Nazi Film Melodrama

2. The Nazi Modernization of Sex: Romance Melodrama

2. The Nazi Modernization of Sex: Romance Melodrama According to a statistical analysis of the titles of films produced during the Third Reich, Frau(en) and Liebe were the most common nouns used in naming products of the Nazi cinema.1 “Women” and “love” were the terms deemed most effective for drawing audiences to the theaters, and presumably they were also considered the most effective for the drawing out of nationalist energies and the erasing of internal conflicts. The erotic drive can be considered the main motor of German fascist cinema, the very basis of spectator pleasure, narrative construction, and the creation of meaning. In this it was entirely consistent with the interests of classical Hollywood. As Mary Ann Doane has pointed out, film narrative and film meaning in American cinema also depend on romance: “the couple is a constant figure of Hollywood’s rhetoric and some kind of heterosexual pact constitutes its privileged mode of closure.”2 The cinema of the Third Reich, following Hollywood , placed the heterosexual couple at the rhetorical and narrative center of almost all of its films. Romance, one could say, formed the very basis of Third Reich cinema, the scaffolding onto which all other genres built their specific architecture; comedies, musicals, and even war and crime films were built upon the core of coupling, their generic patterns inserted over the basic structure of romantic relations. Not all romance was melodramatic, of course. Romance was more often taken lightly in Nazi cinema than seriously; in fact, the majority of films with “Frau” (woman) or “Liebe” (love) in their titles were comedies.3 But the focus and ideological task of each romantic mode varied. Whereas romantic relations in comedy were most often the vehicle for elaborating problems of the social order, such as class conflicts, the romance melodrama took Heins_NaziFilm_text.indd 45 5/3/13 11:43 AM 46 chapter two coupling seriously and privileged it over other thematic concerns, investing its energies into the production and management of sexual desire. The romance melodrama, although somewhat less extensive than the romantic comedy in terms of production numbers, was nonetheless a privileged genre in the Third Reich, receiving far more screen time than war films. The Nazis’ cinematic obsession with the mechanics of desire was surprisingly central for a society that specialized in technologies of death. Far more feature film footage was used for defining sex roles and suggesting sex acts than for defining concepts of national character, generating hatred of enemies, or fabricating notions of race—ideological tasks that were more commonly left to the press and cinema’s paratextual discourses.4 Whereas the Nazis needed little internal negotiation to carry out their genocidal “final solution” to racist paranoia, gender and sexuality were issues that film melodrama had to continually readdress. As Goebbels stated in 1937, “The issue of women’s rights [die Frauenfrage] is our most difficult problem.”5 For the fascist man the problem lay in the question of how to maximize women’s productivity and reproductivity while minimizing the costs arising from her own demands for fulfillment and recognition. Evidently, even if the vast majority of Nazi film narratives circled around sexual concerns, romance films still had military implications. Women were to be made serviceable for the Nazi regime’s massive project of imperial expansion, and the cinema helped to articulate what role they would play in an expanding Reich and ultimately in colonial territories abroad. The shifting borders of the regime’s dominion over both foreign and domestic populations necessitated recalibrations in its gender ideology. One of the most problematic issues concerned women’s participation in paid labor, which was considered undesirable at the beginning of the regime due to high unemployment rates but ultimately became indispensable as the Reich moved closer to war. Love stories in Nazi cinema often took up the issue of women’s place in the public sphere and addressed the issue of the relative values of professional and private life. Contrary to common assumption, most Nazi romance films did not advocate a return to traditional feminine roles or oppose the Weimar era’s advances into sexual modernity. Instead, Nazi romance melodramas often supported a turn away from domesticity while arguing for the maintenance of hierarchical structures and self-sacrificial positions in the workplace. This was true of prewar as well as wartime films. Nazi romance melodramas also spoke to men and aimed to condition male desire as well. As noted in the last chapter, melodramatic spectatorship in...