Mass Culture and Divided Audiences: Cinema and Social Change in Inter-War Germany

Mass Culture and Divided Audiences:

Cinema and Social Change in Inter-War Germany*

Given the central role of the mass media in contemporary society, the increasing attention they have recently attracted among historians is thoroughly understandable. In the case of Germany, the period between the two World Wars has, for a number of reasons, occupied a particularly prominent place in media history. The rapid expansion of mass communications and commercial amusements in Weimar Germany (the advent of radio, the rise of the illustrated press, the continued growth of the cinema) is widely regarded as a powerful modernizing force both culturally — as part and parcel of 'Weimar culture', commonly seen as the very embodiment of modernity¹ — as well as in its social effects. According to this view, the mass media — especially film, the most important entertainment medium of the inter-war period — played a crucial role in eroding traditional regional and class-based patterns of leisure and establishing a more international, 'class-transcendent' and 'socially standardizing' 'mass culture'² shared by all social groups.³ The processes of Nazi censorship and Gleichschaltung (bringing into line) in the years that followed are widely thought to have reinforced this trend. Not only did the media offer more circumscribed and therefore standardized fare, but the Nazi regime also consciously attempted to expand media use as a means of disseminating its messages and of helping to blur class and urban/rural divides within the idealized Volksgemeinschaft (national community).⁴

Though a standard feature of most surveys of the Weimar era and Third Reich, this interpretation invites considerable scepticism in view of the state of research on commercial entertainments in inter-war Germany. Whereas there is a vast literature on the aesthetic content of the new media,⁵ on their organizational history⁶ and on contemporary discourses about mass culture,⁷ research has by and large stopped short of examining assumptions about its social impact, distribution, transmission and reception. This is understandable given the extraordinary vehemence and politicization of cultural debates during the Weimar Republic. It is also understandable in view of the Nazis' political instrumentalization of art and entertainment for propagandistic purposes, not to mention the source barriers that so often hinder the analysis of media reception beyond the level of societal 'discourse'. But examining the social impact of commercial entertainments involves studying not only the discourse surrounding them, but also their patterns of availability and uptake, their potential to exert any socially unifying effect, as well as the wider social and economic context in which they were embedded.⁸ These questions have rarely been addressed in the extensive literature on media and culture in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. And where they have been tackled,⁹ the question of how the social effect of mass culture was related to wider economic and political factors, and how this changed over time, remains open.

This article seeks to shed some light on these issues through an examination of film, the flagship mass medium of the inter-war period. Eschewing assumptions about an inexorable trend towards a more universal mass culture, it approaches film as a medium with a wide range of possible social implications, including the potential to unite or to divide audiences. It argues that the social impact of film changed substantially during the turbulent years between the World Wars, as the context in which films were produced and viewed was profoundly transformed. For a variety of reasons, the early 1930s marked a particular turning point, as developments both within the film industry as well as in society at large began to favour the integrative over the segmenting potential of the cinema as a popular cultural activity — an argument that questions the common emphasis on the pre-Depression 'Golden Years' of the Weimar Republic as a central watershed in the wider history of mass media and commercial culture in Germany.

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Cinema and Social Divisions...