From Weimar to Hollywood: Christian Images and the Portrayal of the Jew

Brown | From Weimar to Hollywood: Christian Images and the Portrayal of the Jew From Weimar to Hollywood: Christian Images and the Portrayal of the Jew Nancy Thomas Brown University of Colorado at Boulder1 During the Third Reich, audiences were hardly a passive public manipulated by an ideological apparatus. Over 1,000 German feature films premiered from 1933 to the end of the war in 1945; ticket admissions increased from 245 million in 1933 to over 1 ,100 million in 1944. Entertainment during the Third Reich emanated from a "ministry of illusion," not a "ministry of fear."2 Hitler and Minister ofPropagandaJoseph Goebbels, keenly aware of film's ability to mobilize emotions and immobilize minds, created overpowering illusions and captivated audiences without displaying overt propaganda. Ideology came packaged in gripping, engaging, and pleasant entertainment steeped in traditional values that coexisted with other emanations ofeveryday life and culture. While the Nazis would not have promoted traditional Christian ideology, their use ofreligious imagery and symbolism were familiar to the general population. When examining films produced during the Weimar era, the Third Reich, and even Hollywood, religious symbolism promoted Christian themes— particularly the doctrines of sin, punishment, and redemption as the moral lesson to be drawn from Nazism—along with the negative stereotype of the Jew. Films made in different decades, using different modes ofproduction, with different cultural codes, and reflecting entirely different attitudes toward the theme of the war and the Jews share these commonalities including the portrayal of the Jew as both physically and spiritually weak. The horrors of the Holocaust have posed crucial historical, ethical, psychological, and theological problems, producing many artistic versions loaded with ideological overtones that not only betray the event's authenticity, but also conformto prevailing social attitudes and convey a comforting, rather than a challenging message. Through the investigation ofthis artistic representation, I confront broader issues raised by the study of the Holocaust, particularly anti-Semitism that enlisted the apparatus of the state to raise mass murder to the highest ideological imperative and the ease with which people accepted the fundamental breaches of human and civil rights. There existed two cinematic paradigms of Jewishness, both of which are firmly rooted in the Christian tradition: one was exploited by the Nazis, the second reappears in the popular culture of post-Holocaust cinema. Weimar Cinema and Jewish Identity Perhaps, instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished historical fact, which the new cinematic discourses then represent, we should think ofidentity as a '"production," which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation. —Stuart Hall The first German Republic and its media experienced challenges from the very beginning. Although freedom of expression was guaranteed in Article 118 of the Weimar Constitution of 1919 and although censorship was prohibited, freedom of the press and of motion pictures was not mentioned explicitly in this Article. A special Motion Picture Law of 1920 established a Central Censorship Board that licensed every meter of film produced or imported. These early movies conditioned new audiences to a new medium of public entertainment and collective daydreaming. Films in the 1920s codified an "architecture ofJewishness," framing images in the metaphor of the city—the embodiment of capitalism, urban exploitation, and power on one hand, and swarthiness, exotic practices, and ghetto sensibilities on the other. The "rich Jew" represented the thriving industrialist, the modern capitalist, the slumlord who manipulates the powerlessness of his fellow citizens and who dominates physical, financial, and political exchange.3 Within the German concern over Judenfrage, Weimar cinema discovered a popular social, cultural, and political question through which to pursue the perceived problems of the big city and thus visually solidified the identity ofthe Jew.4 "In the streets of Berlin, one is not seldom struck by the momentary insight that one day all this will suddenly burst apart. The entertainment to which the general public throngs ought to produce the same effect."5 Such depictions ofJews were certainly not limited to artistic productions of the time. On 24 February 1920, only eight months 14 I Film & History Nancy Thomas Brown | Special In-Depth Section prior to the Berlin premiere oíDer Golem, AdolfHitler introduced his twenty-five...