#andreas killen

What did the makers of enlightenment films hope to accomplish? In the broadest sense, they used the medium to popularize medical knowledge and as a vehicle for their faith in the existence of scientific solutions for social problems. The embrace of film was itself one expression of this. As it had been since its origins in late nineteenth-century motion studies, the moving image was privileged as a tool for capturing and representing natural and clinical phenomena with complete objectivity and truthfulness. Amid the multiple crises facing the war-torn nation, filmmakers espoused the medium’s potential for mobilizing the citizens of the new democracy in the task of reconstructing their society. Painting a picture of a world composed of a host of risks, on the one hand, and supplying information about how to recognize, avoid, and manage such risks, on the other, medical experts, filmmakers, and officials invested great resources in this project of public instruction.

In the journal she kept during her time studying with Sigmund Freud in the years 1912–13, Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote about her pleasure in going to popular motion pictures and predicted an auspicious future for the new medium in a world in which modern workplace conditions left most individuals too fatigued to enjoy more demanding forms of art. Unlike many contemporary film reformers who connected film going to wider processes of psychosocial restructuring, Andreas-Salomé did not stigmatise this development.

An older strand of historiography, typified by Siegfried Kracauer’s “psychological analysis” of German film history in From Caligari to Hitler (1947), placed much emphasis on the hypnotic effects orchestrated by the Nazis’ propaganda campaign; yet such an analysis clearly overstates the power of that campaign. It is also worth noting that attributions of mesmeric power took on a highly self-serving meaning: many high-ranking party officials invoked Hitler’s “hypnotic” persona as a way of minimizing their roles in the regime’s crimes.

This faith in the molding of people was far from untroubled. Even those, like the neurologist and filmmaker Curt Thomalla, who were most deeply committed to this endeavor, acknowledged doubts about the prospects for success given the contradictory forces present in Weimar society. Thomalla welcomed the Nazi regime for putting an end to those contradictions. Yet despite the sharp break that occurred in 1933 and despite the dramatic escalation of techniques of ideological programming under the Nazis, there were nevertheless limits to this process. Recent literature on public opinion under the Third Reich is skeptical of the notion that Germans were mesmerized by the regime’s propaganda and has rather tended to cast doubt on the extent of indoctrination, pointing to evidence of a gradual loss of “trust in the media.”

It was not simply that effective filmmaking had much to learn from trash but that the boundaries of this construct remained fundamentally elusive, especially so as the medium was enlisted in new social policy initiatives. Viewed from this perspective, it becomes apparent that the constantly reiterated protest against Schund served both to justify and to camouflage increasingly radical departures from traditional values and norms. The outrage generated by this construct fueled a strategy of social and cultural transformation that depended on such provocation to maintain its forward momentum. This was especially true as film reform became closely tied to human reform—to that knowledge and “improvement” of the German Volk that lay at the core of National Socialism.

Already in the final years of World War I, the recognition had dawned on German officials that effective film propaganda had much to learn from the film genres most often identified with trash. Such genres might well, according to a standard reformist protest, “speculate on the audience’s lowest instincts,” yet precisely this quality offered important lessons for those seeking to break free of the conservative attitudes that inhibited German filmmaking. As the Foreign Office official Richard Kiliani, confronted in 1919 with the task of mobilizing patriotic feelings against the threat of national disunity, put it quite simply, “At this moment it is a question of arousing mass emotions, rapidly and in a sustained manner.” For those desiring to enlist the cinematic medium on behalf of such tasks, tapping into the realm of affect, instincts, and the unconscious assumed a paramount strategic importance, all the more so as the limits of traditional approaches became plain. Only through such means, stressed Kiliani (here echoing General Erich Ludendorff) could the moving image’s exceptional powers as a medium of “mass influencing” be fully harnessed. Control over the “means of influencing” became a chief objective of postwar governance.

And yet there may be good reasons not to take Goebbels’s lament entirely at face value. The deep anxiety about Schund that made it such an important leitmotif of German modernity is in many ways marked by the same pattern of disavowal and incitement that Dagmar Herzog has found in German attitudes toward sexuality. This ever-present feature of the discourse about film, together with the accompanying, perpetually reiterated calls for “reform,” generated a social dynamic in which the most extreme possibilities of such calls eventually became thinkable. Censoriousness masked deep fascination; indeed, it was likely its aura of the taboo and the forbidden that endowed cinema, in the mind of Goebbels and others, with such transformative powers.

There are many ways of measuring this apparent paradox. Again, an especially telling expression of it comes from Goebbels himself, who in 1939 confided to his diary that “German cinema is still in need of reform”—by which he assuredly also meant that the German film public was still in need of reform. Goebbels here echoed a decades-old theme of film discourse. Since the dawn of the century, no discussion of the new medium could dispense with obligatory, even ritualistic disavowals of Schund, which, in the minds of many reformers, was also an anthropological category. Well before the Nazis came to power, the purging of “trash,” both cultural and human, from society had been central to fantasies of national renewal within important circles of German society.