Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Post-contemporary interventions) by Linda Schulte-Sasse

Author:Linda Schulte-Sasse [Schulte-Sasse, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2012-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

Anomaly or “Fascist Delusion of Female Autonomy”? Pabst’s Neuberin Film Komödianten

Strictly speaking, Pabst’s Komödianten1 (1941) is not a Genius film.2 It is a biography of actress Caroline Neuber (1697–1760), known as die Neuberin, who by no accident is never referred to as a “genius.” I have chosen to include the film here because it follows the master narrative of the Genius film in celebrating Neuber’s historical efforts to institutionalize theater as a serious medium. Neuber, too, is a visionary who prevails against a hostile environment; she is, like Schiller, “the way I have to be.” More importantly, the film generates the same euphoria in German culture as does Friedrich Schiller, aligning itself with the late eighteenth century’s aesthetic of the “heart.” It, too, blends biographical events with stories from canonized literature, this time dramas by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who is also integrated into the film’s plot (as is the early Enlightenment writer with whom Neuber collaborated, Johann Christoph Gottsched). In short, Komödianten operates in the same space as the Genius film, that of an imaginary collective history molded by the struggle of an individual for artistic autonomy, for the uniquely “German.”

Having argued thus far that Nazism’s construction of its imagined community and its imaginary narrative of history is organized around a body politic, I want to explore what happens when that body is female. Can a woman be a sublime, fetishized object that is “more than herself”? Can she function as a site of reconciliation in the mode of Frederick or Schiller? If a woman serves, even rarely, as a subject and object of history, must we not conclude that the functionalization of gender in Nazi cinema is more complex than the usual arguments about woman’s “colonization” would suggest? Finally, how does the inscription of gender in Komödianten figure in its identification with late-eighteenth-century aesthetics?

My answer will be an ambivalent, maybe even confusing one. Komödianten is indeed something of an anomaly in letting Caroline Neuber play the role of historical agent with all its narrative manifestations in the Genius film, in particular, the exorcism of the private sphere. Neuber does provide a site in which social fragmentation cedes to imaginary reconciliation in the aesthetic realm. The crucial feature separating Komödianten from a “real” Genius film is, however, that Neuber provides this reconciliation, while Frederick or Schiller are it, embody it in themselves. This difference will emerge from a reading of how the narrative and the camera represent Neuber, in contrast to Nazi cinema’s representation of male Genius. Precisely the “techne” or effort Adorno laments as repressed by the genius aesthetic (see chapter 5) is omnipresent in Komödianten’s portrayal of Neuber. However forcefully the film celebrates her achievements, it makes us aware of cultural history as process, not as the mystery that simply happens in Genius films. Komödianten thus covertly reconciles discipline with “antimodern” ideology; the internalization of discipline manifested in Neuber’s “hard work” helps her deliver us into the timeless world of noninstrumentalized values (Schiller’s work, by contrast, never seems like “work”).

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