[In the following essay, Schulte-Sasse examines the unique place of Komödianten as a movie featuring a woman in the genre of Nazi “genius” films.]

Ob Männer oder Frauen, ist ganz wurscht:
Eingesetzt muß alles werden

—Hitler, March 1945

G. W. Pabst's film biography of Caroline Neuber, Komödianten (1941), follows in most respects the paradigm of the “genius” films that pervaded Nazi cinema in the early forties. These films extol artists like Schiller, Mozart, Andreas Schlüter, or Rembrandt, scientists, inventors, and politicians as rebels combatting an ossified world. Consistent with this master narrative, Komödianten celebrates Caroline Neuber's efforts to free the German theater from the buffoon tradition of Hanswurst and to institutionalize theater as a serious medium. In this film as well the artist reigns supreme as a chosen being who transcends the ordinary, but whose path is one of “suffering.” Neuber, too, is “the way I have to be”; she is a visionary who prevails both against a hostile environment and against inner temptation. Like Herbert Maisch's film Friedrich Schiller (1940), Komödianten aligns itself with a late 18th-century aesthetic of the “heart” (taking considerable liberties with historical chronology in the process), and blends biographic events with motifs from 18th-century literature, particularly from the works of G. E. Lessing, who is also integrated into the film's plot. In short, Komödianten typifies the genius film in its nostalgic evocation of aesthetic euphoria, in its concoction of an imaginary collective history molded by the struggle of an individual for artistic autonomy, for the uniquely “German.” Like other protagonists of the genre, Neuber acts as a fill-in (in Lacan's sense) who reconciles social ruptures in the aesthetic realm. Yet for all of these likenesses, Pabst's film is unique among Nazi genius films in allowing a woman to forge historical progress. I intend to examine this gender perspective in Komödianten with the underlying questions in mind: How, given the male orientation of National Socialism, is it possible for a genius film to focus on a woman? Does Komödianten suggest that the functionalization of gender in Nazi cinema involves more than a subsumption of all texts under the notion of woman's colonization? Finally, how does the inscription of gender in Komödianten relate to the film's apparent valorization of late 18th-century aesthetics?

The fact that woman is relegated to the role of subordinate partner, nurturer, and reproducer of race in Nazi culture and cinema hardly needs reiteration. A glance at the personae embodied by “darlings” of the Third Reich such as “Reich Water Corpse” Kristina Söderbaum or Marika Rökk bears this impression out, as do a number of recent studies such as Anke Gleber's analysis of the subjugation of the female in Miss von Barnhelm (Hans Schweikart, 1940), Verena Leuken's reading of Heimat (Carl Froelich, 1938), or Karsten Witte's analysis of female guilt in The Great Love (Rolf Hansen, 1942).¹ The latter two films illustrate how often even a film personality like Zarah Leander, whose independence and eroticism appear to challenge the patriarchal structure, is redomesticated within the narrative trajectory of her films, led back to her “place” behind or beside man and family.²

Conversely, the combination of women and political power in Nazi cinema is catastrophic, as Johannes Meyer's Fridericus (1936) illustrates. The film shows Frederick the Great encircled by a bitchy triumvirate: a pouty Maria Theresa, a conniving Madame Pompadour, and an abrasive Elizabeth of Russia. While the Leander vehicle The Queen's Heart (Carl Froelich, 1940) portrays Mary Queen of Scots sympathetically, even the film's title suggests its concentration on Mary as a woman tragically doomed by her beauty. The only female whose mythification in Nazi cinema rivals Frederick's is the Queen Luise of Veit Harlan's Kolberg (1945). However, Luise was not a ruling head of state, and her idolization as Germany's Landesmutter by no means undermines a patriarchal order, as a remark from Heinrich von Treitschke amply illustrates: “it is a touchstone of [Luise's] greatness that one can say so little of her deeds.”³

As this gender constellation indicates, women are deprived of an independent function in the genius film, generally serving to aid the male protagonist, suffer for him, or impede his mission. In Friedrich Schiller, for example, Laura and Franziska are intuitive comprehenders of male genius who voluntarily surrender Schiller to his art and, ultimately, to history. The women in Friedemann Bach (Traugott Müller, 1941) typify the male projections Silvia Bovenschen describes as “imagined femininity”: they act as conventional positive (Antonia) and negative (Fiorini) catalysts, representing the polar opposites of “heart” vs. eroticism, community vs. egocentrism, art vs. exchange value within the male protagonist.⁴ Many genius films render women even more peripheral, as does Paracelsus (1943), the other film Pabst completed in the Third Reich, or Robert Koch (Hans Steinhoff, 1939), in which the scientist Robert Koch's obsession with curing tuberculosis nearly drives his wife to despair.

Komödianten reverses this paradigm, “breaks the rules” of gender coding in Nazi film by featuring a woman as its exemplary historical agent. Neuber's diegetic role parallels precisely that of male protagonists in the genre, although, significantly, nowhere in the film is the title “genius” applied to her. I will argue that while Komödianten illuminates women's ambivalent social role under National Socialism in the forties, it does not radically reassess the feminine (either as body or as abstract principle) in the Nazi weltanschauung. While the film demonstrates that woman can act as a leader, that she can trespass beyond the boundaries of the private sphere in the name of a “higher cause,” it simultaneously restricts woman's historical agency to an essentialist concept of the feminine, and renders woman subordinate to and dependent upon male genius. My analysis will examine how two triadic character groups inhabit the film text: a (more or less fictional) all-female triad in which gender is ultimately displaced as the film's thematic focal point; and the (historical) male-female triad in which gender is restored as a principle of stratification. While the latter valorizes the feminine as crucial to German cultural history, it maintains a hierarchy of leadership in which the masculine ultimately dominates. Moreover, in fictionalizing history while feigning authenticity, it supports Nazism's aestheticization of politics. I will explore this subject further in the second part of my essay.

Komödianten begins with a dispute between Caroline Neuber and Hanswurst after the latter disrupts her theater performance of Medea with his vulgar jokes, which, however, are popular with the public. Neuber declares her intention to create “decent German theater.” Her theater troupe travels to Leipzig, where they perform Gottsched's Sterbender Cato, but after an argument with Gottsched on the direction theater should take, Neuber and her troupe leave. On the way to Leipzig the traveling troupe has picked up a young orphan, Philine Schröder, who has run away after her guardian tried to force her into an affair with Privy Councilor Klupsch in exchange for business favors. The playboy and theater buff Baron Armin Perckhammer falls in love with Philine and wants to marry her against the wishes of his aunt, Duchess Amalia of Weissenfels. Philine is separated from Armin through the intrigue of his relatives, and Neuber's troupe loses the support of the Duchess following an argument between the two women. Neuber is attracted to the Duke of Courland (Ernst Biron, ‘secret ruler’ of Russia), who invites her to make a guest appearance in St. Petersburg. The troupe becomes involved in an orgy in St. Petersburg and Neuber realizes that she must return to Germany. Here she burns Hanswurst in effigy, but Hanswurst and his supporters burn her stage and costumes in revenge. When the troupe runs out of money, Neuber's actors abandon her. The Duchess is distressed when Philine informs her of Neuber's plight; moreover, she finally recognizes the sincerity of Philine's love for Armin. Neuber dies in a remote forest, whereupon the Duchess builds a German National Theater in her honor.

I

THREE WOMEN

“An der ist ein Mann verloren gegangen”: Neuber

In synthesizing male and female characteristics, Führer and mother, Caroline Neuber (Käthe Dorsch) represents the greatest anomaly among Komödianten's three “strong” women. The most important “masculine” behavior Neuber adopts is her renunciation of the private sphere for a life in the public domain (parallel to virtually all of Nazi cinema's genius figures), her exclusive devotion to her cause of furthering the theater, which is captured in her recurring command “further! further!” She repeatedly disparages women for their dependency on men, insisting: “… if I had ever had to, I would always have chosen art over love.” Her subjugation of the private to the public is manifested in Neuber's relationship to her husband Johannes: reversing a common constellation of Nazi cinema, Johannes is the wife, the loyal one who waits, who sacrifices personal needs for Neuber's “higher” cause.⁵ Yet far from naturalizing this reversal, the film suggests that male subjugation is an aberration. While Neuber crosses gender boundaries with relative ease, the reverse remains a source of discomfort; the spectator's sympathy for Johannes is problematized by a sense of embarrassment at seeing traditionally defined boundaries of masculinity transgressed, as when Johannes renders himself a literal buffoon by donning Hanswurst's clown costume.⁶

While Johannes's feminization provides a narrative counterpoint that facilitates Neuber's status as Mannsweib, her other partner, the Duke of Courland, threatens to drive Neuber back to her “natural” place in the private sphere. The interlude with the Duke again violates stereotypic gender distinctions by permitting a male to act as the negative catalyst nearly provoking a woman's downfall. The Duke—played by Gustav Diessl, who often personified dark, exotic men—is a male counterpart to threatening, eroticized women in the popular narrative tradition.⁷ The Duke's desire to drive Neuber back into the limited feminine sphere is suggested by his enjoyment of her as spectacle during their first encounter. The spectacle consists not only of Neuber's gala theater performance, but of the “performance” she delivers arguing with the Duchess of Weissenfels over the social status of actors. Yet the pairing of the Duke and Neuber also has an allegorical dimension. The Duke represents the eroticization of the arts (as divertissement) as it functioned historically in courtly culture. The opposition between the Duke and Neuber thus represents the opposition between an art subjected to external interests and an art which functions autonomously. Komödianten champions autonomous art by linking the Duke's notion of art as power with the courtly, the political, the erotic, and the alien: “You evoke passions, I tame them; you free feelings, I use them. Art and politics are related; both want to rule man.”⁸ Indeed, Neuber's affair with the Duke can be read allegorically as representing the obstacles which prevent the historical development of a powerful (autonomous) artistic culture in Germany. As a woman, Neuber represents the beginning of that process, which is temporarily threatened by the power-obsessed representative of the East who sweeps her away in a flood of eastern eroticism.

Xenophobia of course pervades the semioticization of geography inherent in the Duke's nationality and in Neuber's temporary displacement to the East. The alien Duke lures Neuber away from her place in the Heimat. The East with its “subhuman” inhabitants is linked here with the abandonment of boundaries and the pursuit of unlimited (sexual) pleasure, as well as with the amoral value system of courtly culture, standing since the 18th century in opposition to bourgeois “virtue.” Much like National Socialism's fantasy of the “Jew,” Komödianten's xenophobic portrayal of the East as the site of perilous dissolution is structurally necessary as a negative social fantasy, which is complemented by the organic unity of the German People as its positive form.⁹ In other words, the opposition of negative East/positive Volk fills a void in Nazi ideology and thus masks the impossibility of National Socialism's corporatist social vision. As a social fantasy, the East also serves as a negative counterpart to autonomous art, which is portrayed as a domain of self-restitution, of pleasurable decentering within a contained realm. Moreover, by linking the Duke with courtly art as the sphere of the erotic, excessive, and dissolute, the narrative displaces the historical opposition between the courtly and the bourgeois institutions of art onto an ahistorical opposition between power and creativity, between “lust” and “virtue,” in which lust is a degenerative force that erodes biological and spiritual strength. The film implies that both art and the erotic must be contained as threats to the genius-leader's internal autonomy; it regards the spheres of the self and of art as homologous (hence the Duke's double function as an erotic and artistic threat).

Neuber's trip to St. Petersburg illustrates how the abandonment of Heimat is equatable with loss of self; the genius or leader needs a biological foundation in the People in order to function as genius or leader. The episode affords Nazi cinema one more occasion to visualize eastern unculture laced with threatening eroticism—almost as a mise-en-scène of Spengler's theory of the depravity of the East. Like other depictions of Russian courts (cf. Fridericus, Karl Ritter's Cadettes [1941]), this one embodies Dionysian abandonment and disorder. The monumentality of the mainly interior sets in the St. Petersburg sequence underscores the overpowering effect of this “wild and alien” (Neuber) environment on the characters.¹⁰ Neuber's intoxication with the Duke's eroticism culminates in a room dominated by a massive fireplace that dwarfs (i.e., disempowers) the figures near it, while the fire itself—its flickering shadow reflected on the floor—acts as a metaphoric extension of the “fire” within the figures; Neuber refers to her feelings for the Duke as a “flame.” In his insistence that she abandon everything and “finally become a woman,” the Duke threatens the equilibrium Neuber has heretofore maintained between her private “family” life with her troupe and the public sphere. Passion demands submission—and submission is the destruction of the artist; hence Neuber fears “what is in [her] heart” much more than she fears Russia. The Duke again verbalizes the “fire” motif as he tells Neuber “burn your life!” and she responds “I'm burning, I'm dissolving. …” This is the closest she comes to dissolution (Entgrenzung), to losing the boundaries which must be maintained to ensure the containment of her artistic self.

The St. Petersburg sequence similarly underscores the symbiotic relationship Nazi cinema posits between leader and the led; Neuber's own loss of identity contaminates her troupe, which behaves as a “mass” in the sense in which Gustave LeBon used the term, engaging in indiscriminate lovemaking and debauchery. Neuber discovers the actors engaged in an orgy, an enactment of her own internal chaos. She descends a long spiral staircase, a motif which Freud associated with orgasm, and which visually underscores the figures' earlier joking analogy of Russia with “hell.” The circular and downward movement of the staircase signals the abyss into which the group has fallen, as do the circular Cossack (non-German, i.e., alien) dance movements and shrieks of those indulging in the bacchanal. As in Freud's conception of dream work, the visual manifestation of her own loss of self (“I died inside”) functions as a catalyst for Neuber's own self-retrieval, allowing her to restore herself as leader, and return to her work and to her un-erotic relationship with her husband. This again reinforces the dependency of art and genius on maintaining personal boundaries, on taming the desire for dissolution or merging with an Other. Yet once freed from the “fire of passion,” Neuber faces a literal fire when Hanswurst and his allies burn the troupe's set and costumes. As a carnivalesque aesthetic principle that ruptures aesthetic boundaries, Hanswurst (significantly characterized by Neuber as one who lacks “yearning,” [Sehnsucht]) also has to be contained, a triumph achieved only after Neuber dies in abject poverty.

As in other genius films, Neuber's act of fortifying the inner self is as important an achievement as her historical feat itself; indeed, the former is the prerequisite for the latter. In order to be constituted as a historical “personality,” the hero must ward off the erotic and become impenetrable, a self contained by what Klaus Theweleit calls “body armor.”¹¹ Theweleit has demonstrated how the fascist male character creates an external self impervious to weakness. At the expense of an intact ego, the “soldierly” man's ersatz-ego is literally beaten into him through militaristic socialization from an early age, and is manifested in his erect stance, slick hair, and steely gaze, in his uniform, and the things with which he surrounds himself, particularly the “men.” Above all he must reject the female Other as a symbol of dissolution that threatens his armored self the moment it transgresses the private sphere (i.e., as a female that is not mother or wife). Like art, the feminine, whether in the form of a female body (the actual, social existence of woman) or in the form of an image (the role of the feminine, the erotic in art), needs to be contained, primarily through the family structure.

Paradoxically, this process applies to a female protagonist like Caroline Neuber as well once she enters the public sphere. Retrieval of self for Neuber likewise means surmounting her own female Otherness, particularly her female sexuality. While hardly a soldierly male, Neuber must likewise undergo a process of transcending “feminine” weakness. The Russian episode is the only one in the film in which Neuber's unfeminine behavior breaks down and she becomes “all woman,” and hence nearly abandons her historic mission. The episode is the crucial test that helps to fortify her inner self against alien influence, eroticism, and physicality (a necessary step reflecting the film's subtext of the war, which inaugurates a breakdown of the public-private division). Significantly, in her two scenes with the Duke, Neuber not only appears in lavish dresses emphasizing her womanly figure, but is stylized through framing and lighting as an object of desire. This contrasts with the less “feminine”—even slightly military—design of the clothing she wears in other scenes, such as her travel suit with buttons that recall an officer's jacket, or her rehearsal dress, which has a criss-cross pattern reminiscent of a soldier draped with an ammunition belt.

Like Nazi cinema's male geniuses, Neuber forgoes dissolution with an individual, private Other in favor of a fusion with the collective that is so essential to the National Socialist project. Through their art, which is in Lacanian terminology a contained objet a, individuals like Neuber and Schiller become historical figures who compensate or stand in for the People's lack, acting as the People's objet a. Yet Neuber's susceptibility to the temptation of dissolution is gender specific, again naturalized by the film as a woman's need—evoking in the spectator a response of relief and disappointment at Neuber's self-retrieval. In this sense, then, the film disavows the leader role it ascribes to Neuber, who, unlike male geniuses, must sort out competing voices within herself. As I will elaborate in the following section, Philine is a transitional figure who eases both the film's allegorical transference of woman from private to public, and the tension between the still privatized female spectator and the public woman.

Another gender-specific characteristic that separates Neuber from male artists is her coding as mother (although to be sure a number of older geniuses such as Paracelsus are father figures). Neuber, portrayed as fortyish and slightly buxom, serves throughout the film as a spiritual mother to her “family” of actors, who are repeatedly described as “a herd” in need of “a shepherd,” and develops a particular mother-daughter bond with the orphan Philine.¹² The non-diegetic text opening the film already establishes Neuber's role as mother/teacher:

Caroline Neuber liberated the theater from the cheap obscenities [Zoten] of Hanswurst. Through hard labor she raised/educated [erzog] actors and spectators. Without Neuber our classic writers like Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe would have had found no theater to provide a worthy forum for their works.

As demonstrated by figures like Dorothea in Jew Süss, Franziska in Good-Bye, Franziska (Käutner, 1941), or Maria in Kolberg, woman is frequently a metaphor in Nazi cinema for Heimat, for roots and nurturance, which are set in narrative opposition to the alienation of aimless wandering. They assume this role because they are still confined to the private sphere and hence function as objet a for men constrained by the public sphere. Neuber adopts precisely this female role, only within the public (i.e., male) framework of the theater.

By suffering the exhaustion and humiliation of a vagabond life, she eventually legitimizes theater and provides both her actors and Germany's evolving (male) drama culture with a Heimat. Neuber's death scene visually underscores this nurturing role: she dies while leaning against the wheel of a cart in which she is forced to travel (forced to leave the private sphere), unaware of the historical legacy she will leave behind. At the moment of her death the camera travels down to focus on Johannes's brightly illuminated hand grasping hers; this scene then dissolves to a long shot of the newly founded German Theater. The chiaroscuro effects of the shot highlight Neuber's matronly bosom, and the subsequent dissolve virtually allows the building to evolve from her womb as her consummate child, with the windows of the building radiating the same bright light as her breast (i.e., “heart”). At the same time, the shot of her death is centered by the clasping hands, suggesting that a historical mission requires not only leadership, but the relentless fidelity of the follower (in this case Johannes, but by analogy, the People). Philine's final words dedicating the theater again encapsulate the themes of wandering vs. roots: “Caroline Neuberin! You were homeless [heimatlos], here is your home. You were without peace; here your bold spirit can rest. You never saw what you longed for, but in everything we create your restless longing shall be alive.” In suffering for the collective, Neuber fills in for the female spectator of the Third Reich who was slowly being forced out of the private sphere in early forties.

PHILINE AND THE RECONCILIATION OF PRIVATE AND PUBLIC

Neuber's co-protagonist, Philine (Hilde Krahl), stands in blatant contrast to Neuber by playing a much more traditional feminine role. The subplot involving Philine and the aristocrat Armin von Perckhammer reiterates the male-female (public-private) constellation of the bourgeois tragedy to which the film alludes constantly. Like the heroines of numerous 18th-century dramas, Philine is an object of desire for a variety of aristocratic males. For most of the film, she remains confined to the private sphere and the quest for “true love,” which, as in the bourgeois tragedy, is a paradigm for bourgeois, i.e., “human” virtue. In her beauty and “virtue” Philine recalls Lessing's Emilia Galotti or Goethe's Gretchen, as when a maid addresses her as “noble miss” (gnädiges Fräulein) and she responds that she is not of nobility (gnädig).

Yet while the story continuously thematizes Philine's innocence, the camera titillates the viewer by cinematically exhibiting her eroticism. Her passivity is suggested by the frequency with which she is viewed sitting, allowing the camera to “leer” down at her décolleté and voluptuous bosom. The film uses strategies typical of classical cinema, in which the heroine serves as erotic object for both the fictional characters and the spectator. Indeed, it puts the spectator in the ambiguous position of sympathizing with Philine as victim, yet enjoying both her suffering and especially the pleasure of seeing her softly illuminated body displayed and hearing her sensuous voice. While Neuber fills in for women emerging from the private sphere, Philine fills in both for men, in the traditional mode of dominant cinema (as object of desire), and for women in the sense proposed by Teresa de Lauretis. De Lauretis sees the female spectator caught in a double identification: with the masterful gaze of the male and with the object being looked at.¹³ Here a figure within the narrative, Philine takes on the dual position de Lauretis ascribes to the female spectator.

When Armin first encounters Philine, she provides a striking contrast to the promiscuous actress Viktorine, who disrobes in his presence. The first shot of Philine in the scene is preceded by her shocked off-screen voice (“Viktorine!”), which permits the spectator to “see” her with Armin as she sews—a domestic activity reminiscent of Gretchen's spinning.¹⁴ Corresponding to Laura Mulvey's original paradigm, in which “the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude,” over-the-shoulder shots enable the spectator to share Armin's look.¹⁵ These shots alternate with “objective,” unclaimed shots of both Armin and Philine. Nowhere at this point is Philine granted a subjectivity of her own from a cinematic perspective; only Armin possesses authoritative vision. When Philine makes her debut on Neuber's stage (and simultaneously her debut as spectacle for Armin in the subsequent scene), G. E. Lessing, a student and friend of Armin, raves about Neuber's artistic greatness, while Armin can only think of Philine's legs, exposed by her page costume. Their comments not only articulate the difference between the two men, but capture the contrast with which both camera and narrative will treat the two women. The words also link the artists Lessing and Neuber as transcending the physical, with Lessing always the observer of—never the participant in—human interaction.

Virtually every Nazi film set in the 18th century exploits the connotative appeal of the bourgeois tragedy and imitates the class coding of the genre, in which the aristocracy stands for egotism, intrigue, and exchange value, while the middle class stands for virtue, trust, and “love.” The genre is so useful to Nazism since its exclusion of an Other (the aristocracy and its concomitant value system) in the People's own history is a precondition for National Socialism's hypostatized unity of the People. However, Nazism redefines the gesture of exclusion in the bourgeois tragedy as an exclusion of a national (usually French) Other. This shift constitutes a fundamental reinterpretation of the bourgeois tragedy, since it transforms the latter's attempt to eliminate difference in favor of the universally human into a quest for homogeneity within the parameters of a defined order. In other words, although both the bourgeois tragedy and its Nazified versions represent a quest for “community,” in the latter, difference (class, political, racial) is eliminated only within the sphere of the “German” in order to fortify it against external elements (Überfremdung) or against racial pollution. While 18th-century bourgeois literature was international, the Nazi narrative remains firmly national. Moreover, the 18th-century notion of the universally human was oriented toward a distant future, while Nazism's social fantasy of a People is oriented toward the past (hence the tireless invocation of history). I have demonstrated elsewhere how Veit Harlan's Jew Süss (1940) strikingly refunctionalizes the bourgeois tragedy for antisemitic purposes, but the same point can be made for less “overtly” political films like Komödianten.¹⁶

A central element of the bourgeois tragedy exploited by the Philine-Armin story is the “high” Enlightenment motif of the heart's triumph over class division. The use of this motif permits gender difference to replace class difference: in the name of the universally human (das Allgemeinmenschliche), class difference is elided, but the woman continues to represent the private sphere, compensating for the alienation of public (male-centered) life. As in Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, contradictory forces hinder this transcendence of class division, typically in the form of aristocrats wielding money as a force of persuasion (reliably rejected by the heroes of the anticapitalist narrative) and resorting to intrigue when money fails. In Komödianten, a variety of concrete visual barriers suggest class division, such as the gate (marked by a conspicuous “X” design) to the prison where Philine is held, a victim of aristocratic intrigue; the gate which confines the “homely” cousin whom Armin refuses to marry in her aristocratic “prison”; and the massive gate to the Russian court. The first narrative obstacle to a union of the “heart” is Armin himself, whose social class determines his cocky, patronizing attitude toward women, at least toward those of a lower class.¹⁷ Like Mellefont in Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson, Armin acquires bourgeois virtue in the course of the narrative, discovering his “true” love for Philine and abandoning his lust for divertissement. He becomes an “aristocrat of the heart.” As in the bourgeois tragedy, there need be no explanation for his conversion to virtue beyond the claim that he is merely persuaded by the force of the “heart.”

In its quest for “community” Komödianten thus appears to valorize feeling, the cognitio intuitiva in Sentimentality, which is associated with the feminine and placed in narrative opposition to the dry rationalism of Gottsched and the vulgarity of Hanswurst. Neuber is the public spokeswoman for the “heart”; in the private sphere, Philine adopts this role. Philine's understanding through the “heart” transcends the discursive language of rationality, as Armin articulates when he says: “You have a fine ear; you hear things that one has not even said,” or: “Heaven made you more courageous than me and made your heart clearer than my understanding.” Philine is ultimately able to triumph over the aristocracy for whom “love is a business” because her “heart” accepts only “yes or no.” Furthermore, in keeping with the role accorded to both woman and art since the mid-18th century of compensating for the alienation of a rationalized existence, Philine seems to possess an intuitive reverence for genius. Despite her unfamiliarity with theater and art, Philine not only “feels” that Neuber “serves a great cause,” but she seems likewise to sense Lessing's greatness. When Armin introduces Lessing to the troupe as a budding writer, Philine alone is privileged with a close-up shot as she, characteristically captured by a high-angle shot and veritably glowing due to lighting effects, bursts out in awe: “Oh, you want to be a poet!” The use of the word poet (Dichter) is significant in that the film constantly contrasts terms suggesting the low contemporary status of theater art with terms valorizing “high,” autonomous art.

The film goes so far as to directly integrate famous Lessing phrases into the fiction. When Armin believes himself abandoned by Philine, he declares that he will participate in a military campaign “down in Turkey,” thus repeating Werner's phrase in Minna von Barnhelm. The motif of “calmness” (Ruhe, ruhig) so central to Emilia Galotti appears in Komödianten as well when, for instance, Neuber remarks to Philine that she is “so unnaturally calm.” Philine's response recalls the various stages with which Emilia achieves maturity: “You call this being calm, … suffering what one should not suffer, bearing what one should not have to bear. …” Most significant is Philine's quotation of the line “Pearls mean tears,” with which Emilia expresses intuitive fears about the future of the “community of the heart” she and Appiani have achieved. Several close-ups of Philine fondling a string of pearls visually underscore this motif. The Duchess attempts to bribe Philine with the pearls to leave Armin; hence pearls act as a direct vehicle for aristocratic efforts to uphold class division. The same pearls take on a different function at the end of the film, however, when Philine uses them to convince the Duchess of her sincere feelings for Armin, thus gaining a utopian perspective that is absent in Lessing's Emilia Galotti. Here the film merges allusions to Lessing with the political optimism of the early Schiller. Analogous to Friedrich Schiller's reliance on early Schiller drama, Komödianten thus blends “life” and canonized fiction to create a nostalgic pleasure in recognizing a history that never was. It thus again augments a mythified image of collective history in which spectators can mirror themselves and feel at least momentarily compensated for “real” life through the aesthetic or through a great collective past.

In addition, the film's exploitation of literary allusions reflects the “achieved” establishment or containment of the aesthetic as a quasi-autonomous sphere in modern societies, which compensates for the agonistic struggles and alienation of everyday life.¹⁸ This compensatory function is disguised, however, since the film (and Western culture in general) mythifies autonomous art as value. As the Other of the modern experience, it connotes the feminine and provides a site for decentering experiences. Yet as such, autonomous art has to be contained because a victory of this (feminine) principle in society would undermine the balance between real-life delimitations and imaginary dissolution on which modern societies rely. Philine comes to symbolize the establishment of a contained realm of autonomous art toward the end of the film when she begins to adopt the non-feminine attitudes of her surrogate mother, Neuber. After the Duchess is finally reconciled to the union of Armin and Philine, i.e., after the class obstacle has been surmounted, Philine declares, as Neuber had earlier, that she must choose her art over love. She thus becomes in effect Neuber's functional double. Like Neuber, Philine transcends both social class and the private sphere through art, emerging as both wife and coalition partner: Armin becomes administrative director; Philine, artistic director of the theater that realizes Neuber's dream. Reflecting the film's subtext of 1941, the domesticated woman undergoes a transition from private to public, from Philine to Neuber. Philine's transition is the condition for the film's imaginary reconciliation not only between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, the private and the public, but between the feminine principle contained in art and the masculine principle of rational delimitation—taken together a coalition that provides the basis for the organization of society. Lessing best characterizes Philine's narrative evolution when he chastizes Armin: “You think you have to condescend to Philine. You don't see that she stands beside you, ennobled by her art.” I will return to Philine's Bildungsroman-style transformation later.

DUCHESS AMALIA AS ARMORED WOMAN

The film's third “unfeminine” woman is Duchess Amalia of Weissenfels (Henny Porten), Armin's aunt and Neuber's Maecenas. She is the central force to insist on the domination of class over heart, speaking of marriage as an institution of Staatsraison rather than of love: “Persons of standing are not asked whether they like their marriage partner.” She demands that the artists performing at her court stay within their “boundaries” and resists Neuber's claim to be the equal of any aristocrat through her art. Before the Duchess appears, a large painting of her in Armin's palace announces her imposing presence. Her own chambers are surrounded by large portraits of Weissenfels ancestors which provide a formidable backdrop against which figures like Neuber and Philine fight for recognition. When, for example, Philine finally confronts the Duchess personally, she is positioned directly between two aristocratic portraits which again visually reproduce the notion of class barrier.

What distinguishes the Duchess most fully from other comparable female figures is her extremely masculine physical coding. In a sense, the Duchess as a political leader displays the most “unfeminine” behavior possible. She wears an ensemble clearly emulating the style of a military jacket (Armin is a lieutenant in her retinue), pinches snuff, and her demeanor is characterized by “decisive” male gestures, much like a stereotypic Prussian officer. The significance of military allusions within Nazi ideology can scarcely be overemphasized, yet it is equally obvious that the military is a male domain.¹⁹ Hence the film reveals the Duchess's extreme masculinity to be a facade, a body-armor erected to repress her “natural” female characteristics. Underneath the body-armor suggested in her “uniform” look, she, like Armin, is an “aristocrat of the heart.” Just as Armin's transformation from “playboy” to “aristocrat of the heart” needs no rational explanation within the film's value system, neither does the change in the Duchess. She merely “hears” truth when she meets Philine, whose words provoke the Duchess to utter a series of uncharacteristic Sentimental (empfindsame) evaluations: “In your words a pure heart beats. You speak the truth.”

The encounter between Philine and the Duchess toward the end of the film articulates the new leader status assumed by women. This scene unites and reconciles the three strong women through the presence of the Duchess and Philine and the absence of the (mythic) Caroline Neuber:

PHILINE:
[refering to Neuber] A great woman, who had the stuff to be a great man!
DUCHESS:
Stop! Neuber should remain a woman [Weibsbild] and prove what we women are capable of!

Ironically, it is in this scene, when the Duchess articulates the potential of women, that she first wears a strikingly low-cut dress herself, underscoring her own femininity and contrasting sharply with the military ensemble of her first appearance. Yet, the dress accords with her turn to Sentimentality, and thus complements the scene's verbal content. Philine, on the other hand, appears in a very “professional” ensemble with a black jacket and a lace jabot, not unlike men's clothing at the time and clearly in contrast to the décolleté of her earlier clothing. In another reversal of classical cinema's predilection for objectifying woman as framed icon, Philine briefly fondles a miniature portrait of Armin she finds while waiting in the Duchess's palace. Philine's transformed appearance prepares her narrative transformation; she informs Armin in this scene that she has chosen the stage over marriage to him. With her declaration, “I have already chosen the stage and must remain faithful to it,” she echoes Neuber's frequent comparison of the theater to the lover. Armin, injured by a “Turkish bullet,” appears in this scene, with his arm in a sling, as a castrated man forced to forfeit his earlier power over Philine. Through marriage, which Laura Mulvey has discussed as an important aspect of narrative closure that ensures the characters' social integration, both Philine and Armin find their societal niche, and Armin relinquishes his “narcissistic omnipotence.”²⁰ Yet unlike the classical narrative model, Philine does not retreat into the oblivion of married property, but emerges as dominant in the closing dialogue and frames, which position her in the center of the image from an authoritative low angle as she appropriates Neuber's motto “further! further!” Armin stands decidedly at the periphery of the frame, in soft focus, and Johannes is absent in the film's last scene.

In the final shots Philine in effect becomes Caroline Neuber, while Neuber herself achieves the status of myth; she has been disembodied and transformed into an icon. As Philine dedicates the theater to Neuber, her back faces the camera with an engraved relief of Neuber's head visible in the distance. Like the relief, Philine's figure is framed by a door. The frames surrounding both figures suggest not confinement, but the historical inscription of their achievements. The composition renders Philine, who appears quasi-transcendent in a scintillating white gown, a metonymic extension of the canonized Neuber, while permitting the spectator to share her reverent gaze. The shot thus accords to Philine the authoritative look heretofore denied her. The film thereby completes the transition in which the female spectator can vicariously participate. The scene's aura of religious veneration, augmented by organ music, intensifies as Philine proceeds to the interior of the theater, where she again acts as surrogate viewer for the spectator. Philine continues speaking to Neuber, who has become the theater in the sense that it, in the Duchess's words, is “pervaded by Neuberin's creative breath.” A long shot of the theater, with Philine glowing from a balcony that elevates her as if on a pedestal, represents Neuber's posthumous affirmation of her spiritual successor. The scene recalls Schiller's triumph at the Mannheim theater in Friedrich Schiller. In both scenes, theater serves as a receptacle, a “womb” that nurtures a German culture in which the spectator, here occupying the space of an absent public, can revel in his or her cultural identity. By this point in Komödianten's narrative, a leader/mass distinction in which either gender is capable of assuming the leadership role has overshadowed the gender distinction. Gender has not been replaced but displaced, a displacement made possible specifically by the immediate demands of war, and more generally by modernity's institutionalization of the aesthetic as a stand-in for lack. Here the film slips structurally between the traditionally separate spheres of the aesthetic and political, as Neuber is infused with both the power of the aesthetic and the political power of a leader. The fusion of these two positions into one figure gives her a status as objet a analogous to that of Schiller and other geniuses of Nazi cinema.

THE SUBTEXT OF FEMALE MOBILIZATION

How—given the role of woman under National Socialism—can one anchor the social and historical triumph of woman depicted in the woman-as-leader figure in Komödianten? I do not believe this figure signifies a fundamental rupture in Nazism's subordination of the feminine to the masculine, nor the personal influence of Pabst, but a limited deviation from the domestication of women propagated by Nazi policies. World War II is an important subtext to the film (although unfortunately much scholarship on Nazi film never considers anything but the subtext), especially in 1941 when the involvement of Britain and the U.S. in the war began to make ever heavier demands on Germany's military. Many historians have pointed out the contradictions of women's position in Nazi Germany.²¹ Early social policies aimed at removing women from the work force and promoting motherhood, which was rewarded by social benefits as well as by a hierarchy of medals bestowed upon prolific childbearing women. Nevertheless, the Nazis were never able to stop the trends toward small families (and a high illegal abortion rate) and the participation of women in the workplace. Even between 1933 and 1938 the number of working women rose from 4.24 to 5.2 million.²² As the war progressed economic demands opened up new employment opportunities and generated changing attitudes toward women, who were employed increasingly in heavy labor. In 1941 Hitler spoke of the “additional contribution” women can make: “millions of German women are in the country on the fields, and need to replace men in the most laborious work. Millions of German women and girls are working in factories, workshops and offices, and measure up to men there, too [stellen auch auch dort ihren Mann].”²³ These were to serve as a “model” to other women. By 1943, Goebbels went so far as to state his conviction that “… the German woman is resolutely determined to quickly fill out the space left by the man who has gone to the front not only half way, but all the way.”²⁴ Goebbels cautiously assures in his speech that Germany “need not rely on the bolshevist example,” thus implying the boundaries of the changed status of women. While it called upon women to sacrifice glamor and leisure to the war economy, Nazi Germany would never hide behind women's skirts—a metaphor Theweleit analyzes as embodying the fear of “dissipating, contagious lust,” linking the “red flood” with bolshevism (a fear which Komödianten's Russian episode reflects).²⁵

Komödianten's focus on strong women seems less incongruous in light of these developments; it reflects the anticipation that women will necessarily assume an ever larger public role due to the involvement of the male population in the war. Indeed, cinema audiences in the last years of the Third Reich were largely female. Considering the ideological fortification provided by the male genius films made in the same years, it hardly seems surprising that some should be aimed at the mobilization of women. Seen from this perspective, the appearance in Komödianten of women dressed in clothing suggestive of the military uniform, as well as the lack of imposing “soldierly” men, gains a new significance.²⁶ The visual codification of the “public” woman with her masculine features ensures that the “public” service of a female is seen as the exception in times of need—for example, during war. The film's mirror image of existing social relations, in which women usurp the various roles played by men, also undermines attempts at a nostalgic feminist reading of the film. Ignoring for a moment developments within the characters, all components of social organization in Komödianten are represented by women: the Duchess as upholder of class hierarchy, Neuber as embodiment of cultural progress, Philine as representative of private harmony. Because the forces of community, alienation, and class are all embodied by females, the issue of gender in the film recedes, as suggested earlier, in favor of other concerns.

The absence of male leaders in Komödianten allows women to become the models to which Hitler appealed. Neuber's death in destitution may serve as such a model, preparing women for an analogous death for a “great cause” in accordance with the self-effacing tradition of motherhood. Like the mother of Theweleit's “soldierly man,” she becomes an “example for me of the belief that there is nothing so hard that it cannot be endured!”²⁷ The film's implicit interpellation is analogous to the cover of the 1 April 1940 edition of the Nazi magazine Frauen Warte (Woman's Watchtower), which features a sketch of a peasant woman driving a plough against a background of factory smokestacks, above which hovers the superdimensional but transparent portrait of a soldier's head. The cover clearly depicts in iconic form the spiritual dominance of the absent male that both necessitates and fortifies the female labor under National Socialism. Komödianten synthesizes this ideological mobilization with elements of what Hitchcock termed the “novelette” with reference to his own Rebecca: an “old-fashioned” story from the “school of feminine literature.”²⁸ The Harlequin-romance style of both the Philine subplot and the Russian episode were presumably designed to appeal to a female audience, allowing the film to work on the level of fantasy as well as ideology.

II

GENDERIZING 18TH-CENTURY AESTHETICS: THE TRIAD NEUBER-LESSING-GOTTSCHED

I would like to return to the film text to show how in its appropriation of 18th-century cultural history, Komödianten again undermines a feminist reading. In assuming its aesthetic position the film relies on a second, historically seminal triad, Gottsched-Neuber-Lessing, which reinstates gender as a social-historical category. Komödianten reshuffles 18th-century cultural history, transforming the early Enlightenment's struggle for bourgeois aesthetic forms (ca. 1730s) into a “high” Enlightenment debate between rationality and the “heart” (ca. 1770s-1780s). Besides preempting the chronological development of this debate (displacing it from the second to the first half of the century), the film condenses the debate in the narrative struggle between Neuber and Gottsched. The historical Neuber was indeed instrumental in reforming the status of theater, which was crucial to the institution of a bourgeois vs. a courtly art form. But as Gottsched's contemporary and collaborator, she predated Sentimentality's stress on affective art. The film translates their historical coalition for the institutionalization of a genre into an ahistorical, personal conflict, in which Neuber represents the position that Schiller takes in Maisch's film: she defends the “heart,” which is infused with a Nazified notion of community. By allowing a woman to serve as its central defender of the heart, of the community in defiance of mechanistic rationalism, Komödianten valorizes the feminine as a principle that encompasses the affective, the intuitive, the space of dissolution in the “dark” realm of the aesthetic. This celebration of the feminine is mediated, though, by the film's integration of the third member of the triad. While Gottsched as a male represents an adversarial rationalism that Neuber as a female must surmount, in order to achieve her historical mission Neuber must depend on another male, embodied in her spiritual offspring Lessing. In its historical dimension then, Komödianten at once exalts the feminine and depicts its limitations. While powerful as a principle of aesthetic dissolution, representing the loss of boundaries essential to a community of the “heart,” the feminine as the beautiful is always subject to the sublime, which amounts to phallic mastery (even if both are valorized as essential components of art).

In its strategy of transforming a diachronic constellation into a synchronic, gender-based one, Komödianten resorts to several historical distortions; i.e., it surrenders chronology to ideology. First, the film lends a xenophobic dimension to the respective aesthetic positions (as it did to courtly art in the figure of the Duke), since the Gottsched/Neuber debate is also articulated in terms of a competition between French and German drama. The fact that the figures representing the “heart,” Neuber and the young Lessing (whose aim is to write “real German” dramas for Neuber's theater), simultaneously fight for the “German” over the “French” posits the “German” as the People replacing the universally human, just as Sentimentality posited the bourgeois, the “heart,” as universally human. The film's opposition of German/Neuber/Lessing (whose mother/son relationship also suggests “family”) to French/Gottsched (who appears childless, seemingly impotent) is all the more fanciful given Lessing's actual rejection of Gottsched's French (aristocratic) dramatic model in favor of an English (bourgeois) rather than a German model. Indeed, the fear of the foreign which the film ascribes to Lessing was a historical product of the 19th, not the 18th century.

Second, the age of the adversaries is likewise adjusted in accordance with their aesthetic position. Although Gottsched, born in 1700, was three years younger than Neuber, he appears in the film as a bald old man, considerably her senior. The age difference between Gottsched and Neuber stands metaphorically for the old being superseded by the new, in this case early Enlightenment, the logocentric, being superseded by Sentimentality (albeit about 30 years too early and using somewhat incorrect figures). Not only does the film render Gottsched old and outdated with his “scissors and paste” adaptation of a foreign drama, Sterbender Cato (1730), but it depicts his attitude toward the public as one of arrogance toward “dull, stolid masses,” whereas historically his condemnation of the masses' lack of taste was based on a (for its time) progressive faith in the ability of education to improve that taste. When Gottsched remarks in the film that “Theater is not the mirror of life. Life is filthy, only art is pure,” he is at odds with the historical Gottsched's vision of art as a medium that could directly influence “life” for the better. Art as an autonomous sphere in itself would have had no legitimation for Gottsched; the words this film puts in his mouth would better suit a Novalis or a Schlegel.

Neuber's defense of the People's intuitive appreciation of art intermingles the discourse of late 18th-century aestheticians with Nazi Volk rhetoric, insinuating, like Friedrich Schiller, that aesthetic instinct cannot be taught rationally.²⁹ Again recalling Maisch's film, Neuber describes her art as an articulation of the People: “they sit down there and wait for you to illuminate their dark feeling, to sharpen their dull thoughts, to let their silent mouth speak the words it couldn't form until then. Through us, through the stage the Volk speaks to itself, to the world. I want the mute Germany to begin to speak.” The idea that “speaking” is not only achieved discursively, but also through the “heart,” which is always already present outside of discourse as “dark feeling,” recalls the valorization of cognitio intuitiva by figures like Baumgarten and Lessing. Similarly, Neuber recalls thinkers like J. M. von Loen in her defense of the elision of class distinctions through art: “No one can express nobility who is not noble himself or portray the sublime if he has not the sublime within him. … The great artist is himself a high aristocrat.”³⁰ From a historical perspective, these ideas should go hand in hand with the institutionalization of art as a medium for “practicing” the disposition of sympathy and virtue, rather than as a medium that could be dispensed with once society had received its (rational) message. This notion of art exercising a general disposition was an important component in the development from early Enlightenment to Sentimentality.³¹

If Neuber predates Sentimentality, in Lessing at least the film finds a historical representative of the development—though not this early in his career, when he was roughly four or five years of age. This collapsing of decades underlies the film's most amusing anachronism; at its conclusion after Neuber's death, Lessing appears with a new drama written for her, Emilia Galotti. Since Neuber stopped performing in 1750 and died in 1760 (which is also confused, since the film seems to erase this 10-year gap and to locate her death shortly after the St. Petersburg appearance, which occurred in 1740), it gives pause that a drama published in 1772 makes its way onto her stage. If it is off-balance chronologically, Emilia Galotti fits in ideologically, because it represents the “high” Enlightenment position with which the film as a whole aligns itself, as exemplified by the Philine narrative. Following a classic/romantic conception of art transcending life, Lessing bases his drama on Philine's “tragic destiny” and allows her remark “Pearls mean tears,” which he overhears, to find its way into his manuscript—thus the film transforms its quotation of Lessing's famous line instead into the source of the phrase. Woman's value seems thus dependent on her disembodiment; she inspires but hardly creates autonomous art:

ARMIN:
You speak as though you loved her!
LESSING:
No—Yes! I love a shadow of her, more glowing than the live person. An image [Abbild] more blooming than the source [Bild]. … If I am successful, her destiny will become eternal destiny!

The portrayal of Sterbender Cato (1730) and Emilia Galotti (1772) as nearly contemporary dramas transfers a historical development that took some 40 years onto a synchronic level, rendering the rationality/“heart” debate more easily graspable. It is fun and comforting for the spectator to see a series of important events and people all wrapped up in a neat narrative package. This blending of biography and fiction lends the illusion of having understood what an epoch was all about, not to mention knowing who the “real” Emilia Galotti was. The subsumption of a great cultural heritage in a “meaningful” narrative explains and enhances the end result of that development: the mystification of art and genius.

Although Lessing's role within the narrative is peripheral (as a sidekick to Armin, a sympathetic observer of events, a fan of Neuber), his presence gains immensely in ideological significance within the film's hierarchical ordering of achievement. His presence on the sidelines as the “real” genius reminds us of the boundaries of the feminine. As forcefully as Komödianten demonstrates Lessing's dependency on Neuber's spiritual nurturance, it insists that Neuber is dependent on Lessing as well, although not necessarily on him personally. As the male writer, Lessing provides the “sperm”—the written word of creative genius that fertilizes Neuber's merely reproductive gift—just as the film's opening text promises. Komödianten implies that without this mating with the male, creative genius, Neuber's efforts would have been futile and the German stage would still be a hollow shell. As an actress, Neuber represents Sentimentality's valorization of the aesthetic, of the expression of feeling, both of which require traditional “feminine” traits of emotion and sensitivity. The film thus corroborates Alfred Rosenberg's remark that woman is “lyrical” by contrast to man who is “inventive, forming [gestaltend, architektonisch] and synthetic [zusammenfassend, synthetisch].”³² Neuber's historical contribution remains within the “feminine” sphere of the intuitive and affective: “the theater in bourgeois society was one of the few spaces which allowed women a prime space in the arts, precisely because acting was seen as imitative and reproductive, rather than original and productive.”³³ Hence, only Lessing is privileged by the kind of stylized framing commonly employed in the “genius” films to visualize the inspirational act, as when he appears at a desk discussing his attempts to capture Philine in fiction. The scene is foregrounded by the diagonal line of the room's wall, and light streams through the window behind him as if to illuminate his creative impetus.

Komödianten thus surreptitiously restores the belief that it is indeed men who “make history”—even within art—and that while females may be indispensable, they remain but nurturers. For all its role reversals, the film's tribute to a woman's historical role thus exemplifies Hitler's comment, “when I acknowledge Treitschke's statement that men make history, I'm not forgetting that it's women who raise our boys to be men.”³⁴ The limitation of Neuber's historical role is already implicit in the film's primary thematization of the institutionalization of art, rather than a stylistic or political content. This focus is contained in the title Komödianten, which refers to 17th- and 18th-century traveling artists' troupes, the historical successors of the comedia dell'arte, who were excluded from respectable society. This non-status gains leitmotif character in the film, with Lessing praising Gottsched for even mentioning theater in the university, the Duchess insisting that actresses can only serve for personal “plaisir,” or Neuber warning Philine that actresses are “more disdained than bums and thieves.” Neuber's historical feat is not one of productive genius, but a liberation of the institution of theater from earlier, courtly dramatic forms, a founding of Heimat. Hence the film constantly juxtaposes terms (often French) associated with the older institution of theater (Komödiant or Actrice/Acteur) with terms valorizing the genre, such as “artist” (Künstler) and “poet” (Dichter).

The celebration of historical models, male or female, was part of Nazism's consistent strategy of invoking history while suppressing any critical dialogue with it. The narrativization of Germany's historical heritage made it easier to grasp, allowing for the conscious or unconscious internalization of a normative set of values. Even where a Nazi film permits gender boundaries to gain an ambiguous dimension as does Komödianten, it never ceases to reinforce submission to the authoritative individual; it promotes the leader as the most genuine, most successful fill-in for the collective void. While conceding that—under certain conditions—women may assume a public role, the film affirms at once the Führer principle and the predominance of male creativity. Thus, Komödianten provides another example of Nazism's reorganization of history as narrative—a compensatory reorganization addressing the needs of the present.

Notes

1. Anke Gleber, “Das Fräulein von Teilheim: Die ideologische Funktion der Frau in der nationalsozialistischen Lessing-Adaption,” German Quarterly 59.4 (Fall 1986): 547-568; Verena Leuken, “Zur Erzählstruktur des nationalsozialistischen Films,” MuK 13 (Veröffentlichung des Forschungsschwerpunkts Massenmedien und Kommunikation an der Universität Siegen, 1981); Karsten Witte, “Visual Pleasure Inhibited: Aspects of the German Revue Film,” New German Critique 24-25 (Fall/Winter 1981-2): 238-263, especially 253-59.

2. Leander often portrayed professional women, usually singers who forfeit their career for love and/or domesticity; cf. Zu neuen Ufern (1937), Heimat (1938), and especially Die grosse Liebe (1940). See also the many articles on women in Nazi film in Frauen und Film, issues e.g. 14 (December 1977), 38 (May 1985), 44/45 (October 1988).

3. Quoted in Wulf Wülfing, “Die heilige Luise von Preussen. Zur Mythisierung einer Figur der Geschichte in der deutschen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Bewegung und Stillstand in Metaphern und Mythen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984) 272.

4. Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit. Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).

5. In his sociological study of Nazi film, Gerd Albrecht discusses the relative infrequency with which the marital status of the male protagonist is even disclosed in what he calls “P-films” (films with a political function), while the marital status of females is always a central issue, reflecting woman's confinement to the private sphere. Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1969) 147-154.

6. Cf. the juxtaposition of the feminized vs. the “natural” male in The Scarlet Pimpernel, as well as in the Zorro or Superman films.

7. The film's (and Johannes's) acceptance of Neuber's infidelity again breaks with the norms of the Nazi film narrative, which normally punishes the adulterous female at the least with guilt (cf. Harlan's Das unsterbliche Herz [1939], in which Peter Henlein's young wife feels guilty for her attraction to a younger man), but more typically with intense suffering or death (cf. Gründgens's Der Schritt vom Wege [1939], based on Fontane's Effi Briest; Willi Forst's Mazurka [1935], in which a woman falsely accused of infidelity loses her husband and daughter; or Käutner's Romanze in Moll [1942]). This is not to say that female infidelity is not occasionally portrayed with considerable sympathy, but only that the erotic titillation achieved by the theme is contained by the ultimate price paid by the female protagonist. Cf. also Goebbel's justification for having changed the ending of the original script of Opfergang (1944) in such a way as to spare the life of the adulterous husband: “The adulterous wife must die and not the husband,” quoted in Francis Courtade and Pierre Cadars, Geschichte des Films im dritten Reich, trans. Florian Hopf (Munich/Vienna: Carl Hanser, 1975).

8. In an interesting recent reading of the film, Anke Gleber points out affinities between the Duke's remark and “ideological assumptions behind Nazi film.” See “Masochism and Wartime Melodrama: Komödianten (1941),” The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, ed. Eric Rentschler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1990) 181. While the Duke's remarks indeed display a striking congruence with the Nazi project, it is important to note that the subject position created by the film rejects his cynicism in favor of Neuber's “Völkisch” stance.

9. I am using the term social fantasy as it has been introduced by Slavoj Zizek, as fantasy “invented” by a society to mask the impossibility of its posited utopian ideal: “At the stake of social-ideological fantasy is to construct a vision of society which does exist, a society which is not split by an antagonistic division, a society in which the relation between its parts is organic, complementary.” The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989) 126. For Nazism the supreme social fantasy is the “Jew,” who provides a positive embodiment of social negativity, fostering the illusion that eradication of the “Jew” will result in social harmony.

10. Cf. the visual relief to the massive, overpowering studio sets of the Russian sequence provided by Germany's “fresh air” in the subsequent sequence when the troupe returns home and is forced to perform outside. I am aware of the apparent contradiction between my reading of monumentalism in the Russian set as negative and Nazism's well-known endorsement of monumentalism in art and architecture. I know of no Nazi film, however, in which a grandiose, massive scale in an interior, private setting is associated with “positive” figures. Rather, grand-scale interiors tend to characterize the lifestyle of the self-aggrandizing and materialistic (the huge chest opened in Komödianten's Russian sequence to reveal lavish costumes recalls the chest in which Süss Oppenheimer hides his wealth in Veit Harlan's 1940 film Jew Süss. In both cases the chests suggest excess and materialistic values). The grandiosity of Nazi art by contrast celebrates either the alleged perfection of the German race, or an embodiment of the Nazi state (which is by definition seen as a pure expression of the Volk), but remains confined to an exterior, public sphere. The collision of interiority and monumentality in Nazi cinema tends to disrupt the nurturance of the private sphere, ensured by a feminine presence.

11. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Steven Conway, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987). This is not to deny that Neuber's near dissolution is a source of pleasure to the (presumably female) spectator of 1941. On one level, then, the termination of the relationship elicits a sense of disappointment by denying the female spectator the Duke as an object of desire.

12. In the very first scene of the film Neuber appears on stage as Medea, lamenting the impending death of her daughter, who leans on her shoulder for support much as Philine will later in the film. Indeed, the lines Neuber recites prefigure her role as mother as well as the artist's “path of suffering” so central to the genius genre: “I gave many children life; death took many children from me. Sorrow heaps upon sorrow; a mountain of pain suffocates my heart.”

13. Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” Alice Doesn't (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) 103-157, especially 123. In remarking on precisely the tension between sympathy for and enjoyment of Philine's suffering, Anka Gleber repeatedly posits a disconcertingly clear-cut division between male and female spectators. Cf., for example, “Clearly, Philine's pain evokes identification in the female spectator. Simultaneously, the male spectator can readily align himself with the camera's explorations of Philine's face and figure” (177). While I agree with the conflicting reactions Gleber addresses, her ascription of reactions to individual genders oversimplifies the complexity of spectator response acknowledged in feminist scholarship today.

14. Cf. Miriam Hansen's discussion of the importance of the male hero initiating the gaze in classical cinema, and of how being looked at (vs. looking) serves as an indicator of a female's virtue; Miriam Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” Cinema Journal 25.4 (Summer 1986): 11-12.

15. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 19.

16. Linda Schulte-Sasse, “The Jew as Other under National Socialism: Veit Harlan's Jud Süss (1940),” German Quarterly 61.1 (Winter 1968): 22-49.

17. As in 18th-century dramas, particularly Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, Komödianten thematizes the issue of trust, especially when Armin's uncle persuades Philine that Armin is engaged to a woman of his own class. Philine possesses the absolute security of feeling characteristic of such figures as Luise Miller, thus initially refusing to believe Armin capable of leaving her. Yet like Ferdinand, whose aristocratic socialization permits him to more readily believe the falsified letter portraying Luise as promiscuous, Armin readily falls for the intrigue and castigates Philine as fickle. Both male figures have grown accustomed to hypocrisy and promiscuity through their aristocratic context.

18. See Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Literarische Wertung: Zum unausweichlichen historischen Verfall einer literaturkritischen Praxis,” Lili 18.71 (1988): 13-47.

19. See Theweleit's Male Fantasies, or Karl Prumm, Die Literatur des soldatischen Nationalismus der zwanziger Jahre (1918-1933) (Kronberg/Ts: Scriptor, 1974).

20. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts inspired by Duel in the Sun,” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989) 33-34.

21. See, for example, Renate Wiggershaus, Frauen unterm Nationalsozialismus (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1984); Annette Kuhn and Valentine Rothe, Frauen im deutschen Faschismus (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1983) 2 vols; Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, The Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's, 1987); David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution. Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933-39 (New York: Norton, 1980) esp. “The Third Reich and Women” 178-192.

22. Schoenbaum 185.

23. Quoted from a speech given by Hitler on 4 May 1941 to the Reichstag; reprinted in Kuhn and Rothe 117.

24. From Goebbel's speech on 18 February 1943 at a NSDAP rally in the Berlin Sport Palace; quoted in Wiggershaus 27.

25. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) 27-35.

26. Karen Ellwanger and Eva-Maria Warth's excellent reading of the film The Woman of my Dreams (Die Frau meiner Träume, 1943) regards the protagonist's manipulation of her own image through clothing as a sign of emancipation, warning against the “ahistorical” tendency of some feminist scholarship to regard all Nazi films under a one-dimensional perspective of the image of woman propagated in the thirties, thus ignoring “changed social reality of the forties with its modified role expectations for women.” “Die Frau meiner Träume. Weiblichkeit und Maskerade: eine Untersuchung zu Form und Funktion von Kleidung als Zeichensystem im Film,” Frauen und Film 38 (May 1985): 67.

27. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, Mein Leben (Bilderbach a.d. Riss, 1957) 58ff; quoted in Theweleit, vol. 1, 102.

28. See Tanja Modleski's discussion of how Hitchcock dismisses Rebecca based on its genre tradition in The Women Who Knew Too Much. Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988) 43-55.

29. In a transparent reference to National Socialist biologism, Schiller insists in an argument with the Duke of Württemburg that genius can only be “born,” never “trained.” Cf. Linda Schulte-Sasse, “National Socialism's Aestheticization of Genius. The Case of Herbert Maisch's Friedrich Schiller—Triumph eines Genies,” forthcoming in Germanic Review's special film edition, 1990.

30. Cf. von Loen's Aristocracy: “[Virtue] alone is of noble birth, because it stems from heaven. … This nobility is possessed by all pious and wise people” (Ulm 1752); quoted in Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Literarische Struktur und historisch-sozialer Kontext: Zum Beispiel Lessings “Emilia Galotti” (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1975) 23.

31. See Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ed., Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel: Lessing, Nicolai, Mendelssohn (Munich: Winkler, 1972) especially 52-57, 76-85, and 207-215.

32. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythos des 20, Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1930) 508. Nazi cinema's portrayals of such “inventive” spirits focus on male biographies, as in Andreas Schlüter (architecture), Diesel (technology), Paracelsus, Robert Koch, or Steinhoff's Der Volksfeind (medicine).

33. Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other,” After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 51.

34. From Hitler's speech opening the exhibit “Die Frau” on 18 March 1933; quoted in Wiggershaus 15.