"Lili Marleen": Fascism and the Film Industry

Abstract

Filmmaking in West Germany since the late 1960s has a complex background. Its current high productivity follows twenty-five exceptionally arid years, a moribund period for the country's commercial film industry. Hollywood's particularly ruthless exploitation policy as applied to the West German market meant the enforcement by distributors of block-booking and other nearmonopolistic practices. The Germans, unlike the French or British, were unable to protect their own private industry through legislation. Import quotas and the freezing of box-office receipts the two most frequently applied trade barriers of the 1950s and '60s proved politically unacceptable in the face of the massive lobbying undertaken by the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Motion Picture Export Association during the Adenauer era. The decline was slow since West Germany did grant subsidies to its ailing industry. A combination of fiscal measures (reduced entertainment tax on films of cultural value) and a levy on all box-office receipts sustained production. The industry remained undercapitalized, however, existing from hand to mouth, from film to film. The general slide into insignificance of other European film industries during the 1960s demonstrated the inadequacy of purely economic incentives. The Hollywood product was superior in almost every respect and the attempt to compete by means of exploitation pictures brought some producers shortterm profits but ruined the already volatile market. The loss of the popular audiences was followed by the disaffection of the more serious ones. It was perhaps the very thoroughness with which the Americans cleaned up in West Germany that opened the way for a different concept of filmmaking. How did Europe's most sophisticated and entangled system of government subsidized filmmaking come into existence? It derived partly from the defensive posture of the German industrial establishment in response to the postwar