Posing As a Democrat: Scripting the Male Body in West German Films of the 1950s

Abstract

Abstract The article draws on emblematic examples from 1950s West German cinema to examine how popular film employed elements of typecasting, performance style and staging in order to project images of a positive, “democratic” masculinity and contrast that with negatively connoted “fascist” men. As part of the ongoing project to reimagine the terms of male agency in the wake of military defeat and occupation, numerous commercial films refashioned masculinity according to the dictates of the era’s culture of political transformation. Consciously or not, these works sought to differentiate between an invalidated fascist model of rigid, hardened manliness and newer, more flexible modes of masculinity suited both to serving and leading a reconstructed, democratic nation – literally localizing politics in the body, presenting it as a matter of posture and attitudes. In the process, the article claims, 1950 s West German cinema contributed, both directly and indirectly, to the discourse of democratization in the postwar nation.