Abstract
At first glance, the film A Family Day at the Prellsteins (Familientag im Hause Prellstein, 1927) is a visual dramatization of the postemancipation anti-Semitic discourse in Germany. The “typical” Jewish family of the film answers the worst stereotypes associated with Jewish appearance, behavior, and values: the greedy husband loses his fortune in a card game and dishonorably escapes from his debtors without even notifying his wife; his best friend, a scrawny, childish man—displaying a giant “Jewish” nose—slyly works his way into the wife’s bed and conspires to trick the debtors; and the old uncle, rich and miserly, comes to the rescue, explaining his action in terms of an ethnic—arguably racist—notion of loyalty (“blood is blood!”). As the story develops the spectators are exposed to various anti-Semitic clichés that explain the authentic qualities that differentiate Jews from other Germans, despite the former’s attempt to conceal them1: the avaricious Jew cannot value genuine love; he compensates physical weakness with secret scheming, sexual manipulation, miserliness, and dubiously acquired capital; and, mainly—as practically every character in the film demonstrates—he has no shame. Moreover, the film tells a story of acting, faking, and lying that aims to conceal these conspicuous characteristics, to hide or downplay the stereotypically Jewish objectives and behavior.
The Jews have no shame.
—Hans Blüher, Secessio Judaica
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Compare, for instance, with the stereotypes explored in Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).
This inevitable regression to the defeated “Jewish” type, as Jack Zipes noted, is essentially linked to the psychology and politics of modern anti-Semitism. Jack Zipes, “Oskar Panizza: The Operated German as Operated Jew,” New German Critique 21 (Autumn 1980): 47–61.
Indeed, stereotypes frequently function as representations of an imagined clear and “absolute” difference between individuals within a particular society. As several scholars noted, the crucial role of stereotypes in the construction and the differentiation of the “other” makes them essential components in the public discussion and imagination of collective identities. The following argues that Weimar filmmakers exploited the set of expectations attached to stereotypical representations in order to undermine the logic of these expectations. Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 15–36;
Jan Assmann, “Was ist ein Fremdheitskonzept?,” in Herrschaf und Heil. Politische Theologie in Ägypten, Israel und Europe (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002), 219–220;
Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity,’” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996) 3;
Kathryn Woodward, “Concept of Identity and Difference,” in Identity and Difference, ed. Kathryn Woodward (London: Sage, 1997) 7–62.
Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique (Paris: Alcan, 1924 [1900]).
Sigmund Freud, Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1917 [1905]), 125–126.
Scholars have linked the term “modernity” to various different historical, cultural, and psychological phenomena. I use the term henceforth to indicate the influence of the radical changes in the public spheres, in technology, in the social order and everyday practices since the late nineteenth century on the experience, worldviews, and values of modern contemporaries. For the various implications of such a definition, see: Susan S. Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/ Modernity 8:3 (2001): 493–451;
Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” in The Anti Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: New Press, 2002), 3–15;
Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991);
Geoff Eley, “Die deutsche Geschichte und die Widersprüche der Moderne. Das Beispiel des Kaiserreiches,” in Zivilisation und Barbarei. Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne, ed. Frak Bajohr, Werner Johe, Detlev Peukert, and Uwe Lohalm (Hamburg: Christian, 1991), esp. 18–19;
Robert Wohl, “The Heart of Darkness: Modernism and its Historian,” Journal of Modern History 74:3 (September 2002): 573–621.
For the various associations of these experiences with essentially “Jewish” characteristics, see: Emily D. Bilsky (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford University Press, 2002), 137–172;
Shulamit Volkov, “Anti-Semitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany,” LBI Yearbook XXIII (1978), 25–46.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Probleme des Schauspielers,” Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Werke, vol. 2 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1969), 235. As Galili Shahar pointed out, Nietzsche’s reflections on the Jewish talent were not anti-Semitic, since his “Jew” was an ironically constructed “concept-person,” rather than the representation of an existing entity.
Galili Shahar, “The Jewish Actor and the Theater of Modernism in Germany,” Theater Research International 29:3 (2004), 216–231, here 218.
For the reception of Nietzsche’s comment, see Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, “Jewish Self-Presentation and the “Jewish Question” on the German Stage from 1900 to 1930,” in Jewish Theater: A Global View, ed. Edna Nahshon (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2009), 153–174, here 154–155.
As Scott Spector shows, this pattern resembles gender masquerading, where the fear caused by the expressed indistinctness of fixed, “natural” identities is often accompanied with fascination and attraction. Scott Spencer, “Edith Stein’s Passing Gestures: Intimate Histories, Empathic Portraits,” New German Critique 75 (Fall 1998): 28–56, here 33.
Hans Blüher, Secessio Judaica. Philosophische Grundlegung der historischen Situation des Judentums und der antisemitischen Bewegung (Berlin: Der Weisse Ritter, 1921), 19–20.
Robert Weltsch, “Theodor Herzl und wir,” in Vom Judentum. Ein Sammelbuch, ed. Hans Kohn et al. (Leipzig: Kurt Wolf Verlag, 1913), 158.
Walther Hartenau [Rathenau], “Höre, Israel!” Zukunft, March 16, 1867, 454–462, reprinted in The Jew in the Modern World, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press US, 1995), 267–268.
Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” Jewish Social Studies 6:2 (1944): 99–122, here 99–100.
Arnold Zweig, Juden auf der deutschen Bühne (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1928), 23.
Lubitsch’s father was born in 1850 in Grodno (today Byelorussia). His mother, Anna Lindenstaedt, was born in 1850 in a town on the outskirt of Berlin. For biographical survey on Lubitsch’s early years, see Hans-Helmut Prinzler and Enno Patalas (eds.), Lubitsch (Munich: CJ Bucher Verlag, 1984), 10–12;
Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 19–32.
As Prawer justly notes, Lubitsch’s themes, imagery, and comic style resemble more of the Jewish farce of the Berlin theaters owned by the Herrnfeld brothers than the modernist theater of Reinhardt. Siegbert S. Prawer, Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 51.
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Der Stolz der Firma,” Caihers du Cinéma 198 (February 1968): 31. Indeed, Comolli’s analysis fits Christie Davis’s characterization of the Jews as “canny” in typical anti-Semitic jokes. Christie Davis, Jokes and their Relation to Society (Berlin: Walter de Gryter, 1995). Echoing Arendt’s identification of the Jews as the middle-class parvenu, Lotte Eisner related Lubitsch’s allegedly anti-Jewish humor to “vainglory of the nouveauriche.” The emphasized anti-Semitic stereotypes in these films, she argues, are remnant of the self-mocking Jewish-humor.
Lotte E. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 [1952]), 79. In a 1916 interview, Lubitsch himself associated his imagery with this tradition of Jewish humor: Julius Urgiß, “Künstlerprofil: Ernst Lubitsch,” Der Kinematograph, August 30, 1916, reprinted in Prinzler and Patalas, Lubitsch, 89–90.
The reviewer of the conservative Der Film maintained that the protagonist’s willingness to instantly marry the butler displays “typical American” behavior. Anonymous, “Die Austerprinzessin,” Der Film 26 (1919), 31.
See notes 12 and 13. Lubitsch’s emphasis on clothing in his depictions of the search for new identities is also “Jewish” in a biographical sense. As several critics have noted, it is associated with Lubitsch’s family business and the Jewish business circles of Berlin with which he was familiar from his childhood. Valerie A. Weinstein, Mistaken Identity in Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi Film, PhD dissertation, Cornell, May 2000, 70–72.
Heide Schlüpmann argues that these quick crosscuts form “a logic of contradictions,” which highlights the ridiculous nature of the characters and events and prevents identification with them. Heide Schlüpmann, “Ich möchte kein Mann sein, Ernst Lubitsch, Sigmund Freud und die frühe deutsche Komödie,” Kintop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 1 (1993): 75–92.
As Sabine Hake has noted, unlike many of the female movie stars of the early 1920s, the sexuality of Ossi Oswalda is not concealed but openly exhibited. Her expressed sexuality emphasizes the club visitors’ inability to notice her real gender. Sabine Hake, “The Oyster Princess and the Doll: Wayward Women of the early Silent Cinema,” in Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, ed. Sandra Friedman et al., vol. 2 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 13–32, here 22–23.
Alice Kuzniar’s intriguing reading of the “queer Weimar cinema” interprets this scene as a key moment of “homosociality,” noting the erotic kiss between the two “men” and the lilac flowers in the background. Alice A. Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), 34–36. This scene can also be read, however, as a demonstration of the inability to conceal the “true” self: the tutor is sexually attracted to Ossi because—despite her clothing and his drunk acceptance of her pretension—her femininity cannot be entirely effaced (indeed, at least for the film viewers, her female body contours are evident throughout the nightclub scene). In any case, the following sequences suggest that her in-between status cannot last much longer: shortly after Ossi realizes she can use neither the ladies nor the gentlemen restroom, the couple must leave the place. As mentioned later, they will intimately unite only after each person returns to her and his “original” form.
Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle-Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 85–116.
George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 121–123. In the years following the production of Meyer from Berlin, this metaphorical association of mountain scenery and authentic national qualities was manifested in a new cinematic genre, the Bergfilm (mountain film). As Johannes von Moltke noted, it was an “exclusively German” genre with increasing popularity, which exploited these sentiments as it presented an image of the mountain tops mediated through touristic expectations and modern filmmaking technology.
Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 42–48. According to Eric Rentschler, mountain films maintained convoluted relationships with Heimat films, as they intensified the duality of anti-modern sentiments and fascination of modernity within the “national” sphere.
Eric Rentschler, “Mountain and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm,” New German Critique 51 (Fall 1990): 137–161.
Henry Bial utilizes the notion of “double encoding” in his analysis of the way “Jewishness” is encoded on the stage and screen in the United States. The use of this term here focuses less on the different encoding for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, and more on the ability to insinuate at the same time to the (stereotypically) “Jewish” and the (typically) “bourgeois” aspects of the characters. Henry Bial, Acting Jewish (Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Same is true for the protagonist of the Oyster Princess, whose character, as Janet McCabe argues, also helps in establishing the (imagined) identity of the female spectator of the film. Janet McCabe, “Imagined Female Spectators, Early German Popular Cinema, and the Oyster Princess (1919),” in Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, ed. Randal Halle and Margaret McCarthy (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2003), 24–40.
Oskar Kalbus, a sympathizer and later a member of the National Socialist Party, asserted in 1933 that Lubitsch’s characters are essentially foreign to the nature of the German race. Oskar Kalbus, Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst, vol. I (Altona: Cigaretten-Bilderdienst, 1933), 27. Current scholars still highlight Meyer’s “non-German” characteristics, and his longing to be a part of the German nation.
Sabine Hake, Passion and Deception: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 30–31.
Daniel Boyarin, “Goyim Naches, or, Modernity and the Manliness of the Mentsch,” in Modernity, culture, and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford University Press, 1998), 63–90.
See discussion in chapter three. This tradition was adapted to film already before World War I, and was almost a cliché in Weimar cinema’s portrayal of the bourgeois environment. See, for instance, Ofer Ashkenazi, Making Sense of Modernity: Film and the Crisis of Liberalism in the Weimar Republic, PhD dissertation, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, June 2006, 181–200.
Several historians have dubbed the (long) nineteenth century—between the French Revolution and the outbreak of World War I—as the “bourgeois century.” See discussion in Peter Gay, Education of the Senses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 34–33;
Marion A. Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 182–184.
Valery Weinstein justly argues that Lubitsch “milieu comedies” can be seen as a way to criticize the anti-Semitic stereotypes through exaggeration and decontextualization of these stereotypes. Valery Weinstein, “Anti-Semitism of Jewish ‘Camp’? Ernst Lubitsch’s Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916) and Meyer aus Berlin (1918),” German Life and Letters 39.1 (January 2006): 101–121. It seems, however, that Lubitsch goes further than this: he portrays the stereotyping of Jews as a metaphor for a general problem of the conservative middle-class, the victims of which are not merely Jews, but a whole generation.
For Schünzel’s life, inspirations, and major works, see Jörg Schöning (ed.), Reinhold Schünzel: Schauspieler und Regissuer (München: Text und Kritik, 1989).
For instance, Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. 170–171, 230;
Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity” (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001).
See, for instance, Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 146–137;
Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 142–190.
Weimar filmmakers had always experimented with Hollywood’s formulae. After 1924, however, as Germany experienced an “unparalleled cultural invasion” from America, this tendency had broadened and enhanced in unprecedented manners. Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 117–134, here 117;
Kirstin Thompson, “National or International Films? The European Debate during the 1920s,” Film History 8 (1996), 281–296.
On Anton and Donath Herrnfeld’s theater and its portrayal of stereotypical Jewish and non-Jewish characters, see Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 187–188.
Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From the “Golem” to “Don’t Touch my Holocaust” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 226.
Copyright information
© 2012 Ofer Ashkenazi
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ashkenazi, O. (2012). The Jews Have No Shame: The “Jewish Tragedy” in Weimar Urban Comedies. In: Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010841_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010841_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34419-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01084-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)