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Epilogue Reprivatization after Nazi Cinema: Postwar German Melodrama In spring 1944, as the Reich was preparing for total war and nervously anticipating the Allied invasion, stories of Wehrmacht officers’ lavish lifestyles in occupied territories circulated among the German home front populace, disillusioning many who believed in the mythic power of an ordered and unified Volksgemeinschaft. The Nazi “deployment of sexuality” was backfiring on severalfronts,andthelibidinal,cinematic weaponofwarwasfaultedasafailed technology. In Security Service reports the regime’s spies shifted responsibility for military defeat away from the Nazi leadership’s imperialist fantasies of mass destructionandtowardthesupposeddestructioncausedbyexcessivesexuality, which the Nazi cinema itself had seemingly produced. Not surprisingly, it was female sexuality that received the brunt of the blame for what was perceived as an abrupt decay in moral standards—defined exclusively in terms of sexual behaviors rather than militarist violence and genocide. The Security Service raised an urgent alarm in April 1944 about a general outbreak of what it termed the widespread “tendencies toward excessive sexual behavior without responsibility to the community.”1 Wartime conditions had facilitated a complete breakdown in the restraint of German women, the SD agents claimed: To a much larger extent than during the First World War, women in the present war have been released from their peacetime life order . . . there are coinciding reports from all areas of the Reich that confirm that it is no longer a matter of isolated phenomena, but rather that a large proportion of women and girls are inclined to live it up sexually to an ever stronger degree. This is primarily noticeably with soldiers’ wives. There are reportedly widely known locations in many cities where soldiers’ wives go to meet men and to accompany them Heins_NaziFilm_text.indd 193 5/3/13 11:44 AM 194 epilogue home. While their mothers carry on in this way, the children are often left on their own and at the risk of utter neglect.2 The message that Nazi militarist culture promoted and facilitated the satisfaction of desires unavailable in peacetime bourgeois society had apparently been received by the female audiences of Nazi films. The SD, overlooking the instrumentality of such messages, directly blamed the Nazi cinema along with other forms of mass culture for what it called the “eroticization of public life” in the Third Reich, an eroticization that had given way to what the Security Service depicted as a widespread and detrimental license that was undermining wartime unity. As a remedy the SD recommended a complete departure from Nazi cinema ’s previous gender representations: The original values of the German woman should be discussed and emphasized much more in the press, radio and film than they have been up until now. It is not sufficient that books—which are not read by the majority of the population and can no longer be purchased even by those interested—speak of the woman as the “defender of morality,” “guardian of life,” etc., while films, pop songs, short stories and the illustrated press (joke sections of newspapers, fashion magazines) cultivate the type of the erotic woman who enchants all men.3 Apparently this advice was not heeded at the Propaganda Ministry. As we have seen throughout this book, the “erotic woman” was an indispensable element of Nazi cinema’s attractions, the basic tool of its ideological and financial goals, and the primary interest of Nazi melodramas. Nazi revue films may have offered the most concentrated provocations of desire with their physical displays and fetishism of the exposed female body, but melodrama transformed these erotic provocations into models for living, moving from iconic image to narrative. And Nazi melodramas, far from offering narratives championing housewives as revered family nurturers and guardians of private life in the manner of classical Hollywood melodrama, continued instead to cultivate the eroticization of the Third Reich public sphere even as it was collapsing. A few months after the SD circulated its warning, prints of Veit Harlan’s domestic melodrama Opfergang were delivered to cinemas in the Reich and abroad. The film was enthusiastically received by spectators, and due to its enticing thematization of extramarital relations and its exploration of “natural ” eroticism in luxurious settings, it achieved a box office triumph over Hollywood films in some foreign markets.4 As the Reich general film director noted in a memo to Goebbels on the foreign reception of the film, Opfergang was derisively called a “carnival orgy” by a leading film critic in Switzerland, but the melodrama was nonetheless received with enormous popular success Heins_NaziFilm_text.indd 194 5/3...

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