Nazi Film Melodrama by Laura Julia Heins

Author:Laura Julia Heins [Heins, Laura Julia]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2013-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Battle against the family: Clausen assaults the housewife’s portrait in Der Herrscher (1937). Source: Deutsche Kinemathek

For the fascist man, passionate commitment was best sought outside the walls of the home. At the end of Der Herrscher the hero becomes engaged to his secretary, but since she goes back to her stenography immediately after the proposal, there is no indication that she will produce a new nuclear family for the industrial leader. Instead the secretary herself performs all familial and corporate roles, becoming an entirely subservient worker as well as a combined child/lover figure. For this reason most of the contemporary reviews of Der Herrscher emphasized Inken’s youth to an exaggerated extent. Filmwelt described her character as “a young, childlike creature that demands nothing for itself, but only wants to live for him, the beloved man, and gives him the gift of youth and love.”78 Thus, through the girl’s battle-won gift of youth, the hero regains his own virile energy, which in turn benefits the nation. At the film’s conclusion, Clausen disinherits all of his sons and daughters and dictates to Inken his final will, mandating that a new leader for the corporation should be found in the Volksgemeinschaft rather than in the family.

The problem of negotiating production with reproduction was revisited six years later in another Emil Jannings production, Altes Herz wird wieder jung (Old Heart Becomes Young Again, 1943), which replays many of Der Herrscher’s themes and makes its perversions even more explicit. Here, Jannings once again plays an industrial CEO, in this case a never-married seventy-year-old who seemingly begins an intergenerational romance with a twenty-year-old girl who takes a job in the corporate main office. Later it is revealed that the young woman believed to be his fiancée is actually his granddaughter, the progeny of an interclass premarital pregnancy from many decades past. The girl’s grandmother, the working-class woman whom the hero made pregnant long ago, relinquished all claims on child support in order not to interfere with the hero’s career and is described by the script as “a pearl,” a forward-looking woman who knew how to raise a child with no male help. This film, like Der Herrscher, thereby plays on a male Nazi fantasy of dynasty without family while reinforcing the privileges of male capital. In a scene at the end of the film in which a group of BDM girls dance around a fountain with a few gray-haired friends of the hero, Altes Herz wird wieder jung furthermore suggested that the German “race” could survive and renew itself regardless of total war. Genetic lineages could continue in the absence of marriage, and in the absence of the young men killed at the front, because some old German men would always be available as fountains of insemination.

Thus, the incestuous fantasies of Nazi cinema actually worked in concert with its hostility to the bourgeois nuclear family, since such scenarios allowed for the separation of motherhood from the male world of industrial and military action. It is remarkable how often Nazi narratives include suggestions of incest or actual consummations of it.

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