Erica Carter,
Dietrich’s Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film.
London: BFI Publishing, 2004.
ISBN: 0 8517 0882 X £48.00 (hb)
ISBN: 0 8517 0883 8 £16.99 (pb)
272 pp
(Review copy supplied by BFI publishing)

I was eager to read and review Erica Carter’s new book, both because I admire Carter’s scholarship and because I am intensely interested in Marlene Dietrich’s star persona and afterlife in German cinema and beyond.

As it turns out, however, Carter’s book is not especially about Dietrich or her uncanny doubles – those female performers who functioned as replacements for stars like Dietrich and Garbo, when they were rendered inaccessible to domestic German audiences as a result of exile and censorship after the Nazi assumption of power in 1933. To be fair, Carter does reference the “creative talent groomed for the new German film art” of the Nazi years (actresses such as Marika Rökk, Marianne Hoppe, Kristina Söderbaum). Moreover, she devotes three of her seven chapters to Dietrich and to one particular “ghost”, Zarah Leander, Swedish-born operetta and revue diva with the sublime voice, capable of filling in for the absent Dietrich and Garbo while expressing the potentially limitless violence of the Blitzkrieg. (Dietrich’s Ghosts features one chapter on Dietrich, two on Leander). Nevertheless, it seems to me that Carter’s subtitle more accurately describes the range, scope and originality of her work here.

Dietrich’s Ghosts is in fact a study of “the Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film.” Specifically, it offers an in-depth analysis of neo-Kantian aesthetic theories and practices in Third Reich cinema, in which the cinema is itself understood as “an industry, cultural institution, public sphere, social experience and ‘fantasy machine’.” (4) Third Reich films, alongside critical commentaries, acting practices, and exhibition spaces, Carter argues, endeavored to promote an idealist appreciation of beauty, a disavowal of the senses, a repudiation of the erotic, the sexual, and the primitive. Above all else, they upheld contemplation as the highest, most sublime and disinterested reception mode in Third Reich film.
This is a distinctive argument, which differentiates Carter’s book from the wealth of new writings on this period in German cinema. And, indeed, Carter takes pains to situate her approach both within and beyond existing scholarship on Third Reich film. As she explains in her introduction, “first-wave” historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s – scholars such as Gerd Albrecht, Jürgen Spiker, Joseph Wulf – tended to focus on explicitly political or “propaganda” films in their efforts to highlight links between state ideology and cinematic practices. They were concerned with ideological content and audience manipulation, state-commissioned films and anti-Semitic thinking. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, revisionist scholars such as Sabine Hake, Eric Rentschler, and Linda Schulte-Sasse shifted away from prioritizing films with obvious propagandistic intent to focus on fiction and entertainment films in the Third Reich. Unlike “first wave” scholars, these historians focused on the films themselves, employing critical theory and film studies methodologies that situated exemplary textual readings within larger histories of film industrial development as well as spectatorship and reception.

While indebted to this “second wave” of scholarship, Carter is nonetheless concerned to challenge what she sees as the inevitably “pluralist” implications of much of its findings. Carter stresses, and rightly so, that Third Reich cinema in all its diverse manifestations aimed to impose a consensus on social life. The failures, fissures, and contradictions in Nazi films, she maintains, should therefore “not detract entirely from Nazism’s drive for ‘hegemony’: its project, that is, to forge a common (völkish, militarist, fascist) culture across the regimes multifarious domains of socio-cultural operations, including film.” (5).

In an effort to understand Third Reich cinema differently, then, Carter aims to contextualize the study of popular film within larger histories of production and reception: studio history, acting theory and practice, a history of exhibition, studies of auteurism, the star system, and specifically German (and fascist) cultural discourses of the sublime and the beautiful, “personality” and “genius”.

Dietrich’s Ghosts is the result of years of archival research. Carter has obviously spent enormous time and energy documenting the systematic efforts of the Nazi regime to remake cinema in the image of the hierarchically organized and racist Nazi state – via an academy linking scholarly research and practical training, and through exhibition practices aimed at reinstating the cinema as a public space of the enactment of the identity of the Volk. Most impressive, however, is Carter’s analysis of the differences between the social function of stars in Western democracies and in totalitarian states. Unlike the Hollywood star system, which organized its stars as extraordinary versions of ordinary individuals, ideas of genius and stardom under Nazism were embedded in a racialized, idealized, communitarian and state-political charisma. In the Third Reich’s popular representations, ranging from star biographies to the illustrated press, Carter writes:

the collective embedding of the actor-personality was signaled symbolically by three recurrent metaphors. For the most avid fascist supporters, the metaphor was the military: the star as a ‘soldier of art’ who is ‘open to his people and his time’, willing to ‘risk stepping down from the stage’ to become one element in the ‘troop’ that was the folk community. Others drew on the motif of work as the ethical imperative binding the people to a common cause, and wrote of actors as craftsmen applying their ‘iron industry’ to the construction of a common culture for the German nation. For others again, it was race, ethnos or regional identity that bound the actor-personality to the nation. (63)

Here, as elsewhere, Carter demonstrates how archival research can illuminate textual practices and expand our understanding of now-familiar film theoretical categories (“stars” in this case, but also theories of “masquerade,” “voice” and femininity, which she considers in other chapters of this book). While I expected a study devoted to Dietrich or to Dietrich-like doubles in Nazi cinema, given this book’s title and captivating (if eerily death-like and shrouded cover image), I came away from my reading with a renewed respect for a theoretically sophisticated and materially grounded film history. My only wish is that Carter would have found time and space to consider more female stars of the Third Reich cinema – and more time and space for in-depth analysis of the films themselves.

Patrice Petro,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.

Created on: Wednesday, 20 July 2005