The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Brecht and Weill repeated their success with Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny)—like The Threepenny Opera, a parable of modern society. The responses of audiences and critics were extreme either way and, as Weill put it, “Mahagonny, like Sodom and Gomorrah, falls on account of the crimes, the licentiousness and the general confusion of its inhabitants.”34 It was also epic theater, which for Brecht was central: “The premise for dramatic theatre was that human nature could not be changed; epic theatre assumed not only that it could but that it was already changing.”35

  The Nazis took increasing interest in Brecht and Weill. When the latter attended one of their rallies out of mere curiosity in 1929, he was appalled to hear himself denounced “as a danger to the country,” together with Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. He left hurriedly, unrecognized.

  SECOND ONLY TO HOLLYWOOD

  When Remarque arrived in America, in Hollywood in particular, he probably felt more at home than he might have expected.36 This chapter began with a description of a film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but although that was a seminal Expressionist work, it was a long way from being the only one. In fact, the 1920s, the years of the Weimar Republic, saw what was without question the golden age of German film, when German film rivaled Hollywood in its creativity and impact, when there was a golden generation of German film directors who have given us many of the most beautiful and important films ever made. Moreover, each of that generation—Fritz Lang (1890–1976), F. W. Murnau (1888–1931), Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947), Robert Siodmak (1900–73), Billy Wilder (1906–2002), Otto Preminger (1906–86) and Fred Zinnemann (1907–97)—ended up in America. All but Murnau were Jewish, and all left either before Hitler came to power or not long afterward. It is safe to say that among them they helped create the cinema as we know it today.

  Scholarship about Weimar cinema has been undergoing a certain amount of revision recently. Traditionally, film in the 1920s in Germany has been described as “Expressionist,” as an art form where the emotion generated is more important than the accurate depiction of reality, where distortion is a favorite technique, together with exotic effects and characters, with fantasy and (frequently) horror being a dominant motif. While no one denies that these features did characterize German films in the early years of the Weimar period (or the theater of Reinhardt and Brecht, come to that), the general feeling now is that film was more influenced by art nouveau or the more mechanical modernism of Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, and Fernand Léger, rather than Kirchner, Klee, or Nolde. As the twenties passed, montage became a dominant technique, as in Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1929), by Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zinnemann, and Kuhle Wampe, 1932, by Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht.37

  This was also the period when talking pictures eclipsed silent movies (1929), when cinema audiences went up everywhere, but in Germany, it was claimed, there was something else, something fundamental that helped explain the success of German films. It was shown at its clearest in a book published in 1930 by Siegfried Kracauer. He too went to America and would later write a seminal book about German film in Weimar times (From Caligari to Hitler), but his 1930 book was Die Angestellten, literally “The Employees” or “Workers,” though it was more an examination of a new class that he thought had come into existence since World War I, more akin to what we would now call, in English, “white-collar workers.”38 Kracauer identified a rootlessness, a physical isolation, and an emotional insecurity that produced in this new group a longing for—and a love of—spectacle; as modern life became more streamlined and monotonized, so this new class developed in its leisure time what he called a “culture of distraction.” Elizabeth Harvey likewise argues that mass media came of age in Germany in the Weimar years and that the change produced its effect more among the working class than the middle class and more among women than men.39 Kracauer’s book was the original model for a long line of popular sociological analyses that would dominate the Western world in the second half of the twentieth century, but he also sought to explain why there was such a demand for film in Weimar. More than sound, it was the distraction film offered, the mix of high and low culture that was, he said, the natural home of film. Going to the cinema, much more than the theater or the opera, offered an opportunity to experience what Hofmannsthal had called “ceremonies of the whole” of a kind and on a scale never before experienced, subverting and sabotaging the caste system that Bismarck’s reforms had left intact.

  Among the golden generation, who should take precedence? Probably Lubitsch. The son of a Jewish tailor, Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) was born in Berlin and, at the age of nineteen, joined Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. He made his film debut a year later as an actor, but his main love was directing and, at the end of World War I, he had three hits, one after the other. The first was Die Augen der Mummie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy; 1918), with Pola Negri in the starring role, followed by Carmen (Gypsy Blood), with the same star. Later that same year Lubitsch released Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess), a comedy of manners satirizing American foibles. In this film he first showed traces of what would become known as “the Lubitsch touch,” gentle humor driven home by witty visual flourishes, contrasting with brief scenes—often a single shot—that summed up the characters’ motivations and thereby explained the plot.

  On the strength of these successes, Lubitsch went to Hollywood early, in 1922, and became known for two entirely different types of film—comedies, often absurd comedies, and grand historical dramas. He made a number of classic films toward the end of the silent era (Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Student Prince), but when sound came along he responded with some of the earliest musicals—The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant. In 1935 he was appointed production manager of MGM, becoming the only director to run a large studio. But the hits kept coming and in 1939 he directed Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, cowritten with Billy Wilder, and notable for the fact that, as the publicity for the film announced, “Garbo laughs!” Lubitsch had left Germany permanently when the Nazis achieved power, and he became an American citizen in 1936.

  Fritz Lang (1890–1976) was born in Vienna, studied painting in Paris, and saw action in Russia and Romania in World War I, where he was wounded three times. He was in some ways the quintessential Expressionist director, who began by working for Erich Pommer’s company and whose films in the pre-sound era were crammed with spies, dragons, historical heroes, master criminals, and tyrants. He loved big-budget epics and the special effects that Max Reinhardt had made so popular. Lang was probably the most famous film director in Weimar Germany, his work being likened to a cross between Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler. In the silent era his biggest hits included Metropolis, the world’s most expensive film when it was released, and M, a study of a child murderer (based on an actual case in Düsseldorf and starring Peter Lorre), who is tracked down and brought to justice by his fellow criminals. Many consider this Lang’s masterpiece.40 The famous story about Goebbels summoning Lang to his office, to tell him that his most recent film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), was being banned as an incitement to public disorder, and at the same time offering him the position as head of UFA, the German film studio, has been dismissed as apocryphal. What is true is that Lang, as a Jew, left Germany for Hollywood soon after, while his wife, Thea von Harbou, stayed behind, and joined the Nazi Party.

  In America, Lang was employed by MGM and is held to have been at least partly responsible for the emergence of film noir (despite its French name), his most famous work of this kind being The Big Heat, starring Glenn Ford and Lee Marvin. But he worked with many stars, including Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Tyrone Power, and Edward G. Robinson, in films such as You and Me, 1938, with songs by Kurt Weill, and Hangmen Also Die!, cowritten with Bertolt Brecht. Toward the end of his life he returned to Germany.

  Billy Wilder, born Samuel Wilder (1906–2002) was brou
ght up in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now Poland but studied at the University of Vienna, where he dropped out to become a journalist in Berlin. He started on the sports pages, changed to film reviewing, and acquired a taste for screenwriting. He collaborated with Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Eugen Schüfften, and Fred Zinnemann on the 1929 film Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), but left Germany via Paris (with $1,000 in his hatband) for Hollywood, in 1933 (traveling on a British ship, to learn English). In Los Angeles he shared an apartment with Peter Lorre. His family who remained in Germany—his mother, grandmother and stepfather—all died in Auschwitz.41

  Wilder’s first success was Ninotchka, written with Ernst Lubitsch, but he then went on to have the most illustrious career of all the golden generation, or at least, for most people, the most remembered. Among his films, we may mention Double Indemnity (1944), a murder plotted for the insurance money, The Lost Weekend (1946), an examination of alcoholism, Sunset Boulevard (1950), about an aging film star dreaming of a comeback, Ace in the Hole (1951), an attack on gutter journalism, The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment(1960), which are all so well known as to need no further comment. What is worth adding is that, in the course of these films, Wilder coaxed Oscar-winning performances out of leading actors in unlikely roles—William Holden, Fred MacMurray, and James Cagney as comedians. It was Wilder who paired Jack Lemmon with Walter Matthau, notably in The Front Page, 1974. Credited with breaking the bonds of Hollywood censorship in several of his films, he won six Oscars and was nominated another fifteen times. When he died a French newspaper titled its front-page obituary: “BILLY WILDER IS DEAD. NOBODY’S PERFECT.”

  Erich Korngold (1897–1957) was not a director, but a composer, the son of a Jewish music critic from Brno in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now the Czech Republic. He studied music under Alexander von Zemlinsky, and both Strauss and Mahler liked his work—the latter referring to him as a “musical genius.” Korngold moved to the United States in 1934 and composed many film scores, beginning with an adaptation of Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he wrote for Max Reinhardt’s 1935 version of the Shakespeare classic. In 1938 he was asked to compose the music for an Errol Flynn film, The Adventures of Robin Hood; and while he was in Hollywood the Anschluss took place, so he stayed in California. His film credits include the music for Deception, starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains, Anthony Adverse, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Constant Nymph, and Of Human Bondage. He also composed a piano, violin, and cello concerto and a symphony and arranged operettas by Strauss and Offenbach. His oeuvre—very rich chromatically—is at last being treated seriously in the history of twentieth-century music, and his opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City; 1920), a big hit in the 1920s, has recently been revived in Bonn, Vienna, San Francisco, and London.42

  And then there was The Blue Angel. Besides being, according to some, the first masterpiece of sound cinema and the first major German sound film, it brought together four unusual talents. The plot, it will be recalled from Chapter 27, was based on Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat, the schoolteacher who is ruined by his charges even as he tries to expose them, as he falls hopelessly in love with a nightclub singer. The film, released in 1930, was directed by Josef von Sternberg, cowritten with Carl Zuckmayer, and starred Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich.

  Sternberg, originally Jonas Sternberg, without the “von,” which was added by a Hollywood studio, was Austrian-Jewish, from Vienna, though he spent much of his childhood in New York City where his father was starting anew. Sternberg got a job repairing films and in that way wormed his way into the business. His early films attracted the attention of Charlie Chaplin, who invited him to Hollywood, where Sternberg made his name with a series of gangster movies (the 1920s were the era of Prohibition). On the strength of this he went to Germany in 1930 for The Blue Angel, produced in both German and English.

  Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977) was brought up in Mainz and saw action on the Western Front during World War I. In 1917 he published a collection of pacifist war poems. His first plays did not do well but in 1924 he became dramaturge at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, alongside Bertolt Brecht. There, his play Der fröhliche Weinberg (The Merry Vineyard; 1925) won him the Kleist Prize. The Blue Angel was not his only great success of 1930, a year when he also won the Büchner Prize. After 1933, however, his plays were banned and he moved to Switzerland and then America. Although he did some work in Hollywood, he bought a farm in Vermont and, after World War II, became a cultural attaché to Germany, helping in the postwar investigations of war criminals. He wrote several other plays, which were successes in Germany, and in 1952 won the Goethe Prize.

  The Blue Angel achieved part of its effect from Sternberg’s lighting, which intensified the emotional impact, and owed much to Zuckmayer’s writing, which had to underscore Heinrich Mann’s text, in which Professor Unrat is transformed from a confident, if not entirely likeable full character, into a shell. Emil Jannings (1884–1950), who played Unrat, was at the time a much better known actor than Dietrich, with a remarkable voice and delivery.43 A Swiss, at the time shooting began he had become the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor, for The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command, but at the invention of sound his thick German accent ruined him for Hollywood. During the Third Reich he appeared in several propagandistic films, including Führerprinzip (1937) and The Dismissal of Bismarck (1942), with Goebbels naming him an “Artist of the State” in 1941. On account of this, Jannings was forced to undergo de-Nazification after the war.

  But of course what everyone remembers, or knows, about The Blue Angel is Marlene Dietrich (1901–92), her voice and her legs (showing stockings and garters, in one of the most famous film posters of all time). Born in Berlin-Schöneberg, the daughter of a police officer, she was not at all well known going into The Blue Angel. She had studied violin at school, had failed her audition for Max Reinhardt’s drama academy, but had nonetheless appeared as a chorus girl and in walk-on parts in such plays as Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box. In The Blue Angel she played Lola, the nightclub singer, and what struck a chord was her smoky, world-weary singing voice, in particular the song that made her famous and is always associated with her, “Falling in Love Again.” (Ernest Hemingway famously said, “If she had nothing more than her voice, she could break your heart with it.”) On the back of the success of the film, Paramount marketed her as a German Garbo, and she appeared in her first American film, Morocco, also directed by Sternberg.44

  She made many other films, opposite such stars as James Stewart and John Wayne and working with directors such as Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles. She took an active role in World War II, being one of the first stars to help raise war bonds, making anti-Nazi records for the OSS, including “Lili Marlene,” and singing for the troops under General Patton, even playing the saw.45 After the war, with her film career stalled, she re-invented herself as a cabaret star under the direction of Burt Bacharach. Her return to Germany in 1960 had a mixed reception, but she was buried in Berlin not far from where she had grown up.

  The demise of Professor Unrat set the scene for the demise of Weimar. The Blue Angel was banned in Nazi Germany.

  32.

  Weimar: The Golden Age of Twentieth-Century Physics, Philosophy, and History

  In many areas of science, the wake of war lasted for years. In 1919 the Allies established an International Research Council, but Germany and Austria were excluded. Not until 1925 and the Locarno Pact was this rule relaxed but even then German and Austrian scientists turned down the olive branch. The frost existed on more informal levels too—Germans were banned from international science conferences, they were not offered visiting fellowships, and their research was not incorporated into the leading journals. Notably, the Solvay Conferences of physicists were without German participation until 1923.1

  At much the same time, a new organization wa
s established in the Weimar Republic, the Assistance Fund for German Science, which brought together the universities, the academies, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Societies. While the financial and organizational situation thus slowly improved, problems began to emerge at more personal levels. Einstein began to experience anti-Semitism and he was not the only one. Richard Willstätter had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1920 for his work on the understanding of chlorophyll but, before that, in World War I, he had invented a triple-layered gas-mask, and as a result had been awarded the Iron Cross. Yet he found Munich, where he was professor, so anti-Semitic that in 1924 he resigned his position.2

  Out of this unenviable situation, however, something rather striking occurred. The period between 1919 and 1932 would become the golden age of physics, particularly theoretical physics, and although it was very much an international effort, the centers of gravity in those years were three institutes, in Copenhagen, Göttingen, and Munich.

  Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics had opened in Copenhagen in January 1921, quickly followed, in 1922, by the award of a Nobel Prize. Just before World War I, Bohr had explained how electrons orbit the nucleus only in certain formations, which married atomic structure to Max Planck’s notion of quanta. But, in the same year that he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Bohr also explained the fundamental links between physics and chemistry, showing that successive orbital shells could contain only a precise number of electrons, and introduced the idea that elements that behave in a similar way chemically do so because they have a similar arrangement of electrons in their outer shells, which are the ones most used in chemical reactions.

  THE ADVENT OF QUANTUM WEIRDNESS

  One of the international galaxy of physicists who studied at Copenhagen was the Swiss-Austrian Wolfgang Pauli. In 1924 Pauli was a pudgy twenty-three-year-old, prone to depression when scientific problems defeated him. One problem in particular had set him prowling the streets of the Danish capital.3 It arose from the fact that no one just then understood why all the electrons in orbit around the nucleus didn’t just crowd in on the inner shell. This is what should have happened, with the electrons emitting energy in the form of light. What was known by now, however, was that each shell of electrons is arranged so that the inner shell always contains just one orbit, whereas the next shell out contains four. Pauli’s contribution was to show that no orbit could contain more than two electrons. Once it had two, an orbit was “full,” and other electrons were excluded, forced to the next orbit out. This meant that the inner shell (one orbit) could not contain more than two electrons, and that the next shell out (four orbits) could not contain more than eight. This became known as Pauli’s exclusion principle, and part of its beauty lay in the way it expanded Bohr’s explanation of chemical behavior. Hydrogen, for example, with one electron in the first orbit, is chemically active. Helium, however, with two electrons in the first orbit, is virtually inert (i.e., that orbit is “full” or “complete”).