Index 431
Photographs follow page 192
author’s note
This book is not a translation of my German-language biography Veit
Harlan: Des Teufels Regisseur, which was published in 2000. It is instead a
rewrite. It was motivated by access to hitherto unpublished documents
provided by Harlan family historian Ingrid Buchloh and to first-class cop-
ies of Harlan films on the big screen as opposed to the blurred videotape
copies I had to satisfy myself with previously. It was also motivated by
recent developments in film studies. The original book had been written in
protest against German film scholars who relied on outdated sources,
unaware of the New Film History movement or the exemplary work done
by U.S. scholars. I decided back then to answer anti-Harlan polemics with
pro-Harlan polemics, which I still think was justified in the national con-
text but not in an international context.
Due to legal training at the Kammergericht Berlin, I had also found it
unacceptable that Harlan was denied the right of defense, however tenta-
tive. It is one thing to call a defense unconvincing; it is something else to
question its very existence. And defending Harlan was not even my aim;
my attitude was and remains that of a curious investigator.
The ongoing program “Wiederentdeckt” (Rediscovered) at Berlin’s
Zeughauskino has been a chief inspiration for my rewrite. These screen-
ings of old German films are unusually well attended, and the audience is
no longer dominated by elderly people reviving childhood memories, with
due respect for their motives, but students who wonder why none of these
intriguing films have received the scholarly attention they deserve. The
chief aim of this book, then, is not to create a positive view of Veit Harlan
as a Nazi film propagandist but to encourage a look beyond the existing
German film canon in general and to call for analyses of lesser-known
Harlan films in particular.
vii

introduction
individualist in a
totalitarian State
Following a decree issued by Nazi authorities on April 29, 1942, all Jews
living in the Netherlands had to wear the yellow star, and by July mass
deportations to the extermination camps in the East had begun. It was
around this time that the family of Anne Frank moved into a hiding place
at Prinsengracht 163 in Amsterdam. Otto Frank was an ordinary business-
man specializing in spices and pectin and therefore not particularly well
connected, but even an internationally recognized film director such as
Ludwig Berger, whose credits included Universum Film (UFA) and
Paramount musicals, had to fear for his life. Just a year earlier, his
Technicolor extravaganza The Thief of Bagdad had won three Academy
Awards. Now his only protection against arrest and deportation was his
forged papers identifying him as Aryan, which could be exposed at any
time.
Another German refugee fighting for survival in the Netherlands was
Camilla Spira, an earthy stage actress who shortly before Hitler’s rise to
power had costarred in Fritz Lang’s film Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse
(The testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933). The daughter of a Danish-born
actress and her German Jewish colleague, she might have survived on her
own—blond and full bosomed, she looked almost like the caricature of an
Aryan woman, and by Nazi law’s definition was only half-Jewish, but she
had a Jewish husband and two children, and after the internment of the
whole family in the Westerbork transition camp she could save them only
if she passed as 100 percent Aryan. She succeeded with the help of lawyer
Hans-Georg Calmeyer, later called “the Oskar Schindler from Osnabrück.”
He was part of the Reichskommissariat (Reich’s Commissar’s Office)
installed in the Netherlands to deal with Jewish matters. Spira insisted to
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