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Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of a Nazi Town
- University of Michigan Press
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187 Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of a Nazi Town In October 1946 Rolf Thiele and Hans Abich received a license from the British military government occupying Lower Saxony to create the Film Construction Company (Filmaufbau GmbH) Göttingen. The new film production firm made its home in an abandoned airplane hanger on the outskirts of town. The founders, both just twenty-eight years old, played up their inexperience with cinema, especially with that of the Third Reich, to obtain the considerable financing necessary to build a film studio. Except for a few bombing raids right at the end of the fighting, Göttingen had escaped World War II relatively unscathed and offered a rich cultural and intellectual environment in which to rebuild German cinema. Thiele and Abich declared their plans to craft realistic yet entertaining films that would help re-educate Germans. Between the years 1949 (when the Göttingen firm made its first film) and 1961 (when it closed down for financial reasons), this new venture produced ninety-five motion pictures . Although Film Construction Göttingen never made as many movies as studios in Berlin, Munich, or Hamburg, it did hold a respectable fourth place in total production behind those established locations of German filmmaking. And while Göttingen too produced some of the light entertainment that characterized 1950s West German cinema, most of the films promoted Thiele and Abich’s ideas about movies, notions that anticipated some of the qualities of New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s.1 The significance of this film studio in Göttingen reiterates one of this book’s main points, namely, that many Germans participated in political changes through cultural activities.2 Film Construction Göttingen also relied upon familiar important figures in town. Both Heidelbergs, for example, helped found and finance the endeavor. Their Capitol Theater became an even more important location in Göttingen’s cultural life, hosting what were now national premieres. For Film Construction Göttingen’s first debut, the highly acclaimed 188 Becoming a Nazi Town Love ’47, critics from across Germany joined over 30,000 viewers to see this “rubble film” at the Capitol in March 1949.3 This film company, like previous cultural organizations, built national success partly from established ideas, institutions , and individuals in Göttingen. Likewise, starting in 1948 some of the same leaders of interwar sharpshooting helped build that activity into an even more popular activity for men and women. And the same prime movers from the 1920s and 1930s directed the Händel Festival into the 1950s and beyond. These continuities in all three activities studied here over the 1940s therefore beg the question: When did Göttingen stop being a Nazi town? The short answer is: almost immediately after World War II ended, the pervasive influence of Nazi ideas in Göttingen’s daily life ceased. The two world wars have served as catastrophic bookends in this study of Göttingen. In both cases those conflagrations caused major ruptures in Göttingers’ lives. Yet we have seen that important ideas and individuals from the Kaiserreich shaped cultural life in Göttingen well into the 1930s. The November 1918 revolution brought new laws and democracy to Göttingen but did not replace individuals at the peak of political power with people more sympathetic to democratic governance. Indeed, one major explanation for the atmosphere in Göttingen that fostered Nazism’s growth was the lack of substantive change in personnel and ideas to match the new Weimar Republic’s formation. After World War II Göttingers likewise used the complex process of denazification and British occupation to their advantage. And some of the figures studied here— sharpshooting leader Wilhelm Lange, Händel Festival directors Walter Meyerhoff and Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard, cinema owner Ernst Heidelberg, and cultural critic Heinz Koch—continued successful careers that bridged the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, and Federal Republic of Germany. However, there are marked differences between the aftermaths of the two world wars in Göttingen. Unlike the shift to a republic in 1918, Germans in 1949 tied the creation of the Federal Republic directly to the promotion of democracy at all levels of West German society. The lengthy Allied occupation ensured that the economic, diplomatic, and military weight of the occupational and then Federal Republic governments undergirded real changes in the town hall and cultural life. Women in particular became more involved in all the cultural practices studied here and in public life generally, especially...