„Gehe niemals vom Wege ab …“

Zusammenfassung

Fritz Genschow was a man of many talents. In the 1920s he started his career as an actor, both on stage and in front of the camera, but he soon moved on to scriptwriting, directing, and producing films. He even became the announcer known as Uncle Tobias on the RIAS radio station. One of his most popular and most successful films was his adaptation of the fairy tale „Little Red Riding Hood“ (1937) which the Board of Film Censors of the Nazi regime praised highly as „educational for the national community“. The cinematic techniques employed in this film were quite a novelty. The plot of the film is composed as a story within a story. The framework story, set in the Nazi present, is filmed in black and white, whereas the sequences in which the six-year-old girl Liesel dreams herself into the fairy tale and assumes the role of Little Red Riding Hood are rendered in colour. It can be assumed, however, that the real reason for the film’s major success was due to its inherent Nazi ideology: the sentimental, rural setting, the role of the woman and the Arian beauty symbol featured in the film and, not least, the ubiquitous Nazi symbols. Genschow’s remake of „Little Red Riding Hood“ (1953) appears to be a harmless enough musical comedy. But under the surface this new version also bears witness to its time of origin. As with most post-war German films, both for children and adults, it favours noncommittal contents. It becomes evident that both adaptations of the fairy tale reflect the mood of the Zeitgeist and that Genschow knew perfectly well how to play it.