Abstract
The Blue Angel opened in the town of Göttingen to a sold-out crowd on June 17, 1930. Like most viewers, Heinz Koch, the leading cultural critic at Göttingen’s largest newspaper, could hardly contain his excitement. His review made clear that advertisements, which promoted the film as “Germany’s greatest sound film” and “the greatest artistic achievement of the season,” were not hyperbole. Koch wrote that the film served as nothing less than “an eternal mirror” on the human condition, one that showed “ecce homo.”1 Overall in 1930, cinema’s role in German society reflected a great deal about a nation in turmoil. Reichstag battles over films on the Great War, the spread of sound technology, intensified scrutiny of film by censorship bodies, and greater anxiety about the role of American culture made movies front-page news in Germany. That year, too, violent political agitation and elections across the nation marked a major watershed in the politics of the Weimar Republic.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, 1971, orig. 1947), 215–18; Peter Baxter, “On the Naked Thighs of Miss Dietrich,” Wide Angle (1978): 18–25; John Blair, “Colonialism in Josef von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel,” West Virginia University Philological Papers (Fall, 2003): 53–61; Erica Carter, Dietrich’s Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film (London, 2004), 136–45; Elisabeth Bronfen, “Seductive Departures of Marlene Dietrich: Exile and Stardom in ‘The Blue Angel,’” New German Critique (Spring/Summer, 2003): 9–31; Stephen Lamb, “Woman’s Nature? Images of Women in The Blue Angel, Pandora’s Box, Kuhle Wampe and Girls in Uniform” in Visions of the “Neue Frau”: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany, ed. Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West (Aldershot, 1995), 124–42; Judith Mayne, “Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel, and Female Performance” in Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric, ed. Dianne Hunter (Urbana, 1989), 28–46; Heidi Faletti, “The Doomed Moralist in The Blue Angel and Lola” in National Traditions in Motion Pictures, ed. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead (Kent, 1985), 80–4.
Modris Eksteins, “War, Memory, and Politics: The Fate of the Film All Quiet on the Western Front” Central European History (1980): 60–82; Jerold Simmons, “Film and International Politics: The Banning of All Quiet on the Western Front in Germany and Austria, 1930–1931,” The Historian (1989): 40–60.
Eve Rosenhaft, “Women, Gender, and the Limits of Political History in the Age of ‘Mass Politics’” in Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany, ed. James Retallack and Larry Eugene Jones (Cambridge, 1992), 149–73.
Cited in Joseph Horowitz, Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (New York, 2008), 298.
Thomas Saunders, Hollywoodin Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley, 1994).
Adelheid von Saldern, “ ‘Kunst für’s Volk’: Vom Kulturkonservatismus zur nationalsozialistischen Kulturpolitik” in Das Gedächtnis der Bilder: Asthetik und Nationalsozialismus, ed. Harald Welzer (Tübingen, 1995), 45–104, and “Massenfreizeitkultur im Visier: Ein Beitrag zu den Deutungs-und Entwirkungsversuchen während der Weimarer Republik,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte (1993): 21–58.
Bruce Murray, Film and The German Left in the Weimar Republic (Austin, 1990).
Theodore Rippey, “Kuhle Wampe and the Problem of Corporal Culture,” Cinema Journal (2007): 3–25.
John Willet, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period (New York, 1978), 145–9, 206–8.
Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society: France and Germany in the Twenties (New York, 1976), 59.
See Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berkeley, 2006).
Helmut Korte, Der Spielfilm und das Ende der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 1998).
Jan-Peter Barbian, “Filme mit Lücken: Die Lichtspielzensur in der Weimarer Republik” in Der deutsche Film: Aspekte seiner Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Uli Jung (Trier, 1993), 51–78.
Gertrud Koch, “Between Two Worlds: Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930)” in German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York, 1986), 60–72; Bronfen, “Seductive Departures.”.
Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (New York, 1965), 230.
Scholars have used the relationship between Lola and Rath to study this nexus. See David Davidson, “From Virgin to Dynamo: The ‘Amoral Woman’ in European Cinema,” Cinema Journal (Autumn, 1981): 31–49.
Richard McCormick, “From ‘Caligari’ to Dietrich: Sexual, Social, and Cinematic Discourses in Weimar Film,” Signs (Spring, 1993): 640–68.
Werner Sudendorf, Marlene Dietrich (Berlin, 1980), 68, 71–2.
Bronfen, “Seductive Depatures,” 26–30. See also E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film (London, 1983), 49–59.
Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln, 1993), xi.
Throughout the Weimar years, Gottingen boasted four daily newspapers. The Gottinger Tageblatt, which controlled at least a quarter of the town’s circulation, generally espoused a nationalist, right-wing ideology, offering early support for Hitler’s party. The cautiously liberal Göttinger Zeitung captured about 17 percent of local readership. The probusiness Niedersächsische Morgenpost’s reach was somewhere between that of the Tageblatt and Zeitung but paid less attention to culture. The Volksblatt supported the Social Democratic Party and represented a steady oppositional voice with about 20 percent of local circulation. Eckhard Sürig, Göttinger Zeitungen (Göttingen, 1985), 17–20, 39–55.
Adelheid von Saldern, “Göttingen im Kaiserreich” in Gottingen: Geschichte einer Universitätsstadt, Band 3, ed. Rudolf von Thadden and Günter Trittel (Göttingen, 1999), 14–56, and “Zur Entwicklung der Parteien in Göttingen während der Weimarer Republik,” Göttinger Jahrbuch (1971): 171.
Barbara Marshall, “The Political Development of German University Towns in the Weimar Republic: Göttingen and Münster, 1918–1933” (Dissertation, University of London, 1972), 201.
Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter (Chapel Hill, 1983).
Fritz Hasselhorn, Wie wählte Göttingen: Wahlverhalten und die soziale Basis der Parteien in Göttingen 1924–1933 (Göttingen, 1983).
David Imhoof, “Guns, Opera, and Movies: Local Culture in Interwar Germany, Gottingen 1919–1938” (Dissertation, University of Texas, 2000), 18.
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984).
Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, 1989).
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conwa (Minneapolis, 1987–1989, two vols.).
Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984) remain touchstones for studying the ways in which men in Weimar Germany viewed women and female sexuality as threats.
See also Katharina von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley, 1997).
Vibeke Petersen, Women and Modernity in Weimar Germany (New York, 2001).
Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other” in Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modelski (Bloomington, 1986), 188–207; Rosen-haft, “Women.”.
David Imhoof, “Culture Wars and the Local Screen: The Meaning of World War I Films in One German City around 1930” in Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History, ed. Peter Rollins and John O’Connor (Lexington, 2008), 175–95.
A number of scholars have critiqued Kracauer’s assumptions, especially his gendered readings. See the New German Critique issue devoted to Kracauer, volume 54 (1991); Mike Budd, ed., The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories (New Brunswick, 1990); Petro, Joyless Streets.
Julia Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill, 2002), 119–218.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 John Alexander Williams
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Imhoof, D. (2011). Blue Angel, Brown Culture: The Politics of Film Reception in Göttingen. In: Williams, J.A. (eds) Weimar Culture Revisited. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117259_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117259_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29215-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11725-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)