Cleavage Sex in The Total Cinema of The Third Reich

Cleavage: Sex in the Total Cinema
of the Third Reich
John E. Davidson
Long-standing wisdom holds that the National Socialists were ingenious at

enlisting support for their cause by using peoples libidinal desires. Wilhelm
Reich criticized the political Left for having failed to understand the sexual
element successfully at work in the Nazi youth organizations and beyond.1
Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse both used variations on the Freudian
analysis of sexuality to unpack the fascist personality.2 But concern with sex
was not just limited to subconscious processes during the Third Reich. Tor-
sten Reters, building on the work of Hans Dieter Schfer and others, presents
a thorough study of the official discourses surrounding heterosexual relations
under the Nazis, demonstrating the multifaceted push toward sexual activity
in public policy.3 Such empirical research and analyses of semantics show
All images are reproduced with the kind permission of Transit-Film GmbH and the Murnau
Foundation.
1. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe, 3rd ed. (New
York: Orgone Institute, 1946).
2. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1975);
Herbert Marcuse, State and Individual under National Socialism, in Technology, War, and Fas-
cism, vol. 1 of Collected Papers, ed. Herbert Marcuse and Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge,
1998), 6788.
3. Torsten Reters, Liebe, Ehe und Partnerwahl zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus: Eine sozio-
logische Semantikanalyse (Dortmund: Projekt, 1997); Hans Dieter Schfer, Das gespaltene Bewut-
sein: ber deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit, 19331945 (Munich: Hanser, 1981). The stress
New German Critique 98, Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 2006
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2006-006 2006 by New German Critique, Inc.
101
102 Sex in the Total Cinema of the Third Reich
that leading officials, including Hitler and Goebbels, subsequently promoted

heterosexual promiscuity in hopes that it would produce human reserves for
the army of the Volk in years to come. This encouragement extended to women
as well as men, despite the fact that it conflicted with rhetoric supporting
home and hearth and, later in the war, the warning to women against demor-
alizing the men at the front through infidelity.
It comes as no surprise that rhetoric, policy, and practice in the Third
Reich evince enormous contradictions, even in an area as sensitive as sexual
activity, since situational pragmatism was as much the Nazis calling card as
ideological rigidity. That being the case, the Volk surely did not draw all or
even the bulk of its behavioral models from official proclamations. The cul-
tural products of the day provided an equally important means of circulating
normative information about sexuality and sexual practice. Though we need to
be wary about imagining German audiences as passive receptors of encoded
messages, careful scrutiny of material such as popular movies can give us a
good deal of insight into the prevailing atmosphere about sexuality. Indeed,
it is precisely because of the reciprocal dynamic between the personal invest-
ments of viewers and films, on the one hand, and the institution of film and
its perception of the publics wants and needs, on the other, that an investiga-
tion of the implications about sex in the cinema may reveal so much. The
need to study individual films in the context of these concerns has been reit-
erated often of late, and close textual analysis remains key, for while just as
many contradictions arise within individual feature films as in the space
between public policy and practice, such tensions are simultaneously present
in the movies. Thus they are both potentially more effective for the contem-
porary viewer and more conspicuous for the cultural critic today. The rela-
tive absence of overt ideological directives within many of these narratives
opens them to an analysis informed by cinema studies and its understanding
of the function of filmic representations in societies (not just totalitarian
here is on heterosexuality, as same-sex practitioners were subjected to increasing censure, impris-

onment, and even death after 1934 (see Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against
Homosexuals [New York: Holt, 1986]). Much has been written and speculated about the role of
homosocial and homoerotic impulses of the Movement dating back to roots in the nineteenth
century and beyond (see, e.g., George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Moral-
ity and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988]). Though
the undercurrent of sexual tension between men remained after the Nazis came to power, cer-
tainly the official policies toward same-sex relations changed after the Rhm purge in 1934. At that
point Hitler adopted an openly antigay stance to justify the murders within the ranks, quite cor-
rectly realizing that the homophobic streak among mainstream Germans was a vein that could be
tapped for support.
John E. Davidson 103
ones), an analysis that will generate insights both cleaved from and cleaving
to the specific situation of the Third Reich.
The title of my essay thus has a meaning that goes beyond the reference
to womens bodies. The analysis of cleavage eschews an exclusive focus on
Nazi ideology in considering the cinema of the Third Reich in order to pro-
duce knowledge that ultimately, albeit by an indirect path, indicates that the
everyday workings of the Nazi state and the peoples participation (active and
passive) in its barbaric programs may parallel other cultural situations as well.
Much of the best work on National Socialist cinema begins explicitly or implic-
itly with a similar realization, often taking gender roles and identifications
specifically into account.4 The treatment of sexual activity itself in mainstream
cinema provides a further field of discovery, a highly fraught and contradic-
tory arena in which aesthetic responses are evoked that are not bounded by
the drive of (ideological) narrative. I attend to the sexual cleavage in Nazi-
era films not to salvage oppositional impulses from them (for there were
precious few of those) but rather to understand better the Nazis success at
allowing a wide range of pleasures to become participating elements within
the acceptable and accepting body of the Volk.
Having averred that cleavage is not simply a reference to breasts here, I
find that the representation and staging of womens bodies nonetheless supply
useful points of departure for this topic. Indeed, as long as one avoids equating
sexuality with the womans sphere (as seemed to be the case in many National
Socialist representations), it is essential to recognize how womens bodies serve
as both ideological and visual anchors in Nazi cinema. One of the periods
most infamous works, Veit Harlans Jud S (1940), affords a clear example
of how this works. The film details the rise of S Oppenheimer to the posi-
tion of Hofjude in eighteenth-century Stuttgart and the ensuing civil con-
flict after he removes the citys ban against Jews. In the logic of this odious
anti-Semitic work, the entrance of the Jew into the body politic is the equiva-
lent of a cancerous invasion that will spread until excised, a metaphor often
used by Hitler and his cohort. The malignancy is ultimately removed at the
4. Stephen Lowry, Pathos und Politik: Ideologie in Spielfilmen des Nationalsozialismus

(Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1991); Karsten Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag: Filmkomdie im Dritten
Reich (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1995); Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its
Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the
Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996);
Lutz Koepnick, En-gendering Mass Culture: The Case of Zarah Leander, in Gender and Ger-
manness: Cultural Productions of Nation, ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Provi-
dence, RI: Berghahn, 1997), 16175; Sabine Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2001).
end; however, the legal justification for the resolution of Jud S is based not
on the damage done to the public directly but on the violation of a woman,
Dorothea, played by Kristina Sderbaum. Ultimately this legal maneuver
brings us back to the people, because the villain is condemned not for harm-
ing Dorothea but for breaking the ancient laws prohibiting miscegenation,
a verdict insisting on the sanctity of the womans body as a vessel of the Volk.
But, as Linda Schulte-Sasse reminds us, the sacred nature of the woman-as-
Volk conflation is not consistent, for in playing off of eighteenth-century bour-
geois dramas such as Gotthold Lessings Emilia Galotti and Friedrich Schil-
lers Kabale und Liebe, Harlan maintains the tension between the virtuous
bourgeois heroine (Dorothea) and the scheming aristocratic seductress (the
Duchess).5 In juxtaposing these characters, the narrative thus presents at best
an ambiguous figure of womanhood.
For the present study, however, the ambiguity of a different part of Har-
lans film must also be noted. One early incident in a crowd scene enacts
another form of gendered violence against an unknown woman: the (acciden-
tal) baring of her breast as the throng jostles to get a glimpse of their newly
installed Duke. The Dukes hearty laughter at the sight of this womans body
and discomfort gives viewers the first signal that all is not right in the state of
Wrttemberg, even as the film and the audience clearly share in that forbidden
view and take part in its implicit violence. Such women, who appear in the
margins of stories, add a further dimension that requires scrutiny.
In the first part of what follows, I sketch out a framework of womens
roles and presentations in Nazi cinema based largely on works featuring
two of the periods biggest stars: Sderbaum and Zarah Leander. Any easy
assumptions about women, sex, and the cinema of the Third Reich run into
immediate difficulties when faced with the various incarnations of these
larger-than-life idols. Critical readings of their films have tended to concen-
trate on the story and on the encoding of gender and sexuality within the plot
involving the main figure; the following analysis shows that even at these
levels their characters elude preconceived ideological categories about sexu-
ality. Furthermore, since films effect is not limited to the roles embodied by
representative stars, I place my examination of these stars images in the
context of those who have, like that woman in the crowded streets of Harlans
imaginary Stuttgart, been pushed to the margins and yet kept visible.
To facilitate this contextualization, part 3 detours through the theory of
sex and representation forwarded by Arthur Maria Rabenalt, a onetime Nazi
5. Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich.

film director who in his later years devoted himself to researching sexuality in
the history of representation. His five-volume Mimus Eroticus explores the
relation of the theater and theatricality to the sexual substrata of society from
the Greeks down to the present.6 Rabenalt conceives of margins of representa-
tions that, unlike those in the incidental example from Jud S, most often
hold an affirmation of sexuality, one that film in particular can incorporate into
a total cultural expression. Key to his understanding of the totality of represen-
tation in the twentieth century is its resistance to the increased dominance of
dramatic narrative attending the bourgeois dramas of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, a dominance that left much of the aesthetic embodiment of
sexuality to recede into obscurity and be replaced by sadistic sexual moments
like that in Jud S. Rabenalt implies that the technology of film can overcome
the false division that hampered especially nineteenth-century theatrical rep-
resentation by encompassing both the narrative element and the marginal
excess of sexuality that enables a liberating cultural form to arise.
The precepts behind the vision of film developed by this major player
in the Nazi entertainment industry will then be considered in light of two
films that deploy a fairly clear break between the dramatic narrative about
sexuality and its scenic treatment, even as the formal construction of that
separation rejoins these elements. Close readings of Rabenalts Liebespre-
miere (1938) and Georg Jacobys Die Frau meiner Trume (1944) expose a
cleavage that seeks to overcome the divisions within representations that
marked the theater of the bourgeois age. In addition to a narrative argu-
ment about proper gender roles, these films encompass a further, nonnarra-
tive level that becomes the aesthetic repository of sexual excess as a styl-
ization of nature, a level that transcends the narrative, semantic, ideological
realm. Reuniting these elements through the medium of film turns such mov-
ies into total cultural products (in Rabenalts parlance) that have the power
to dissolve the gap between the public and the private. In the semiprivate
public space created, I argue, material and allegorical manifestations of sexu-
ality and work appear simultaneously, both showing and hiding what is usu-
ally pushed to this societys margins. With this understanding of totality in
mind, I return in the final pages to the megastars with whom I began, finding
that what makes them such important figures is that both the narrative and
the scenic levels of sexuality have been condensed into and onto their bod-
ies through the techniques of film. This cleavage, more than overt ideological
6. Arthur Maria Rabenalt, Mimus Eroticus, 5 vols. (Hamburg: Verlag fr Kulturforschung,

1965). Hereafter cited as ME.
encoding or viewer identification per se, accounts for these womens extraor-
dinary effect.
Prevailing Nazi rhetoric maintained a strictly traditional view of womens

roles: the famous triad virgin-mother-whore was as often in evidence here as in
any Western discursive context, and it was certainly noticeable in the cinema.
The virginal womans body certainly seems ubiquitous and often functions as
an allegorical figure of the Volk, which must remain pure or perish, as seen in
Harlans Jud S. Sderbaum is perhaps the most notorious embodiment
of this idea on screen, and her repeated trips to a watery grave earned her
the nickname Reichswasserleiche (the official corpse of the Third Reichs
waters). The very existence of this popular, highly ironic label clearly indicates
that the audience was not passively receiving messages about gender and sexu-
ality. Motherhood was officially revered and even financially rewarded under
the Nazis, and this too finds its reflection on celluloid, although not with the
frequency one might expect. As for sex workers themselves, Klaus Theweleits
now-classic contention that prostitutes and independent women are associated
with enemies (especially communists) holds true in Nazi films.7 Generally, fast
women appear at best as egocentric temptresses who can lead a hero astray,
as in Rabenalts Achtung! Feind hrt mit! (1940) and Reitet fr Deutschland
(1941), and at worst as active agents of crime, corruption, and even enemy ele-
ments, as seen in films as different as Hans Steinhoffs Hitlerjunge Quex (1933),
Karl Ritters Urlaub auf Ehrenwort (1937), and Erich Engelss Die goldene
Spinne (1943). However, a closer look at the gestures to active sexuality in Nazi
films, starting with Sderbaums roles, reveals much that does not jibe easily
with this dominant scheme.
As is the case with most stars in studio systems, Sderbaums relatively
consistent screen persona is assumed in some ways to be a direct extension of
the real person behind the roles.8 Hers is that of an outgoing young woman
with a powerfully budding sexuality, whose exuberance and inner desires
make her susceptible to intriguing figures and, hence, improper choices. This
aura develops already with early films such as Harlans Verwehte Spuren
(1938), in which Sderbaums character is initially intoxicated with the cor-
rupt and degenerate atmosphere that brings the plague to Paris at the time of
the great exhibitions. To call again on the example of Jud S, Dorotheas
fascination with Oppenheimers cosmopolitanism as she brings him into
7. Klaus Theweleit, Mnnerphantasien (Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern, 1977).

8. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: BFI/Macmillan, 1987).
Stuttgart blinds her to his Jewishness, which although disguised remains per-
fectly visible to her fianc, Faber. Another example is one of the eras most pop-
ular films, Harlans Die goldene Stadt (1942), which tells of a young womans
attempt to escape the confinement of her Bohemian farm. Sderbaums fig-
ure again shows dangerous characteristics early on: while driving a carriage,
she whips her horses into a frenzy to impress the engineer who has come from
Prague to convince her father to drain his swamp in order to modernize for
agriculture. The editing cuts from shots of Anna and the engineer together in
the carriage to close-ups of the churning horses to close-ups of her face, which
displays a maniacal pleasure at this moment of barely displaced sexuality
unveiled. Of course, no longer content with the simple farmer who has been
picked out for herand dismayed by the open brutality that her father subjects
her toAnna heads to the seductive golden city, only to find her dream man
to be unavailable. Her cousin, Tony, then seduces her, and she lives with her
shopkeeping relatives for some time. But after becoming pregnant and finding
herself severely neglected by Tony and abused by his mother, she returns to the
countryside. Her father rejects both her and the unborn child, whereupon she
follows her mothers path to suicide in the moor.
While the inner weakness for the foreign that accompanies Sderbaums
character is replaced by a more proper, Germanic attachment in a film such
as Harlans Opfergang (1944), her demise is nonetheless always linked to her
nearly unbridled desire and palpable, active sexuality. Clearly this link between
Sderbaums barely concealed physicality, screen presence, and visual sexual
innuendo has as much to do with the popularity of these films and this star as
the disciplinary strains of their misogynist narratives. Stephen Lowry has
explored this in a fine reading (informed by Fredric Jamesons notions of
reification and utopia in cinema) that shows how Die goldene Stadt initially
addresses real concerns of the women in the audience (social restrictions and
physical abuse) only to offer up the cause of those problems (submission to
patriarchy) as their solution.9 As important as this insight is to understanding
the social moments of utopian promise that the film ultimately denies, a more
thorough account needs to be made of its libidinal appeal. The utopian impulse
tapped by evoking the problems faced by real women under patriarchy at the
films outset certainly will pull many viewers into a sympathetic position, but
so does Harlans ability to make Sderbaum stand in for sexuality itself. Anna
9. Lowry, Pathos und Politik; Fredric Jameson, Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,
Social Text 1, no. 1 (1979): 13048; see also Johannes von Moltke, No Place like Home: Locations
of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 6269.
is a tragic figure, but the film seems more bent on condemning the fathers
connection to the land and tradition (usually so positively valued in Nazi dis-
course), as much as or more than her poor choices, for it causes him to reject his
daughter and her child and to resist the modernizing forces that would serve the
common good (draining the swamp to make wheat fields). The ideological sign-
posts of sacrifice and loss reappear at the end as Annas death makes him realize
that he has erred: accompanied by an unbearably melodramatic score, the films
final shot shows the grave marker for Anna and her mother standing not in the
swamp but amid golden waving grain. Yet the terminus of loss in melodrama is
notoriously ambiguous, as many have pointed out, and the viewer could just as
easily see this finale as a memorial to her independent, sexualized impulses
rather than as a sign of the necessary removal of deviant female sexuality.
The differences between Annas active and seemingly justified dissat-
isfaction in Die goldene Stadt and Dorotheas passive and self-destructive
virtue in Jud S, as well the difficulties (albeit not insurmountable) in rec-
onciling the presentation of sexuality in the former with the stereotypical gen-
der ideology of National Socialism, indicate the pitfalls of assuming an easy
correspondence between public discourses on sexuality and cultural represen-
tations in the Third Reich. This is clearly the lesson to be learned from Reterss
study on love and marriage under the Nazis.10 Similarly, Antje Anscheids
excellent close reading of Sderbaums presence in Harlans Opfergang under-
scores that the Swedes screen persona hardly fits into prefigured categories.11
A brief glance at another top star at Ufa leads to a similar conclusion: the ideo-
logical reading of narrative structures, codes, and dialogue cannot account for
all of the impact of and response to their films.
10. Reters, Liebe, Ehe und Partnerwahl.

11. Antje Anscheid, The Heroine of Fascist Virtue? Kristina Sderbaum in Veit Harlans The
Great Sacrifice, in German Popular Cinema, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2003), 10828. Although this is not the time to explore it further, it
is worth remembering here that many of the most influential female stars in Nazi film were not
German but rather came from lands and populations that both were and were not considered Ger-
manic. This complicates understandings of the role of culture under the Nazis that work from the
level of ideology down (on this point see, among others, Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, and
Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich). Another aspect tangentially related to my topic that
has not received thorough critical examination is the fact that some of these stars appear almost
exclusively in films directed by their husbands or partners. It is difficult to observe the often sadis-
tic visual treatment of Sderbaums body in Harlans films, for example, or the relentless propulsion
of Marika Rkks dances under Jacobys direction without wondering what personal sexual dynam-
ics are also at work in the construction of these works. For some insight into the former relationship
see Frank Noacks biography, Veit Harlan: Des Teufels Regisseur (Munich: Belleville, 2000); and
Alison Guenther-Pals discussion of Harlans postWorld War II films, Sexual Reorientations:
Homosexuality versus the Postwar German Man in Veit Harlans Different from You and Me
(Paragraph 175) (1957), in Halle and McCarthy, German Popular Cinema, 14870.
Unlike Sderbaum, who stars exclusively in melodramas, Zarah Lean-

ders films have an element of the revues joy in song and staging in them,
although their happy resolutions often have a hint of melancholic loss about
them as well. The famous examples of Detlef Siercks La Habanera and Zu
neuen Ufern (both 1937) clearly fill this bill. In each drama Leanders char-
acter is similar to Sderbaums in that she is tempted into sexual activity
with an inappropriate man. In La Habanera this leads her to be seduced by
the fevered atmosphere of Puerto Rico and its charismatic leader (played by
Ferdinand Marion), which causes her to abandon her northern European
roots for ten years. While that island and her marriage become a metaphori-
cal prison, Leanders weakness in her choice of men in Zu neuen Ufern lands
her in a real prison: after falling in love with a swindler-turned-army officer
(Willy Birgel), her character, a famous English performer, is convicted of fraud
and deported to a womens penitentiary in the Australian colony. In both films
truer men eventually come to the rescue, although the women at first resist being
saved, insisting on remaining true to the mistakes they made out of desires
genuine fervor. As in other Leander roles, sexual activity itself is not presented
as a problem in these two films.12 Indeed, the distinctly melancholy air she
adopts at the end of those films indicates that her misguided passion is at the
very least something to be mourned, even if it arises only in connection with
inappropriate object choices. Thus viewers were as likely to find their spirit of
amorous adventure underscored while watching her ride into the sunset as
they were to be properly cleansed of all such impulses.13
In Rolf Hansens Die groe Liebe (1942), one of Leanders greatest suc-
cesses, her character picks exactly the right man but fails initially to under-
stand what makes him so right. Once again playing a highly successful singer,
Leander is wooed and won over by Wendtland (Viktor Staal), a dashing pilot
on brief assignment in contemporary Berlin. Duty calls him back to the front
and demands silence of him, which the waiting woman does not understand.
After several reunions, partings, missed communiqus, and scenes of marriage
interruptus, the woman decides that she can no longer wait: her lovers loy-
alty must be to her or the relationship must end. Unfortunately, his sense of
12. Marc Silberman points out that a distinction is drawn in Zu neuen Uferns narrative between
the vampish figure she cuts and sings onstage and the real Gloria Vane, who is more demure and
retiring (German Cinema: Texts in Context [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995]). While
she may only perform the always ready and available woman onstage, the fi lm also suggests
strongly that she is sexually active with Finsberry, whom she loves. That he is the wrong object
choice for the fullness and constancy of her affections is what lands her in prison, rather than that
she makes such a choice at all.
13. See also Koepnick, En-gendering Mass Culture.
duty leads him back to the front, so they part company. Of course, she feels
that she can never really be happy again and, hearing that her man has been
shot down not far from where she is on tour in Italy, rushes to his side. They
reconcile by agreeing to try it again with marrying and relish the two weeks
sick leave Wendtland has, after which they must let things happen as the call of
duty dictates.
This film provides us with a most concrete example of how the overt
ideological semantics about heterosexual love conflict with the female star as
a figure of erotic displacement and investment in the cinema. As has been
well documented, the plots tensions revolve in some sense around the jour-
ney of an independent, sexually sovereign woman to a position in which her
own desires are subordinated to the needs of the homeland and her lovers
sense of what is right.14 The sexual activity of neither party is made into a
problem in itself, and there is never any prudish indication that these figures
should be celibate. Indeed, the film posits as absolutely normal and under-
stood that the relationship between these two is sexually active. As Reinhard
Andress points out in an illuminating discussion of the construction of love
(not specifically sex) and its relation to Nazi ideology in this film, its final
configurations of assumed marital union acquire particular Nazi flavorings
through the uniforms in evidence and importance of duty, which perhaps
accounts for the lack of a demand that she give up her career.15 Yet finding
and losing true love, then regaining it again only to renounce any exclusive
rights to the lover in light of the greater good at a higher moral register, fits
another famous production of 1942 just as well as it does Die groe Liebe:
Michael Curtizs Casablanca.16
14. Ute Bechdorf, Wunsch-Bilder? Frauen in nationalsozialistischen Unterhaltungsfi lmen

(Tbingen: Vereinigung fr Volkskunde, 1992); Silberman, German Cinema.
15. Reinhard Andress, Verschoben, aber nicht aufgehoben: Zur Topographie der Liebe im
Kontext von Volksgemeinschaft und Krieg in erfolgreichen NS-Filmen, Monatshefte fr
deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur 91 (1999): 35975.
16. The initiation of the beautiful friendship between Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains at
the end of Curtizs film reminds me that the issue of homosociality in this masculinist culture is
interestingly raised in Die groe Liebe through Wendlandts slightly infantilized flying partner. He
eschews relationships with women because es lt sich leichter in die Kiste steigen (it makes it
easier to climb into the crate without them) on those dangerous flights if one has no such distrac-
tions, along with the knowledge that mother is the only woman who truly loves him. While these
two characters happen to be Nazi pilots, and find parallels in other Nazi-era works such as Liebes-
premiere (see below), such nonsexual figures and relations like this buddy pairing are certainly
not limited to the world of Ufa in the 1930s and 1940s film. Again, rather than insisting that these
sexual anomalies are peculiar to the Hitler era, students of (German) cinema would be better served
by looking at the common ground this opens up across temporal and national borders.
In all of Leanders films, and Die groe Liebe in particular, elements

that resist an easy reading of codes and enplotments capture the audience as
much as the discourse and semantics. The excess of songs, production num-
bers, and especially the filmic presentation of Leanders body are as essen-
tial to considering the sexual nature and effect of her work as any ideological
message. Although Sderbaum does not sing (as proven by moments, such as
those in Jud S, when she intones songs for us), she and Leander are clearly
similar figures who can be vehicles of ideal Nazi types and roles even as they
exhibit the contradictions in the ideology, without, of course, challenging it
in any significant way beyond appealing to various forms of desire. Both are
filmed in the techniques used to develop, designate, and deliver stars, includ-
ing repeated facial close-ups and a preponderance of shots in which they
alone occupy the screen, and so it is understandable that so much of the dis-
cussion of sex and Nazi cinema concentrates on them. But what if we were to
consider more pedestrian fare? More important, what to make of works that
do not restrict the mise-en-scne to cutout scenery serving as a backdrop for
the star but rather bristle with a scenery of humans evoking naked sexuality
in a manner that transcends narrative as it does in the revue film?
Karsten Wittes useful ruminations on the Nazi revue acknowledge and
yet go beyond the understanding of the chorus line as the result of rational-
ization and the projection of militaristic fantasy held by cultural critics of the
Weimar era (such as Siegfried Kracauer and Alfred Polgar).17 Witte claims
that Nazi ideology makes itself felt both in the aestheticization of human
beings as material and in the relative stiffness of these works when compared
with their Hollywood counterparts. His acumen seems apparent to anyone
who compares Frank Capras It Happened One Night (1934) with its German
remake, Paul Martins Glckskinder (1936), or Roy Del Ruths Broadway
Melody of 1936 (1935) with Hans Zerletts Es leuchten die Sterne (1938).18
Important and influential though it is, however, Wittes implicit repressive
17. Karsten Witte, Visual Pleasure Inhibited: Aspects of the German Revue Film, New German
Critique, nos. 2425 (198283): 23863; Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag; Siegfried Kracauer and
Thomas Y. Levin, The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995); Alfred Polgar, Girls, in Im Lauf der Zeit (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1954), 12123.
18. On Capras and Martins films see Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion; and Cary Nathenson,
Fear of Flying: Education to Manhood in Nazi Film Comedies: Glueckskinder and Quax, der
Bruchpilot, in Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the
Third Reich, ed. Robert C. Reimer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 84108. On Del Ruths
and Zerletts films see, e.g., Michaela Haibl, Unterhaltung, in Enzyklopdie des Nationalsozial-
ismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml, and Hermann Weiss (Munich: Deutscher Taschen-
buch, 1997), 18186.
hypothesis might not take elements such as material and budgetary compari-
sons enough into account. And though the treatment of humans as aesthetic
material is indeed essential to all these German films, it remains to be seen
whether this makes it specifically Nazi. Most important, the notion of ideo-
logical inhibition potentially limits us in our ability to note the contradictory
cleavage forwarded by these representations, which also enable and express as
much as they repress. To bring this cleavage more fully into view, the follow-
ing section turns to the proverbial horses mouth, for underneath the attempts
of at least one director to recast his work with the Nazi film industry in a harm-
less, even positive light lies instructive evidence about the place where sexual
representation, Nazism, and bourgeois cultural taste overlap.
After making a career of directing film and theater in the Third Reich, Arthur
Maria Rabenalt was able to continue his work well into the 1970s in West
Germany.19 Nevertheless, he is still associated with the Nazi period through
his earlier work, such as the nationalistic film Reitet fr Deutschland and the
overtly propagandistic Achtung! Feind hrt mit! Reinforcing this association
was the convenient rewriting of his role in the Nazi film industry in Film im
Zwielicht (first published in 1958), which despite its apologetic characteris-
tics does contain interesting information on what he terms the nonpolitical
film under the dictatorship.20 What makes Rabenalts Mimus Eroticus inter-
esting in the present context is not so much its revelations about sex and Nazi
cinema, for despite having a section devoted to the Hitler era it provides little
information that goes beyond Film im Zwielicht. Rather, the five-volume Sit-
tengeschichte (history of social customs or mores) offers an invaluable con-
text within which to situate Rabenalts earlier thoughts on sexual allure in
Nazi cinema, opening up those thoughts and the films themselves to a more
thoroughgoing evaluation.
Since a complete rehearsal of Mimus Eroticus is not possible here, I
merely want to touch on some of its basic components before focusing on a
series of distinctions that will be useful in understanding the central topic of
sexual representation that, according to Rabenalt, always gets moved to the
margins of representation in the theater. Theatricality for Rabenalt results
from three interacting elements: the impulse to play and to present, the dic-
tatorial will to view of the public, and tricks of dissimulation (ME, 1:17).
19. He also made a pair of early Defa pictures in East Germany as well.
20. Arthur Maria Rabenalt, Film im Zwielicht: ber den unpolitischen Film des Dritten Reiches
und die Begrenzung des totalitren Anspruches, mit Ergnzungen zur Neuaufl age (Hildesheim:
Olms, 1978).
There is also something about the theater that is inherently related to naked-
ness and hence to sexuality, for they both express the natural world and pro-
vide a tun als oba magical make-believe space of dissimulation that con-
tains the possibility of human self-stylization as a sexual being (1:61). Rabenalt
finds that some historical moments embrace this dialectical core of sexuality
naturalness and self-stylizationin their art seamlessly, while others mar-
ginalize it through an overdetermined turn to narrative.
Mimus Eroticus embodies many of the contradictions one can expect
from cultural conservatives who worked in popular entertainment, as well as
from those who wished to distance themselves from the real criminals of
the Third Reich. Among other things, Rabenalt is nearly pathological in his
attempts to avoid including (male) homosexuality in his considerations, and so
the womans world, and especially womens bodies, become equated with his
notion of sex in representation. While he is quite explicit about the ill effects of
fetishizing women as sexualized objects, even going so far as to speak of the
links between scopophilia, coercion (Ntigung), and rape, he likewise holds
up the realm of culture in which womens bodies can be (self-)aestheticized
as an emblem of life affirmation. This is the distinction he draws, for exam-
ple, between the striptease and the Schnheitstanz (inadequately rendered
below as exotic dance), a distinction to which I return in a moment. Before
doing so, however, it is instructive to trace out Rabenalts ideas about the
historical relations between sexuality and representation, for they expose the
insights and the blindness to be uncovered in his work.
His account of sexual history begins with the ancient Greeks, who rep-
resented the last occurrence of a total high culture, which for Rabenalt
expresses itself in its works of the spirit even though it could not manifest
itself politically. Greek antiquity initially possessed a paneroticism that knew
no real distinction between the public and the private (ME, 1:4243), one
that celebrated above all womens mysteries: Even the orgy [and its repre-
sentation] is not Dionysian but originates in the aphrodisian, the Ur-Mother
(1:29). The introduction of Aphrodite herself on the stage introduces naked-
ness into Greek theater, whereupon its gendered representations changed
significantly. Previously, costumed men playing women had entailed not a
homoerotic moment, according to this reading, but a kind of Verfremdungs-
effekt(!) (1:29), enhanced often by stylized masks. The appearance of womens
bodies in the scenery of Greek theater changes this by adding the quality
of the showgirl, and Rabenalt even speaks of Aristophanes work as a kind
of revue in antiquity. What makes these showgirls bodies important is their
simultaneous existence as the ultrareal and the allegorical, for they are both
immediately present as what Rabenalt calls human material and stand in

for something, anything, else (nation, peace, freedom, etc.).
Given the parameters used to define theatricality, it does not surprise
Rabenalts reader to find that sex is the something most often placed in the bal-
ance on the real and the allegorical sides of women in the scenery. In the cult
of the theater, woman becomes a complete sexual being [totales Geschlechts-
wesen] (ME, 4:37).21 This use of womens bodies ebbs and flows throughout
the history Rabenalt traces, but it becomes particularly apparent again in the
periods of the baroque and rococo, when it visibly transcends the theater to
appear in the scenic presentation (szenische Darbietung) of the church
facade, the circus, and so forth (4:38). In keeping with his claims that sexual
theater is both a natural state and a magical stylization that blurs the boundar-
ies between the stage and life, he expands his understanding of nakedness in
such times to mean not simply the state of being without clothes but also the
attempt to make the bodily shape demonstrably visible beyond the dominant
fashion of the day (4:16).
It is important to note that Rabenalts sense of his own day is not lim-
ited to the contemporary setting of the economic miracle but is a general pres-
ent after the demise of the bourgeois age, which occurs in either 1914 or 1918,
that is, with the beginning or end of World War I (4:68). Passages such as
ones in which 1939 is referred to as today make clear that this is a prob-
lematic confusion of temporal boundaries (4:36), for, unlike many of his con-
temporaries, Rabenalts implicit version of revisionism does not depend on
ignoring the Nazi years; rather, it largely removes the distinctions between
that era and those preceding and following it.22 The conceptual frame that he
constructs to enable this consists of his ideas about sexualitys relationship to
the world of the public and private, and his understanding of the medium of
film itself. According to Rabenalt, film technology emerges from the bourgeois
21. Rabenalt disagrees with those who see theater as an outgrowth of religious rites; rather, it is
the flip side of the religious and thus becomes its own cult by making the religious earthly and
concrete (ME, 1:70).
22. This is a strategy that proves itself to be more effective at deflecting guilt in the long run
than the attempt to set up a year zero that demarcates a completely fresh start for Germans.
According to the historians Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, it is potentially more dangerous
from a contemporary standpoint as well, since the insistence on continuity threatens to obviate the
important distinctions between liberal democracies and fascist states (Shattered Past: Reconstruct-
ing German History [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003]). The point of view of this
essay is that a healthy appreciation of not only those distinctions but also the continuities between
certain aspects of those different states is necessary.
period, but the total scenic possibility of the artistic cinema ultimately is that
which inaugurates the postbourgeois age in culture.23
For Rabenalt, the attempt to accentuate the (female) body in a manner
that exceeds and yet remains recognizable as a fashion of an age, without actu-
ally revealing the body, is a staple of mainstream cinema. With this notion of
excess and nakedness in history Rabenalt lays the groundwork for understand-
ing the theatrical (and especially filmic) representations of his own age. The
extravagance, even ridiculousness of todays revue costume [that] expends
so much effort to show nothing has its roots in the world of baroque alle-
gory (ME, 4:78), which as a cultural impulse arises near the beginnings of the
bourgeois age (4:40). The link between the erotic scenery of the baroque and
the present thus becomes important because it casts today as a period main-
taining the best and the worst of what went before in the bourgeois age, as well
as holding the possibility of overcoming it.
According to Rabenalt, two distinctly troublesome, although not entirely
negative things, occurred in the general zeitgeist of bourgeois culture, and they
found their reflection in the theatrical presentation of sexuality. First, an artifi-
cial schism was created between the public and the private that rests to a cer-
tain extent on what can or cannot see the light of day (ME, 4:7), which is the
dominant situation up to 1914. Increasingly, however, the law came to replace
the socially implicit light of day as the normative instance, and as the disci-
plinary enforcement of statutes became more invasive it began eliminating the
23. Rabenalt goes on to subdivide film in Germany into four politically defined periods (pre-
1933, National Socialist, postwar, Federal Republic of Germany), but these remain subdivisions of
a cultural branch that is an orphan of the political impulses of bourgeois culture, even if that culture
has ceased to exist itself: Wie die Oper ein Kind des Absolutismus, ist der Film ein Geschpf des
demokratischen Zeitalters, wenn er sich auch zeitweise als Geisel im KZ der Diktaturen befindet
(Just as the opera is a child of absolutism, film is a creation of the democratic age, even if it occa-
sionally finds itself a hostage in the concentration camps of dictatorships) (ME, 4:113). The last
qualifying clause shows the ease with which Rabenalt springs to different sides of his contradictory
positions, for the idea of film held hostage flies in the face of most of his work here and in Film
im Zwielicht, which is bent on showing the possibilities that film possessed in its nonpolitical
aspects. The use of the plural dictatorships reflects his recourse to totalitarian theories about
National Socialism, simply equating the dictatorships in Argentina, Italy, and especially the USSR
with Nazi Germany. In regard to culture in the National Socialist period specifically, Rabenalt
criticizes a great deal of the official use of nudity in revues and, less officially, in film. He uses a
largely implicit standard of artistic competence to divide the sexual representations in the films he
celebrates from the auswechselbarem Kitsch (indistinguishable kitsch) in German imitations of
Pariser Vaudevilleszenik (Parisian vaudeville scenery) lacking in jeglicher Flair und der imma-
nente Geschmack des franzsischen Vorbildes (any kind of flair or the immanent good taste of the
French model) (4:252).
possibility of a secret private life. Anticipating some moments in Foucault,

Rabenalt sees the disciplinary mode as having previously enabled a secret
public world of private performance on the margins of respectable theater
that at this historical point is being shut out. The second problematic aspect
of bourgeois culture makes itself felt here, for in bourgeois theater in general
the emphasis on narrative rather than on total aesthetic visual and aural pre-
sentation constrains the presentation of bodies (for Rabenalt almost always
womens) as both material and allegory, reducing it to an impoverished ver-
sion of the tun als ob. What develops onstage after 1914 is not an extension
of the treasured mimus eroticus Rabenalt has traced back to the sexual total-
ity of Greek culture but a poor imitation based in the perceived promise
of debauchery, the voluptas ludens. In tandem with the general emphasis
on dramatic storytelling, an additional psychological symbolism gets associ-
ated with removing clothing: the sequential uncovering of the body becomes
equated with the uncovering of the soul, a narrative essential to bourgeois
theater through the early naturalists that both posits and aims to colonize a
private self. Thus, concludes Rabenalt, the artistic (French) revue arises from
the marginalization of the sexual in the real theater and is to be welcomed
as a correspondence to the secret private impulses of this age. The devel-
opment of the (American) striptease arises for similar reasons but is to be
lamented for transplanting the sadistic narrative of nakedness into the realm
of self-stylization.
Although Rabenalt seems to be quite a student of the form, he con-
demns the inherently misogynistic character of the striptease, which in
einem Mnnerstaat mit ausgesprochener Frauenherrschaft die Rache des
Mannes an der Diktatur des Weibes [ist] (in a mens nation with a pro-
nounced dominance by women is the males revenge on the female) (ME,
4:80). The revenge he speaks of has its logic in force: it is a rape that never
quite comes to pass, combined with the attempt to attain absolute and erad-
icating psychological knowledge over the object. The teleological drive to
nudity in the striptease always stops at the moment of completion, frus-
trating further the compensatory aspect of full possession aimed at by the
Schaugelst of the male audience. The difference between the striptease
and the exotic dance is important for Rabenalt, because he sees exotic dance
as the stylizing of the natural human form, an aestheticization that has its
basis in positive rather than negative sexual energy. At stake is the differ-
ence between using women as human material in violence against women
and affirming the life force necessarily represented by the natural aspect of
women.24 The difference is ultimately one between generic enplotment and

aesthetic occurrence. The striptease, by and large, always tells the same story
and presents nothing beyond that. The theatrical revue or, in film, the multi-
plied exotic bodies of extras create a living picture that resists the narrative
drive that has dominated the public culture of theater in the bourgeois age,
thus helping to introduce an age in which the clear division between public
and private can be eliminated.
The Aufhebung of the public-private scenario occurs especially in
film because its keyhole function opens up private spaces to the viewer. It
makes a move toward a new, total society and has everything do with sexual-
ity as Rabenalt understands it. The logic of such postulations about moder-
nitys total culture plays into his apologia for (his participation in) the Nazi
period.25 However, looking beyond the apologetic or even fascistic aspect of
this construction, one sees that Rabenalt offers insights into the aestheticiza-
tion of everyday life to which those who condemn the entire conjuncture of
mass culture as irredeemable ( la Horkheimer and Adorno) may be blind.26
Rabenalt uses the scenic as a totalizing concept when he turns his attention
24. Again, Rabenalt seems blind to or unconcerned about the latent misogyny of this concep-
tion, even though he elsewhere seems quite aware of the potential misogyny of cultural representa-
tion. It is equally striking that he seems to be free from the overt racism that many of his contem-
poraries showed in viewing the spectacles of the Roaring Twenties and beyond. At one point he
states bluntly that the performances and cult of appreciation around Josephine Baker were among
the only life-affirming aspects of the cabaret between 1918 and 1933. At another point he lauds the
behavior of African American GIs as more civil and humane than that of their fellow members of
the postWorld War II occupying forces. Obviously such an association of the racial other with
elemental forces and this condescendingly friendly view of black soldiers are not without signifi-
cant prejudice: nonetheless, they are a far cry from the overtly racist rejection of Neger culture
from many of his age.
25. It implies, on the one hand, that National Socialist violence had nothing to do with the
eradication of the private, since that eradication is a result of the modern media themselves. On the
other hand, the National Socialist state simply becomes modern in the most banal sense, like so
many others. One could, more cynically, read Rabenalt to say that National Socialism was much
more of a return to Greek culture than first meets the eye (if not in quite the way that its ideologues
envisioned it), since it proposed a total cultural vision that failed to ground a total, permanent poli-
tics. In the double movement of these hidden inferences we see a definite point of demarcation
separating the apologetic, conservative Rabenalt from more critical understandings of the Third
Reich. He never realizes that the public-private distinction was already a false one, as had long
since been claimed in regard to the Nazi era (e.g., by Brecht) and, more recently, in regard to bour-
geois society by a host of feminist thinkers. He also has no interest in condemning the Third Reich
and the normality of modern states on the basis of their continuities. See Bertolt Brecht and
Margarete Steffin, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1981).
26. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cum-
ming (New York: Continuum, 1999).
to the twentieth century, recognizing the power of the new media in a man-
ner that cannot be encompassed easily by the impulses of reactionary mod-
ernism.27 His understanding of the power that the new cultural technology
offers parallels that espoused by, say, Ernst Jngers reading of modern war-
fare as an elemental battle of man against machine that transcends the calci-
fied experience of bourgeois life.28 Yet where Jnger gives a glimpse into an
extreme, vitalist vision of the postbourgeois political, Rabenalts cultural
conceptions help us comprehend the more quotidian (hence more pervasive)
manifestation of this totality.
After sexuality has been relegated to the private side of the public-
private division that marks alienated, bourgeois society, that private world
seems to be eliminated as it becomes the narrative focus of the nonpolitical
or Gesellschafts film, in which the viewer becomes witness to the intimate
alcoves, beds and bedrooms, closets and dressing rooms of private people
(ME, 4:65). But in doing so, cinema can recapture the marginal moments of
sexual representation through its formal properties of montage and mise-en-
scne, in which the multiplication of bodies as bodies and the shifts in per-
spective can break through the restrictive drives of narrative. Narrative film
allows for the distinction between, and yet the conjoining of, the mimus eroti-
cus and the voluptas ludens in the possibilities offered, on the one hand, by
its formal, visual excess and, on the other, by its content.
This cleavage in sexual representation had become impossible in the
imitations of the bourgeois stage. Film has only nature as its material and
offers not only dramatic imitation of life (Nachahmung) but first and fore-
most its visual reimaging (Nachbildung), and this opens the way for wom-
ens bodies, always the fulcrum of sexuality for Rabenalt, to recapture some
of their position as both pure, natural material and allegorical figuration. As
these films always cast that allegory in terms of sex itself, the mimetic impulse
that once had been the purview of secret shows at the margin of the theatri-
cal world can today find its place in the margins within individual cine-
matic representations themselves.
27. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and
the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
28. Ernst Jnger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin: Mittler und Sohn, 1926); Jnger,
Krieg und Lichtbild, in Das Anlitz des Weltkrieges: Fronterlebnisse deutscher Soldaten, ed.
Ernst Jnger (Berlin: Neufeld und Henius, 1930), 911. On Jnger as an important figure for the
medias avant-garde see Thomas Elsaesser, Moderne und Modernisierung: Der deutsche Film der
dreiiger Jahre, Montage/av 3 (1994): 2340.
Using the striptease as a metaphor for narrative and the exotic dance for the
excessive formal self-aestheticizing of human bodies in many films and
revues provides a way to think about different investments in the total cul-
ture of cinema in Rabenalts age. It discloses a cleavage between the medium
of film and a popular version of a lost, lamented totality, the restoration of
which is a significant part of the modernist drive to overcoming through cul-
ture. Such cleavage can serve the ideological aims of a totalitarian state, but
it is by no means limited to them. This popularized gesture to totality is in
many ways all that remains of earlier utopian modernist impulses in a sup-
posedly postmodern present, which often appears to reject that tradition so
utterly. Indeed, that gesture may well serve as the very basis on which the
rejection of modernism unwittingly rests. If we turn to specific film exam-
ples from the Third Reich to flesh out this abstract model, then there is
no better place to start than with Rabenalts own work. Films like Liebes-
premiere, whose central dramatic narrative includes the marginalized aspects
of presenting the body an sich, show that while Rabenalt is critical of the
striptease, he recognizes its narrative equivalent as an integral part of the total-
ity of popular culture. This becomes a kind of unity of opposites in which the
discourse of the dramatic level provides a comment on the drives of the scenic,
and vice versa.
The film begins with an elaborate revue number, complete with flashy
costumes, stately choreography, leggy women, and tuxedoed men moving in
concert to swelling music. The star suddenly stops to complain that she can-
not possibly dance in the dress she is being made to wear, revealing that this
is just a rehearsal. The director reassures her that she should trust him and
that everything is going just right, gesturing to the shows author for confirma-
tion, who in turn complains that he hardly recognizes his piece underneath
all the glitz. The director cuts this comic whining short to restart the rehearsal,
which then segues seamlessly into the real performance of the show as a smash
hit, with the star wearing the same outfit.
This opening encapsulates the films treatment of its central plotline: a
woman, seeking independence in matters of her personal lifetoday we
would say her reproductive rightsultimately learns that accepting the wis-
dom of the man in charge is really the way to happiness. A typical enough
plot in this era, but it would be far too limited to see this merely as a vehicle
of fascisms sexual politics; the attraction remains equally, indeed far more,
embedded in the show and what happens to sex in the extravagance of the
margins. The rehearsal of the opening number has held our attention for
minutes, whereas the exchange about the dress is only a brief interlude before
we return to a longer segment that is, once again, just the dance. When the star
begins talking about what she has to wear and its restrictions, the film moves
from a stylized presentation of human material to a disciplining and brutal
concentration on the womans bodythat is, from the scenic presentation of
nakedness in Rabenalts sense to the story about controlling a womans body.
The movement of this opening is a palimpsest of the film to come, as Liebes-
premiere divides its treatment of sex, soon unveiled as the movies central
theme, into terms parallel both to Rabenalts material/allegorical understand-
ing of womens bodies in the exotic dance or revue and to his notion of the
striptease. The latter structures the plot itself, while the former locates itself
in the excesses of the mise-en-scne.
To underscore this point briefly, consider the basic conceits that drive
the narrative. Vera (Kirsten Heiberg), having had considerable experience
in relations with men, has decided that those relationships do not work out:
she plans to have a child without a husband. Her friends argue against this
decision, claiming that women ultimately need the strength of a man to keep
them happy and in line. The leading voice in this chorus is a lawyer, who
states his case in the most stringent ideological terms possible.29 She meets
Axel (Hans Snker), an aspiring composer in search of the break that will
allow the quality of his musical material to make itself felt. Vera falls for him
enough to back his project and, eventually, agrees to marry him. Before the
wedding Axel learns of her plan to raise a child without a father, and, not
knowing that she has changed her mind, he takes offense. Axel designs to
beat her at her own game: the marriage goes forward without being consum-
mated, and the rest of the plot strains to get to the point at which that con-
summation can take place. The final reconciliation introduces the tender
moment in which they lie down together in his apartment, just as Axels best
friend, the librettist (Rolf Weih), closes the door and whispers to the noisy
neighbors and viewing audience: Shhh . . . Liebespremiere.
If ever there was one, this is a mainstream film about the sexual act
that it cannot show. Liebespremiere takes this to an extreme: all moments of
29. As a side note, this figure (Heinz Welzel) is addressed as Doktor and reminds this viewer
unmistakably of Goebbels in appearance, bearing, and speech. Given Goebbelss contradictory
role as both a showpiece for family propaganda and an infamous philanderer (well known to
Rabenalt and others as der Bock von Babelsberg), the implications of this allusion are enticing
but must remain out of consideration here. See Arthur Maria Rabenalt and Herbert Holba, Joseph
Goebbels und der Grossdeutsche Film (Munich: Herbig, 1985), 123; and Felix Moeller, Der
Filmminister: Goebbels und der Film im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Henschel, 1998).
sexual titillation are divorced from the dramatic narrative. There is endless
talk of love, marriage, and sex (even the text of the new musical includes
songs urging women to take off your clothes and lie down), but the various
plot strands all have to do with the frustration of sexual impulses. Sex pre-
mieres just at the moment that the doors close and the film ends, in parallel
to Rabenalts description of the striptease, which ends just as its promise of
full nudity is to be fulfilled. The notion that, in a society managed ostensibly
by men but dominated by women, the striptease is the revenge of man against
woman certainly corresponds to the disciplining aspect of this narrative
quite well. But if this symbolic urge to rape manifests itself in the narrative
through an ironic refusal to consummate the marriage, the more gratuitous
moments of exhibiting womens bodies respond to a different, less sadistic
impulse according to Rabenalts logic. The marginal stuff is not simply an
extension of a misogynistic treatment of women in representation. These
margins generate a different space of audience participation that is polymor-
phous in two ways, being open to both different object choices and the plea-
sure in the absurd excesses used to draw our attention to it.
Rabenalts women extras in Liebespremiere thus return to the dualistic
nakedness that he found in the women figures on the Greek stage and the cul-
ture of the baroque: that of radical materiality and allegory at once. Womens
bodies are the nature that this film uses to ground itself, but they also become
an allegorical representation of sex itself, which is constantly evoked and can
never be fully present. Sex is the beginning and end of the movie, but never the
substance of it, except in the presentation of womens bodies as sex and the
erotic pleasure gained in viewing them. The background scenerythe dances
in the beginning, the backstage states of undress, and, most important, the
artists nude model one floor down (fig. 1)is all about the presentation of
sexual (read womens) bodies and the pleasures of scoping and exhibiting. Fur-
thermore, when the scenic elements are not immediately visible in the back-
ground, the variation of images enabled by montage allows the film to con-
struct a total imaginary space in which both the narrative center and the
sexual scenery exist simultaneously for the viewer.
This clearly does not present any kind of a challenge to the totalized
containment of women in misogynistic representation, yet it points to other
aspects in works of popular culture that invite participation in a manner that
denies simple ideological designation. In films like Liebespremiere one
should not look to the narrative developments and resolution themselves as
the place in which the utopian is evoked and revoked. Quite the contrary, the
narrative focuses on the struggle between the sexes to such an extent that
Figure 1. The Inspiration for
Hard-Working Craftsmen in
Liebespremiere
it is not seductive at all. Rather, here one finds a different moment of audi-
ence investment in the power that creates a representation: the mimetic
impulse of the sexual at the borders of this film creates the space for an aes-
thetic effect that transcends the ideological import of the narrative without
necessarily threatening it.
Importantly, elements of excessive sexuality become part of the scen-
ery surrounding the striptease of sexual consummation that drives the rest
of Liebespremieres plot. In her astute reading of the domestic spaces assigned
to the main characters, Sabine Hake posits that the set design of the heroines
luxurious, angular apartment helps encode an independent, self-contained
(modern) womans sphere negatively. She contrasts that closed arena with the
mens apartments, which look out onto the surrounding city, noting the cor-
respondence of the happy ending to the starlets move into her husbands flat.30
While this discussion of the overlap between basic tenets of Nazi ideology
and the modernism of containment attending international popular cinema
is quite strong, it brings Hake to refer to Vera as frigid.31 This makes sense
within the interpretation of the set design as an extension of her attempt to
be self-determining in matters of gender relations; however, the film quite
pointedly underscores her extensive experience in matters of love. Hence we
should augment this reading by noting the similarity of the mise-en-scne in
those atelier apartments, the backstage area of the theater, and the stage sets
during the performance. Although the latter two do not open onto the outside,
in each of these sets a transparent division is made between the foreground and
background (interior and exterior), which both separates and unites the nar-
ratives main figures and the bodies of extras around them. In the ateliers the
windowpanes mark the division, which we can nonetheless see through: back-
stage and onstage staircases and banisters, frames for flats, and curtains fulfill
the same function.
Elsewhere I have argued that similar mise-en-scne, shot composition,
and camera work in Wolfgang Liebeneiners films generate a semipublic pri-
vate sphere where private lives and the public ideology of work meet.32 There,
as in Rabenalts conception, the essence of film is its keyhole character,
which allows it to inhabit one space, and thus include the audience, while
showing another that is both contiguous and noncontiguous. A fluid sense of
30. Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich, 62, 6567.

31. Ibid., 62.
32. John E. Davidson, Working for the Man, Whoever That May Be: The Vocation of Wolf-
gang Liebeneiner, in Reimer, Cultural History, 24067.
containment is at work in such space. Hence Rabenalts concentration, here

and in countless other films, on dressing rooms, backstage scenes, carnival
wagons, artists ateliers, and so forth: the difference is that these places empha-
size the coeval existence of work and sexual activity as constitutive elements
of human existence. The human material in the background at the theater is
always at work stylizing, self-aestheticizing the sexual impulse. The atelier is
not just a private place of work (Vera works in her apartment as well) but one
open to the margins rather than just to the outside: Snkers character draws
inspiration from the sight of a nude model in the apartment across the way, a
body that again functions at both the material and the allegorical levels of
the film. But just as that body is intricately linked to and infinitely removed
from the production of the music for the show, it also cleaves to the presence
of the chimney sweep shown later in nearly the same marginal screen posi-
tion relative to the central narrative (fig. 2). If for Liebeneiner the semipublic
private sphere tends to be constructed based on configurations of art, work,
and gender, the social totality of modern cinema as Rabenalt conceives it suc-
ceeds because it simultaneously insists on and blurs the distinction between
the central work of narrative and the expression of sexuality it has marginal-
ized (fig. 3).
This division between, yet interweaving of, scenic presentation and narrative
is not always as clear-cut as it is here: Rabenalts film has been a convenient
place to work this out because it is so clearly conscious of this cleavage. His
chronicle of the bifurcations of the sexual into theatrical scenery and into
narrative, while not an accurate history of sexuality, does give us a way to
understand the role of sexuality in film that augments the insights offered by
models based on rigid ideology critique or utopian psychological notions of
identification, and yet also opens up our understanding of an avenue of posi-
tive investment in pleasure that exceeds both of those models. To show that
this scheme may be generalized beyond one film and filmmaker, I turn now
to Jacobys Die Frau meiner Trume, a film quite similar in some respects to
Rabenalts but which also differs from it significantly.
The sandwich structure of Liebespremiere, which separates out the
erotic scenery from the narrative of sex and yet adjoins them in the open-
ing sequence, applies to the entirety of this Marika Rkk vehicle. Opening
and closing with elaborate dance sequences, each lasting about ten min-
utes, Jacobys film puts brackets of spectacular excess around a mundane plot
once again triggered by a womans refusal: a weary revue star vows never to
work in another stage show. Her manager cannot stand the thought of losing
Figure 2. Working Elements in the Margins of Liebespremieres Mise-en-Scne:
At Home . . .
. . . behind three different phone calls . . .
. . . and within one

Figure 3. Working Elements in the Margins of Liebespremieres Mise-en-Scne:
In the Theater . . .
. . . offstage . . . . . . and backstage
. . . onstage . . .
profits and so presses his prize commodity to remember her contracts.

Dressed only in a slip and a fur coat, she tries to escape, boarding a train that
takes her to a frozen mountainous region, miles from anything except an
engineering station where a crew is building a road over previously impass-
able terrain. The narrative then turns to developing a comic love story between
the head engineer (Wolfgang Lukschy) and the starlet, who initially could
not be more different in temperament. He assumes that a star in such produc-
tions must be a woman of low values, an opinion that she overhears him utter
before he is aware of who she is, and her pride initially prevents her from
seeing his better qualities. The second engineer ostensibly provides further
comedy by initially having designs on this wayward beauty as well. Though
Rkks character sings a couple of songs and takes a few steps during her
hiatus, she does not perform extravagantly again until she returns to the the-
ater near the end of the film, convinced that though the engineer is the love
of her life, she cannot build a relationship with him. He of course realizes
that they must be together and follows her, finagles a ticket, then meets her
after the show with a proposal she does not want to refuse. Behind a lowered
umbrella the man of duty and the woman of his dreams kiss as the music
swells to a grand finale.
All the typical tropes of conservative gender ideology surge through Die
Frau meiner Trume. Rkks character has no domestic skills, and much of the
intended comedy in this picture centers on her inabilities and her woeful
attempts to improve in this domain. Despite this, the film insists neither that
she attain domestic competence nor that she leave the stage to become an ade-
quate partner. If anything, the development of this character has more to do
with constancy: first to her obligations as a performer, then to her nature as a
woman who is indeed a sexual being to her very bones. The narrative remains
embedded from beginning to end in the mean-spirited disciplinary logic of
Rabenalts striptease: the opening routine is called The Woman with No
Heart; the closing, The Woman of My Dreams. In between this womans
body becomes the locus of the fantasy of control and manipulation in a love
story that ends, like Liebespremiere and so many other romantic comedies,
just at the moment that its conquest seems assured.
Once again, the division between the narrative about sex and the scenic
visualization of it is not absolute. Here, for instance, the audiences disciplin-
ary fantasies may well spill over into the films primary attraction: the seem-
ingly self-directed contortions of Rkks body in the dances themselves. Par-
ticularly in The Woman with No Heart, the choreography consists to no
small degree in the star being thrown about the stage quite violently. The
grand finale of this number has her holding one leg at a seventy-five-degree
angle to her trunk, exposing her can-can outfit in all its bloomered glory, as
she hammers down a set of stairs on the other leg to end in a crashing split.33
These routines are also not without a certain narrative impulse, since they
traverse vast spaces to illustrate their titles. The initial Woman with No
Heart dance moves laterally between different social locations within a
relatively stable and identifiable time frame (late nineteenth mixed with early
twentieth century). It achieves its change of venue through steady move-
ment toward screen right, generating an illusion of an infinitely expandable
horizontal stage. The shift takes place on a car driving from the wharf
through different urban scenes to deliver the heartless woman ultimately to a
Parisian nightclub (fig. 4). The Woman of My Dreams, on the other hand,
moves vertically through history, spending time with other great cultures
but beginning and ending with a conspicuously modern, if ethereal, pair in a
Greek revival setting, who reappear as the stars in each intermittent setting.
The changes of location are undertaken almost entirely through vertical tran-
sitions, beginning with the woman tossing a large balloon to her suitor. As it
descends to his hands, it bursts and continues falling to the floor as a hand-
kerchief embossed with a Chinese landscape. The camera changes to a point-
of-view shot looking straight down at the hankys image, which dissolves
slowly into the next scene in ancient China. After the pursuit of his dream
girl is frustrated in this setting, the suitor follows her down some stairs, to
emerge in very different time, place, and costume. After again failing to
capture his quarry in these Spanish surroundings, he is forced to flee by
jumping off a balcony, from which he falls back to his original position and
is eventually united with his lover (fig. 5). The different historical periods
are bridged here by graphic continuities and matches implied by cutting on
33. Rkks routines always stand out for their athleticism as much as their refinement of move-
ment (see Robert Mller, Temperament und Tempo: Marika Rkk und der deutsche Revuefilm,
in Idole des deutschen Films: Eine Galerie von Schlsselfiguren, ed. Thomas Koebner [Munich:
edition text + kritik, 1997], 293303; and Witte, Visual Pleasure Inhibited), and Die Frau meiner
Trume certainly makes its bookend dances seem real endurance tests, both in length and in varia-
tion of dances. Another point that could underscore the discrepancy between espoused Nazi tenets
and actual cultural practice is to be found in the coding of different types of dances here. The can-
can routine, which forms the apex of the characterization of The Woman with No Heart, predict-
ably evokes (French) bourgeois decadence both thematically (nineteenth-century debauchery) and
visually (the bloomers are designed to create highly abstract geometric patterns reminiscent of
certain moments of decadent art). However, the redemption of The Woman of My Dreams,
who has already aped a Chinese ballet and a Spanish flamenco, culminates in a radically over-the-
top sequence that returns three times to a jazzy Charleston. This officially frowned-on dance form
could not find a more enthusiastic celebration.
Figure 4. The Horizontal Transitions through the Modern City of Die Frau ohne Herz
Figure 5. The Vertical Transitions through the Ages of Die Frau meiner Trume
motion, but nothing connects these eras thematically save the dreamlike and
ahistorical vehicle of love itself. If one were to paraphrase the imperative
embodied by the film on the basis of these dances, it would be that you must
change from a woman of your time into a woman for all times.
Still, the pleasure of these routines exceeds both their sadistic attempts
to discipline and the messages they imply: preserved here is a positive address
of nakedness to the viewing impulse of the audience, as Rabenalt understood
those terms, an address that starkly contrasts with the juvenile nudity evoked
by the fur and the slip. The final dance especially makes much ado about
showing us nothing in regard to the bodies of the extras, putting human
material on a self-generating display that is only heightened by the millen-
nial changes of cultural costume. Even while the woman holds our atten-
tion by dancing in a frenzy of personal freedom that always remains within
the constraints of a love story, the people at the margins serve as the variable
and nonrestricting mise-en-scne that seems both more real as bodies and
more allegorical as figures of sexuality. Understood out of Rabenalts per-
spective, which encapsulates that of many of his contemporaries, those sur-
roundings are what give even mainstream feature films the possibility to gen-
erate total artworks in regard to the erotic.34
Celebrated in the margins of such movie spectacles is a kind of sexual
liberation from the strictures of bourgeois forms. The appeal of this total
spectacle helps us understand the striking parallel between the final dance
scene in Jacobys Die Frau meiner Trume and the opening (and closing)
sequences of Leni Riefenstahls Olympia (1938), in which the Olympic spirit
of beautiful bodies in orchestrated motion is carried through the ages and the
nations that lie between ancient Greece and the modern state of Germany to
end in the technoGreek revival of Speers temple of arc lights. The techno-
logical advance in culture, though it also brings with it increased rationaliza-
tion and teleological narrative drive, has generated the means to eradicate his-
tory and capture the excess of what has been pushed to its margins and, thus,
give it full weight. For Jacoby, the point is the gesture to sexuality embedded
in the aesthetic; for Riefenstahl, it is the sensuality of the aesthetic itself.
Rabenalt, however, subsumes both these points in his particular understand-
ing of the interrelations of sexuality and representation.
34. Missing here is the ambivalence toward the total cinematic experience one notes, for
example, in Kracauers notion of the cult of distraction, since Rabenalt is uninterested in its
political potential, except in an apologetic construction of a nonpolitical film as exile (Film im
Zwielicht, 79). However, Kracauer clearly overintellectualizes when he claims that the regimented
bodies of the mass ornament are devoid of sexual personality.
Rabenalts treatment of sexuality gives clues about the cinemas vari-

ations on the dramatic theater and the importance of the representational
margins within filmsthat is, the return of the formerly secret expression of
desire in a world in which the private has been made obsolete by technology.
Two aspects of cinematic representation stood out in the analyses of films
about sex: the multiplication of bodies, which brings with it both the reproduc-
tion of human forms and their fragmentation into parts, and the breakdown of
bourgeois notions of public and private space. Rabenalt sees the incorporation
of these aspects into film as an increase in possibility for erotic expression.
In particular, the sexual representation through body parts is to be seen not
as a perverse fragmentation or fetishizing but as the return of a total sexual
existence that had been all but lost in the ascendancy of narrative through
nineteenth-century theater and life. Rabenalt celebrates the overcoming of the
bourgeois age in the interweaving of public and private enabled by film. In this
belief in the transforming promise of film form, he shares the view of a num-
ber of his Weimar contemporaries, many of them dedicated leftists hoping to
mobilize cinemas revolutionary potential. But the spatial possibilities of film,
recaptured in the entertainment industry, have from D. W. Griffith on down
primarily assisted dominant conservative forces under the guise of increased
realism and innovation in expression, and so Rabenalts liberating vision of a
return to total sexual culture assumes the erasure of other modes of resistance.
It is important to recognize the affirmative tenor of the erotic gesture, which
invites participation in ideological constructs that go well beyond overt narra-
tives of ideology and power. And the technology of the cinema makes this
possible, incorporating and surpassing the possibilities of theatrical perfor-
mance in the bourgeois age by creating a space in which the nod to a total
erotic life can be made.
In some ways the element of space explains the differences between
Kristina Sderbaums sexual personae and the others discussed here, for the
generic requirements of her works insist on a fairly rigid public-private dis-
tinction even as the camera tends to break it down. The revue films and the
melodramas built around performance, on the other hand, challenge that
separation both narratively and formally, even if the ideological implications
of their plot resolutions sometimes point to a traditionally gendered division
of space. But as Rabenalt recognizes, the breakthrough in cultural represen-
tations of space moves us closer to a total cultural sphere that has no political
correspondence other than the status quo, and the erotic scenic gesture helps
audiences affirm that totality. However, where for Rabenalt the destruction
of the false bourgeois division of public-private is the key to liberation, our
analyses imply that this liberation is an illusion not limited to the Nazi era,
allowing as it does for the total triumph of bourgeois kitsch. Harlans Die gold-
ene Stadt overcomes the limitations of the brgerliches Trauerspiel such as
Christian Hebbels Maria Magdalena (1844, which the film closely resembles)
more thoroughly than the contemporary drama from which it was made: Rich-
ard Billingers Der Gigant (1939). Still, it does so only by insisting more firmly
even than its nineteenth-century predecessors on the privatization of personal-
ity and the primacy of personal desire expressed through the total sexual being
of the female star determined within a narrative of restriction. In turn, that nar-
rative generates an imaginary middle-class community, which simultaneously
invites and forgets the majority of those at its margins, much as the woman in
the masses of Jud S is made visible only to be subsequently laughed out of
existence by the stars who dominate the story. Total culture is intimately con-
nected to the cult of star personalities, the promise of boundless pleasure, and
the illusion of a classless society based in self-actualizing possibility. Such
connections, as we know today, are not solely aspects of the Nazi age.

Cleavage Sex in The Total Cinema of The Third Reich

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Cleavage Sex in The Total Cinema of The Third Reich

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Cleavage: Sex in the Total Cinema

of the Third Reich

Long-standing wisdom holds that the National Socialists were ingenious at

that leading officials, including Hitler and Goebbels, subsequently promoted

here is on heterosexuality, as same-sex practitioners were subjected to increasing censure, impris-

4. Stephen Lowry, Pathos und Politik: Ideologie in Spielfilmen des Nationalsozialismus

5. Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich.

6. Arthur Maria Rabenalt, Mimus Eroticus, 5 vols. (Hamburg: Verlag fr Kulturforschung,

Prevailing Nazi rhetoric maintained a strictly traditional view of womens

7. Klaus Theweleit, Mnnerphantasien (Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern, 1977).

10. Reters, Liebe, Ehe und Partnerwahl.

Unlike Sderbaum, who stars exclusively in melodramas, Zarah Lean-

14. Ute Bechdorf, Wunsch-Bilder? Frauen in nationalsozialistischen Unterhaltungsfi lmen

In all of Leanders films, and Die groe Liebe in particular, elements

immediately present as what Rabenalt calls human material and stand in

possibility of a secret private life. Anticipating some moments in Foucault,

women.24 The difference is ultimately one between generic enplotment and

30. Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich, 62, 6567.

containment is at work in such space. Hence Rabenalts concentration, here

. . . behind three different phone calls . . .

. . . and within one

. . . offstage . . . . . . and backstage

profits and so presses his prize commodity to remember her contracts.

Rabenalts treatment of sexuality gives clues about the cinemas vari-

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