Hollywood, Hitler, and Historiography: Film History as Cultural Critique

On the wide ocean on which we shall venture out, the possible routes and courses are many, and the identical studies made for this volume could, if dealt with by another man, … easily occasion essentially different conclusions.

—Jakob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

HOLLYWOOD MEETS HARVARD

Hollywood has a long history of courting academia. As Peter Decherney has detailed, the relationship dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century, when collaborations with Columbia and Harvard Universities formed part of the industry’s bid for cultural respectability. This romance was recently rekindled when the Hollywood Reporter went to Harvard in the summer of 2013. What prompted the industry trades to visit the Ivies almost a century after Harvard had served as the incubator for what eventually became the Academy Awards? In a six-minute online video designed to promote the magazine’s July cover story, “How Hollywood Helped Hitler,” we meet Ben Urwand, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Titles in block lettering, fancy editing effects, and a looped sound track lend the brief clip the hip ambience that its makers seem afraid their subject matter lacks. As the camera explores his bookshelves to set the atmosphere of learnedness, and cutaways show Urwand sorting through his research materials, the young scholar expounds his qualifications (“I spent about ten years in the archives in Germany and the United States”) and discusses the files that he found among Hitler’s personal papers while writing The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Urwand). From those papers, he was able to reconstruct Hitler’s opinions of the movies: the Führer could cry over Greta Garbo, his favorite actress, loved everything by Laurel and Hardy, and disliked Tarzan. But the real argument of Urwand’s book, we learn, concerns Hollywood’s decision not to show the persecution of the Jews or any screen Nazis during the 1930s. The reason, he argues, lies in the fact that the studios were doing business with real Nazis at the same time—a fact that he terms “collaboration,” explaining that this was the word he found in the historical documents.¹ Not wishing to reinforce the impression that he might be casting collective blame on “the Jews” of Hollywood for collaborating with the world’s most notoriously anti-Semitic regime, Urwand emphasizes that he sought to bring out the courageous voices of American Jewish screenwriters Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht, who stood up for the Jews and against Hitler. These exemplars he pits against the readiness of the studio heads to make concessions to Nazi demands concerning distribution and censorship of Hollywood movies—a relationship for which he deliberately and provocatively chooses the titular term “collaboration.” It is a loaded term and one that simplifies a complex mix of culture, politics, and industry. But just before we cut back to the cover design of the July issue of the Hollywood Reporter, featuring a swastika on the landmark Warner Brothers’ Water Tower, Urwand concedes in closing that “it’s a complicated story.”²

In view of snippets like this one, what’s complicated about the story of The Collaboration is that it has become difficult to sort out the claims of the book from the media attention that swirled around it. Both deserve our attention as they throw into relief not only the embattled state of academic publishing but also the continuing hold of Hitler on our historical imagination. As numerous commentators have pointed out, the latter has long been cinematic in its own right: Urwand scours Mein Kampf along with Hitler’s movie preferences to suggest that his “historical imagination had been deeply informed by film” (17), and Eric Rentschler has persuasively argued that the Third Reich was in an important sense “movie made.”³ Fascism’s fascination with cinema, which Susan Sontag famously traced to the work of Leni Riefenstahl, only solidified in the aftermath of Nazism—from Hollywood’s anti-Nazi films of the 1940s through subsequent waves of “screen Nazis” (whether sexy or nasty), which appear to have been cresting again in recent years...