Transcript​​

[Movie clip plays]

 

These were excerpts from the 1931 German movie M by Fritz Lang. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest films of all time.

 

It is highly unlikely that Barbara, Anneliese, Lisa or Alma saw M when it was released in German cinemas, as they were small children in 1931, and M deals with grim subject matter. However, as these women grew up, they became true film lovers and often went to the movie theater to see a new movie as soon as it came out.

 

Welcome to What They Can Teach Us: The Podcast. My name is Frank Brückner and I created the series to provide additional context to the website, “What They Can Teach Us,” which was developed from interviews with four women who immigrated from Germany to Canada in the early 1950s.

 

The website and podcasts were initiated and are supported by the Chair in German-Canadian studies at the university of Winnipeg. In these podcasts, you will learn what life was like in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Barbara, Lisa, Alma, and Anneliese, like so many of our parents and grandparents, left Germany and crossed the Atlantic ocean to begin their lives anew in Canada.

 

This is part 3 of a series of short podcasts, accompanying the interviews of “What They Can Teach Us”: What They Were Watching. Let's take a peek with our ears.

 

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Among the many difficulties these women faced when they immigrated to Canada was the language barrier. Their English was not very good, if it existed at all.

 

They came from a different culture and had just survived the most horrible war in world history started by their fellow Germans. They were seeking a new and better life in an unknown, sparsely populated country, 28 times the size of Germany.

Barbara, Anneliese, Lisa, and Alma had to immerse themselves into every aspect of their new home country. Movies provided a genius way to do that as they are based in visual storytelling. New immigrants to Canada, even if they did not yet understand English, were mostly able to follow the plot of films that were showing in their local movie houses.

 

By the time our four interviewees Anneliese, Barbara, Alma, and Lisa arrived in Canada in the early 1950s, the art of films with sound was only about 20 years old.

 

Before sound films, which were also known as “talking pictures” or “talkies”, or Tonfilm in German, there were silent movies, often accompanied by live music to provide the score. Title cards explained the plot and or the dialogues. This silent film era spanned more than 30 years, from the late 19th century until the late 1920s.

 

[Movie clip plays]

 

Among the first inventors of film were the brothers Max and Eugen [sic] Skladanowsky in Berlin with their “Bioscope,” and Louis and August Lumière with their “Cinématograph” in Paris, who screened their short films in front of astonished audiences, just two weeks apart from each other in late 1895.

 

No matter if we are talking about live action or an animated cartoon, one second of film is composed of 24 individual frames, as they are called. How does that translate into length? Let's do some math.

 

With a 35-millimeter film, one second of film is about 45 centimeters long. One minute, about 27 meters. And a 90-minute movie is about 2,469 meters long, two and a half kilometers. That is almost 130,000 single frames. A five-minute short film contains 7,200 individual frames. That's a lot to take in.

 

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We often associate the golden age of German silent movies with expressionist films, such as Fritz Lang's fantastic futuristic science fiction movie Metropolis from 1927, shot at Babelsberg film studio, which still exists to this day in Potsdam, just outside of Berlin.

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There's also The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with its crooked walls and dramatic lighting made by Robert Wiener in 1920.

And of course the first film adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the terrifyingly beautiful vampire film Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau.

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In reality though, the overwhelming majority of films produced in Germany, Canada, and the United States were entertainment flicks that satisfied the taste of a broader audience. Period films, romantic comedies, or melodramas were actually more popular genres than expressionism.

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During the same time period, Canadian cinema was dominated by American productions. Of the few Canadian films that were produced, the most expensive one, the sentimental World War I drama Carry On Sergeant, dramatically failed at the box office after its release in 1928, and it took the Canadian film industry until after the Second World War to recover.

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In contrast, during the 14 years of the Weimar period, the first democracy in Germany, from late 1918 to early 1933, the German film industry churned out an average of 250 films per year, with Babelsberg Studio becoming the largest studio in Europe. It was often considered the German equivalent to Hollywood.

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Since silent films did not present a challenge when it came to language, even foreign actors could be hired. American actor Louise Brooks, as well as Greta Garbo from Sweden, played leading roles in German director G.W. Pabst’s films.

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The advent of sound in film in the late 1920s changed the industry once again. Some producers and studios were reluctant at first, but the 1930 drama The Blue Angel, or Der blaue Engel, Germany's first “talkie” by Josef von Sternberg, made Marlene Dietrich an international superstar.

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Other early films with sound were Berlin Alexanderplatz, an adaptation of Alfred Dublin's novel, and the Threepenny Opera, adapted from Bertolt Brecht, as well as the previously mentioned thriller M by Fritz Lang, with the powerful actor Peter Lorre.

 

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By 1932, Germany had 3,800 cinemas eligible to play Tonfilme, or sound films. One of the most successful productions was the musical film Die drei von der Tankstelle - The Three from the Gas Station - with its tunes that are still well-known today.

 

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Very soon after sound hit the movie theaters, the time of artistic and personal freedom in Germany came to a brutal end. By the late 1920s, several German-Jewish filmmakers had already been invited to work in Hollywood, among them Ernst Lubitsch and Michael Curtiz.

 

But when Hitler and his anti-Semitic and anti-democratic movement seized power in 1933, they immediately banned Jews from working in film, hospitals, at universities, in public administrations, and in many other places. They even banned lighthearted comedic musical films like The Three from the Gas Station, because too many of the cast and production crew were Jewish.

 

In the years right after 1933, more than 1,500 film professionals, directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, and others left Germany. Most of them went to the United States.

 

This enormous artistic and intellectual brain drain was not limited to the film industry. Writers, artists, university professors, musicians, industrialists, doctors, journalists, politicians, and regular everyday people fled from the rapidly escalating regime of terror. Many of them were Jewish, like Hedy Lamarr and Billy Wilder. Others were communists, like writer Bertolt Brecht, or had a deep hatred of Nazis, like Marlene Dietrich.

 

However, not everybody was lucky enough to get out of Germany and, later, Europe. Kurt Gerron, a highly successful actor and director who acted, among many other movies, in The Blue Angel and Die Drei von der Tankstelle, was forced to direct the Nazi propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, which means Theresienstadt. A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area. A fake documentary aimed at deceiving the Red Cross about the inhumane conditions in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

 

Shortly after completion of filming, Kurt Gerron, his wife, and the entire film team were deported to Auschwitz and murdered in the gas chamber upon arrival in October 1944.

 

Film artists who stayed in Germany either made arrangements with the Nazi regime, kept a low profile, or full-heartedly embraced the new movement. Still, there were exceptions. Some risked everything by helping Jewish or other persecuted Germans to hide and/or escape from their Heimat, or homeland.

 

[Deutsche Wochenschau intro plays]

 

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Alma, Anneliese, Barbara and Lisa were six, nine, seven and 10 years old, respectively. As they came of age in the so-called Third Reich, they must have heard this opening sequence of the Deutsche Wochenschau, which translates to “German Weekly Review,” at the start of the newsreels that screened in theaters before the main film.

Newsreels have been screened before the main film since the beginning of German cinema. Silent and often containing war propaganda, like their European enemies’ counterparts in World War I, they became less propagandistic and more informative after the end of World War I.

 

By 1933, there were four major German companies producing short documentary newsreels, each with their own individual focus on world events. Shortly after the Nazi takeover in January 1933, under pressure of Josef Goebbels' new Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, newsreels were censored and aligned with the new rulers' politics.

 

Seven years later, in June 1940, a month after the German attack on France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and less than a year after Germany started the Second World War with its attack on Poland, all four newsreel companies were merged into Die Deutsche Wochenschau.

 

Opening with a sequence of the infamous “Horst Wessel Lied,” the Deutsche Wochenschau spat out hateful propaganda and footage of victorious battles to energetic tunes of glorious fanfares and pathetic words fanatically declaimed by Nazi narrators. This program was broadcast until the very end of Nazi dictatorship in May 1945.

 

[Movie clip plays]

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The Nazis recognized the immense importance of sound and film and used them for their purposes. We often associate the 12 years of Nazi dictatorship with big propaganda movies like Triumph of the Will or Olympia, both directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Her use of light, choreography and music were regarded as technically innovative and creatively aesthetic. Yet at the same time the glorious glorification of white Aryan supremacy made her one of the most effective propagandists of the so-called Third Reich and helped pave the way to the Holocaust.

 

Riefenstahl even used Romani prisoners from camps for extras who were mistreated on set, then sent to the death camp Auschwitz once filming was finished. Leni Riefenstahl kept denying her responsibility until she died in 2003 at the age of 101.

Leni Riefenstahl's films, along with other white nationalist and anti-Semitic productions such as Ohm Krüger, produced and starring Emil Jannings, the winner of the world's first Oscar, or Jud Süß, a hateful depiction of Jews based on distorted facts of a real judicial murder in the 18th century, reached vast audiences.

 

300 film trucks and two film trains drove all across Germany and occupied territories, screening these films everywhere, from beer halls in remote villages to big theaters. These mass screenings were instrumental in helping Nazi philosophy to penetrate Germany and Austria.

 

However, even the propaganda ministry knew that the depiction of too much hate on the screen would be counterproductive to their goals. So propaganda films or blatantly anti-Semitic productions made up a maximum of 20% of all films in Germany. The rest of the films either conveyed extreme right-wing propaganda in very subtle doses or not at all.

 

As with most authoritarian governments, it was more important for the Nazis to rule over their followers using a modern equivalent to the ancient Roman motto, panem et circenses, which basically means “bread and games.”

 

Thus, the majority of movies were pure entertainment: comedies, melodramas, historical or musical films. They entertained the audience and helped to distract them from actual politics, crimes against humanity and the war.

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More than a billion people per year saw movies in about 7,000 theaters in the so-called Großdeutsches Reich or “Greater German Empire,” including Austria and occupied countries.

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One of the most famous movies is the 1944 comedy film Die Feuerzangenbowle, or The Punchbowl, starring Heinz Rühmann, one of the biggest German movie stars of the time, whose career also continued after the war, despite his involvement in Nazi film industry. Die Feuerzangenbowle, with its funny characters and lighthearted plot, has developed into a cult movie, still shown at German universities and on TV around Christmas.

 

[Movie clip plays]

 

Although all movies were censored by the National Socialist regime, some, which did not necessarily conform to the Nazi ideal, were still allowed. Many of those films had swing music in their soundtracks, which was otherwise banned in lieu of nationalist ideas of racial pseudo-Germanic folk music. The following excerpt from the 1937 film Der Mann der Sherlock Holmes war - The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes - is a perfect example of that contradiction.

 

[Movie clip plays]

 

When the war ended, Barbara, Lisa, Alma and Anneliese were teenagers, or in their early twenties, respectively. Thanks to the military power of American, Canadian and British forces in the West and the Red Army in the East, the murderous Nazi regime came crashing down and so did its propaganda machine. Germany was forced to surrender unconditionally and the entire country was occupied by the Allied forces and later divided into four different zones.

 

Surprisingly, the German film industry began making films very soon. The first movie of a number of Trümmerfilme, or “rubble films,” was Die Mörder sind unter uns, which translates to The Murderers are Among Us, selling almost six and a half million tickets.

 

[Movie clip plays]

 

Filming in the ruins of bombed-out cities offered extraordinary opportunities in terms of style and sets. Often cinematography evoked expressionist images of earlier films from the 1920s. Others, the romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings.

 

While some of these early movies attempted to acknowledge German guilt, they were at the same time accused of whitewashing the Nazi history and war crimes and instead focusing on German suffering and post-war trauma.

 

After the war, the main forces behind efforts to denazify Germany were the United States and the Soviet Union, and film was once again the perfect tool to reach hearts and minds. Now Germans going to the movies were exposed for the first time to newsreel footage of the horrors that occurred in the concentration camps, images that Germans were not shown while the Nazis were in power.

 

In the years before television, regular, everyday Germans had no opportunity to watch the evening news to learn what some of their countrymen were doing to other human beings. The period of “rubble films” were short and the movies were not very successful as most Germans were not ready to be confronted with their recent past and many were unable or unwilling to accept their complicity in Nazi politics and crimes.

 

It wasn't long until Germans were craving normality. In the late 1940s, “rubble movies” with their grim topics and imagery were succeeded by Heimatfilme, or “homeland films,” often shot in idyllic landscapes unscathed by the war, such as the Alps or the Lüneburg Heath.

 

These simplistic and sentimental stories set in the countryside showing conservative gender roles, untouchable class distinctions and stereotypical characters created and satisfied a yearning for good old days that never really existed. And the good guy always won the girl in the end.

 

Schwarzwaldmädel, or Black Forest Girl, from 1950 is considered the first Heimatfilm. Many more followed well into the 1960s.

 

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Heimatfilme with their romantic stories of life untouched by the horrors of the Third Reich helped to lull Germans into a soothing amnesia, which would last until the early 1960s, when finally the first former Nazi perpetrators were put on trial in Frankfurt, following the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.

 

[Movie clip plays]

 

After World War II, the Canadian film industry slowly came back. Apart from financing, the biggest challenge was language. The two major languages, French and English, also defined the two film markets in Canada. Most films were produced in Quebec, and some movies were shot in both languages with a different cast.

 

When Alma, Anneliese, Barbara and Lisa arrived in Vancouver, there were 41 movie theaters in the city, ranging from 416 to 2,871 seats. Most of the films they screened were US productions, which nevertheless helped all four protagonists to familiarize themselves with the new language and North American ways of life.

 

Or, as Lisa explained, “We went to the movies. We sat all day long in the movies, you know, and that's where I learned a lot of English, just listening to the sound, you know.”

 

[Movie clip plays]

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This ongoing series will add new podcasts in irregular intervals, so stay tuned for What They Can Teach Us: The Podcast and check back regularly for new episodes.

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