On Emigres and British CinemaDestination London: German-Speaking Emigres and British Cinema, 1925-1950. Edited by Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli. Vol. 6 in Europa: German Cinema in an International Context. New York: Berghahn, 2012. 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-85745-803-2 (pbk). US $34.95.The Continental Connection: German-Speaking Emigres and British Cinema, 1927-45. By Tobias Hochscherf. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. 244 pp., ISBN 978-0-71908-309-9 (hc). US $75.00.The attention historians have given to the impact of German-speaking filmmakers-including John Russell Taylor's Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres, 1933-1950 (1984) and Ehrhard Bahr's more wide-ranging Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (2007)-has focused overwhelmingly on their success or failure within the American studio system. British cinema, always under the shadow of Hollywood, remained largely unexplored in this regard, though there was important pioneering work by Kevin Gough-Yates and several contributions to the collection The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929-1939 (2000), edited by Jeffrey Richards. The two studies considered in this review give the topic the detailed, specific, and focused consideration it deserves, mapping out and analyzing the variegated and conflicted histories of German-speaking actors, cinematographers, composers, designers, directors, producers, and scriptwriters as they migrated or fled to Britain, and encompassing the degree to which these interlopers were welcomed, treated with indifference, or even subjected to suspicion and hostility.Taking their cue from Film Europe and Film America: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920-1939 (1999), edited by Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, which emphasized the internationalism of the film industry in the 1920 and 1930s, both books widen their scope to encompass a broader subject matter than that of the emigres who fled Nazi Germany; and the designation Germanspeaking also allows consideration of Austrian and Hungarian film personnel. Each book shows the influence of Thomas Elsaesser's Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary (2000), which emphasized the complexity of this phenomenon as well as the importance of understanding individual trajectories and the two-way reciprocities that characterized this international exchange, particularly before 1933, after which a return to Germany became impossible for those who had Jewish ancestry or connections. The two studies are notable for their clarity of focus and depth of scholarship, but a collection is clearly different in nature from a single-authored monograph, so I will take each in turn.Destination London is a welcome reissue in paperback of a study that first appeared in hardback in 2008. It was the principal outcome of a three-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, and directed by the two editors. Many of the chapters were expanded from papers given at the project's major international conference in 2005 and reflect how profitably the research drew on work from scholars in Britain, Germany, and America. Most of the seventeen essays have a tight focus on individual filmmakers, but Tim Bergfelder's succinct introduction does much to bind the collection together, raising the significant conceptual and historical issues the volume goes on to explore. Bergfelder contends that the impact of German-speaking emigres-there were four hundred in the British film industry toward the end of the 1930s-was multifarious, encompassing varied aesthetic innovations, methods of production, professional training, and technological developments. Although the term emigre is preferable to exile, which would be applicable only to the post-1933 period (and then not completely, as the importance of some filmmakers to Nazi cinema meant that the exclusion of Jewish personnel was applied selectively for a period), even that label is itself rather broad-brush. …
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Open Access
Dec 24, 2023
Kenneth Oldfield 
