German Hollywood Presence and Parnassus: Central European Exiles and American Filmmaking

Abstract

The limited Douglas Sirk renaissance of the 1970s among American film students and German cineastes, promoted by New Wave filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1971 reassessment of the older director (95-106), confirms that the exile position of many Germanspeaking film directors, artists, scenarists, and freelancers active in Southern California after 1933 is widely unappreciated. Neither in Fassbinder's praise nor in German studies, such as Ulrich GregorEnno Patalas' standard Geschichte des Films 1895-1960, is Sirk identified as director Detlef Hans Sierk (also Detlev Sierck) of Central European cinema fame in the 1930s. Similar name changes -director Kurt Bernhardt to Curtis Bernhardt, Hermann Kosterlitz to Henry Koster, composer Franz Wachsmann to Franz Waxman -suggest immediate assimilation of Hitler refugees in their American film haven. And this assimilation more than the German tone and film genre marked their contributions to American filmmaking. The German-speaking exiles' presence was, however, felt in their motifs, formal characteristics, and casting, as well as in directing and acting. During cold wars and open conflicts, there are obvious limits to practically realizing the ideal of an exclusively exile film project, i.e., a film created by German emigre alone. Such independent cinema activity in countries antagonistic to Germany had little chance of succeeding. Who would distinguish exile-German from German Reichs national, or friendly from enemy alien? Successful independent film work by exiles did not even emerge from pre-war locales of German film exile on the continent, from Paris, London, Zurich, and Amsterdam, where German refugees congregated before 1939. The exception appears to be Gustav von Wangenheim's anti-Nazi film Kdmpfer, or Fighters. Its year of production in the U.S.S.R., 1936, preceded World War II. This film profiles Bulgarian Communist George Dimitroff, who nearly reduced Goering to a ranting maniac in 1933 before the Supreme Court of Leipzig when the Nazi leader attempted to implicate the Bulgarian in the Reichstag fire. In Hollywood, the transatlantic center for German film exiles and the Parnassus of German exile literature from 1940 on, a similar production failed to reach the American public. The late and famous German exile playwright Carl Zuckmayer noted that a Hauptmann von Kopenick, or Captain ofKoepenick, remake originated as a totally German exile project. Under the same title, German director Richard