Hollywood �ber Alles : Seeing the Nazi in American Movies

Abstract

Hollywood Über Alles:Seeing the Nazi in American Movies Geoffrey Cocks No figure in fact or in fiction embodies absolute evil as much as the Nazi. The American-movie Nazi drew its initial presence and force from the sheer enormity of Nazi destructive impact on the real world, the Nazis’ own projection of their dark drama onto the movie screens of that world, and the emigration of much German, European, and Jewish talent to Hollywood in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Hollywood largely avoided the subject of Nazism for political and economic reasons. From 1941 on, however, the Nazi figure assumed a place in a wide variety of movie genres, not only because of the fervor of war, but because the Nazi allowed Hollywood to engage American issues of class, race, and power without indicting American culture itself. Hollywood movies about the First World War caricatured Prussian officers as bearers of the arrogant rot at the top of Old World society. This type of “pre”-Nazi figure was evident even in the urbane officer in Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941) in contrast to the thuggish party leader (Confessions of a Nazi Spy [Anatole Litvak, 1939]). Click for larger view View full resolution Nazi officers in Man Hunt (left) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy Such urbanity usually conceals thuggishness, however. Erich von Stroheim’s portrayal of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in Paramount’s Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943) recalls Stroheim’s earlier portrayals of Prussians, but it adds the menace of Nazi racism. Wilder, an Austrian-Jewish émigré, indirectly exposes the Nazi persecution of Jews when Rommel notes that there is no Moses to part the Red Sea for the British and when Rommel rages, in German, at officers dallying with a French hotel maid: “Is this the German army or a Jews’ school?” The movie elliptically refers to the Final Solution (articulated formally in early 1942) when Rommel observes ominously about prison camps that “we can use paper in Germany, a great deal of paper,” hinting at the bureaucracy of euphemisms used in Nazi communications (Sonderbehandlung—“special handling”—being the most infamous). Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) channeled Warner Bros.’s longstanding anti-German and anti-Nazi stance into themes of group identity and collective resistance to the Nazis, an approach promoted by the new Office of War Information. Colonel Strasser, as played by German émigré Conrad Veidt, is Teutonic in the aristocratic Prussian style without being self-stereotyped like von Stroheim and so exudes a more modern malevolence à la Nazi. He, like Rommel, sports no aristocratic “von.” His name has a utilitarian, even proletarian, simplicity and directness to it. He wears the uniform of the Luftwaffe, the most recent and Nazified of the German armed services, and he arrives in an airplane. The German army officers [End Page 38] around him are a blend of arrogance and officiousness, described and dismissed by Rick’s Russian bartender as “Germans boom, boom, boom, boom.” Click for larger view View full resolution The Nazi uniform is, in other words, dapper camouflage for thugs--typically played, ironically, by the sorts of people the Nazis despised. More than any other wartime American film, Casablanca’s production resounds with the powerful voice of recent emigrants, many of them Jewish, from fascist Europe. Director Curtiz was from Hungary. Veidt had fled Germany with his Jewish wife. Peter Lorre, born László Löwenstein in Hungary, plays Ugarte, an oily but hapless trader in refugee souls.1 But even though many of the crew and cast, as well most of the twelve German-speaking actors, were Jewish, there is famously no mention of Jews in Casablanca, or indeed of religion or race at all. Unlike Once Upon a Honeymoon (Leo McCarey, 1942), Address Unknown (William Menzies, 1944), Tomorrow the World (Leslie Fenton, 1944), and None Shall Escape (André de Toth, 1944), the Nazi in Casablanca appears not to be presented in the context of a war against the Jews. This tactic reflected the concern among Jewish studio heads in Hollywood that America, with its own obvious history of anti-Semitism, would interpret the war (or the film’s representation of it) as a defense of Jews.2...