Projektionen der Moral. Filmskandale in der Weimarer Republik by Kai Nowak (review)

While political historians have time and again studied the functions and effects of political scandals in the increasingly mediated public spheres of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, film scholarship has often treated the topic rather anecdotally and taken the logic of “scandalous” communication as a given. Child prodigy and avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger chronicled sordid episodes in the lives of various Hollywood stars of the classic era in his notorious Hollywood Babylon (1959), often relying on no other evidence than sheer gossip. In Film as a Subversive Art (1974), Amos Vogel, the Austrian-born founder of the New York film club Cinema 16, attempted to identify the formal, content-related, and thematic transgressions that gave his selection of films (mainly international art house cinema from the 1960s and 1970s) what he deemed a “subversive” quality. Based on his 2012 doctoral dissertation, Kai Nowak’s Projektionen der Moral: Filmskandale in der Weimarer Republik can lay claim to being the first systematic, empirically exhaustive, and methodologically reflected study of public scandals triggered by motion pictures in the tumultuous period between World War I and the Nazi seizure of power. Taking his cues from the “New Film History” of the past thirty years, German “system theory,” and media archaeology, Nowak understands film scandals not as a momentous manifestation of a film’s intrinsic aesthetic or political qualities, but as an interplay of various “protest performances” across journalistic, legal, diplomatic, or media networks. Rejecting the “normative” approach of previous scholarship and its binary norm/transgression matrix, Nowak adopts a disengaged “functionalist” perspective as proposed by the sociology of Niklas Luhmann. Film scandals in the Weimar Republic, for Nowak, are best understood as an articulation of the “crisis of classical modernity” (Detlef Peukert) and a response to modernity’s increasing self-reflexivity, experience of contingency, and pluralization, which challenge social cohesion.

With the fading influence of older, holistic models of interpreting the world and the values and norms derived from them, Nowak emphasizes that mass media not only took over the orienting function of traditional systems of explanation (such as religion), but also became a target of the same attempts of regulation and met with the same conflicting responses as modernity itself. Scandals in this perspective are important social sites where moral conflicts in modern society are publically communicated and fought out, including conflicts about the meaning of modernity itself. Since mass media play a key role in the staging of modern scandals, media scandals also often assume a strong self-referentiality and are not only about their transgressive or provocative content, but also expose an era’s diverging views on mass media, spectatorship, and their political regulation through the nation-state.

Projektionen der Moral pursues three interrelated objectives. First, Nowak is interested in the “causes” of film scandals, i.e., the topics and aesthetic strategies that triggered public conflicts about social norms and values. Second, Projektionen der Moral aims to describe the relationship between film and popular culture, and the public sphere and politics in late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany from a media history perspective, including the role of film in the contemporary “media ensemble.” Third, the study seeks to illuminate the “functions and mechanisms” of film scandals. According to Nowak, scandals are not the fulfillment of an art work’s or film’s inherent “scandalizity,” but function as specific, historically contingent modes of reception and communicative practices based on “narrativization, dramatization, reduction of complexity, escalation, confrontation, formation of alliances, and identity management” (14).

Nowak’s book is divided into four large, thematic sections that are organized around four potential fields of conflict: “Crime, Violence, and Death,” “Sexuality and Gender,” “War Remembrance,” and “Politics and Ideology.” Although Nowak’s book as a whole is concerned with the culture wars following the German defeat in World War I, the first section actually goes back to the 1910s (the period when cinema transitioned from a “cinema of attractions” to narrative) and the cinema reform movement...