Abstract
The urban comedies discussed in chapter two demonstrate the ways in which Jewish filmmakers highlighted the role of emulation in modern identity formation. This recurring metaphor associated these comedies with the discourse about Jewish assimilation and, at the same time, facilitated the portrayal of the stereotypical “Jew” as a symbol of modern urban society at large. This chapter shifts the focus to a different genre that was equally popular among Jewish scriptwriters and directors, namely, the domestic melodrama. Unlike many of the Weimar urban comedies, the domestic melodramas discussed in this chapter avoided direct (or stereotypical) references to the “Jewish-milieu” as the setting of the plot. The contemplation of the role of mimicry and simulation in the constitution of modern authenticity, however, was an equally crucial element in this popular genre. Employing and enhancing the previously described symbolism, Weimar domestic melodramas underscore two further key components in the contemporary Jewish identity discourse: the spatial imagination of hybrid identity, and the concept of “the stranger” as a necessary mediator within modern urban society.
Be a man in the street and a Jew at home
A brother to your countrymen and servant to your king
—Judah Leib Gordon, “Hakiza Ami”
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Notes
See a detailed discussion in John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Narrative (London: Wallflower Press, 2004).
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 37–58.
Wylie Sypher, “Aesthetic of Revolution: The Marxist Melodrama,” Kenyon Review 10:3 (Summer 1948): 431–433;
Martha Vicinus, “‘Helpless and Unfriended’: Nineteenth-century Domestic Melodrama,” New Literary History 13:1 (1981): 127–143; Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 131–148.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” Screen 18.2 (Summer 1977): 113–118;
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodrama of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Hans Blüher, Secessio Judaica. Philosophische Grundlegung der historischen Situation des Judentums und der antisemitischen Bewegung (Berlin: Der Weisse Ritter, 1921), 19–20. See discussion in chapter two of this volume
Colin Bird, The Myth of Liberal Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34–42;
Charles R. McCann, Individualism and the Social Order: The Social Element in Liberal Thought (New York: Routledge, 2004), 184–186;
Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21–38, here 24.
Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1966), 80–81.
See also Stefan Jonsson, Subject without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modem Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 49–53.
Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: C.H. Beck, 1999), 158–162, 299–300;
Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2007), 9–36;
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Phoenix: Orion Press, 1964), xxxiii.
See also Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Past: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1–7.
Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz (ed.) (New York: Shocken, 1978), 155.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (New York: Routledge, 1984); and idem, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 278; and idem, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 211–212.
While Gordon’s writing also advocated Jewish particularism (Hebrew culture), his aforementioned imperative in the poem “Hakiza Ami” has been heralded as a slogan of acculturation. See the discussion in Michael Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil?: Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle-Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11.
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 166. Sharon Gilerman makes a similar point in her German into Jews, although she emphasizes developments related to national assimilation rather than Jewish acculturation within the urban bourgeoisie.
Sharon Gilerman, Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 17–52.
On the replacement of “amalgamation” by “assimilation” (where the different components retain their identities), see Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 96–100.
Wolfgang Benz, “The Legend of German-Jewish Symbiosis,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XXXVII (1992): 95–102, here 97.
Willy Haas’s reference to this film and to Grune’s “intensive mimetic vision” is representative of its reception: Willy Haas, “Zusammenarbeit mit Karl Grune,” Film-Kurier, September 16, 1925. See also Bruce A. Murray, Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic: From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 80–82.
Siegbert S. Prawer, Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 92.
David Lode, “Der filmische Filmer,” in Pioniere in Celluloid: Juden in der frühen Filmwelt, ed. Irene Stratenwerth and Hermann Simon (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004),, 293–295.
In works such as Apocalyptic Landscape (1913) and The Burning City (1913). Carol S. Eliel, The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Ludwig Meidner (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, 1989).
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1947), 119.
Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997);
Bernhard Waidenfels, “Heimat in der Fremde,” in Heimat: Analysen, Themen, Perspektiven, ed. Will Cremer and Ansgar Klein (Bonn: Bundeszenrale für Politische Bildung, 1990), 109–121.
Different aspects of the interrelations between Heimat imagery and urban modernity are explored in Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);
John A. Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007);
and Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape, Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Intriguingly, the Cold War German Jewish director Konrad Wolf described his filmmaking in a similar fashion, as a search for the Heimat in which he—an outsider—could feel at home: Konrad Wolf, “Selbstaüßerungen,” Sinn und Form 35:5 (1984): 897–900, here 900.
In his comment on Georg Hermann’s 1912 novel Die Nacht des Dr. Herzfeld, Hans Kohn has portrayed this struggle as the fundamental experience of the “uprooted” urban Jew of Berlin: “the big city, the absolute opposite of Heimat, becomes his Heimat.” Hans Kohn, “Der Roman des Entwurzelten. Georg Hermann: Die Nacht des Dr. Herzfeld,” in Juden in der Deutschen Literatur, ed. Gustav Krojanker (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1922), 27–40, here 33.
As noted by Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 [1952]), 129–137.
Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 41–67, 153–172.
This scene was repeatedly mentioned by impressed reviewers. Curt Wesse, Grossmacht Film. Das Geschöpf von Kunst und Technik (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1928), 229–232.
For a detailed analysis of this film and its place in Weimar film history, see Ofer Ashkenazi, The Walk into the Night: Reason and Subjectivity in Weimar Film (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2010), 35–45.
Balázs indicated that the street, the focal point of the film, is a “ghostly impression” of reality (ibid.). Kaes is cited from Anton Kaes, “Schauplätze des Verlangens. Zum Strassenfilm in der Weimarer Republik,” in Filmarchitektur-Von Metropolis bis Blade Runner, ed. Dietrich Neumann (München: Prestel, 1996), 26–32, here 27.
For the use of this phrase, see Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970), 184–185;
David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 163;
Elizabeth Albanis, “A ‘West-östlicher Divan’ from the Front: Moritz Goldstein Beyond the Kunstwart Debate,” in Towards Normality?: Acculturation and Modern German Jewry, ed. Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 217–236.
On the emergence of mass consumption culture in Weimar cities and its reception as a vital break with the bourgeois past, see: Rudy Koshar and Alon Confino, “Regimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth Century German History,” German History 19:2 (2001): 133–161, here 136;
Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience 1900–1945: Modernity and Crisis (London: Routledge, 2001), 7;
Sandra J. Coyner, “Class Consciousness and Consumption: The New Middle Class during the Weimar Republic,” Journal of Social History 10 (1977): 310–331;
Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. 109–120.
As some scholars have noted, despite the abundant references to rupture and crisis, mass consumption culture was a rather limited phenomenon in Weimar: Timothy W. Mason, “Women in Germany, 1923–1940: Family, Welfare and Work: Conclusion,” History Workshop 2 (1976): 77–79.
Walther Rathenau, “Höre, Israel!” Zukunft, March 16, 1867, 434–462; Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 267–268.
For instance, in Walther Rathenau, Von kommenden Dingen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1922).
See also: Peter Berglar, Walther Rathenau: Seine Zeit. Sein Werk. Seine Persönlichkeit (Bremen: Carl Schünmann Verlag, 1970), 129–149.
As asserted by Maximilian Harden, cited in Harry F. Young, Maximilian Harden, Censor Germaniae: The Critic in Opposition from Bismarck to the Rise of Nazism (Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1939), 249–231.
Dagmar Barnow, Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 44–43.
Harry Kessler, Walther Rathenau: His Life and His Work (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1930 [1928]), 93.
As characterized by Jonathan Boyarin, “The Other Within, and the Other Without,” in The Other in Jewish Thought and History, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 424–452.
Ever since the early days of the Weimar Republic, scholars have depicted various aspects of its culture as related to the experience of crisis. Todd Herzog, for instance, has recently asserted that Weimar was “a culture of crisis, a society that […] continually defined itself through its perceived crisis” (emphasis in the original). Todd Herzog, Crime Stories: Criminalistic Fantasies and the Culture of Crisis in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 6.
See also: Herbert Kraus, The Crisis of German Democracy: A Study of the Spirit of the Constitution of Weimar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932 (1919);
Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf, Die Krise der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005);
Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993);
Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann (eds.), Dancing on the Volcano. Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Lang claimed that his “wandering took [him] over half of the world,” including North Africa and India. Fritz Lang, “Autobiography,” in Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang (London: Secker and Warburg, 1976), 9–15, here 12.
Despite Lang’s criticism of Pommer’s work on the set of Die Spinnen (The Spiders, 1919/1920), Lang and Pommer maintained generally close, even cordial relations (as opposed to the tensions that characterized the relationship between Lang and May once Lang began directing). See Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (New York: Saint Martin Press, 1997), 53–55, 62.
Fritz Lang and Barry Keith Grant, Fritz Lang: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), xi. In his aforementioned autobiography he mentions his mother’s maiden name, but fails to disclose any additional detail about her (he is more generous in describing his architect father).
Jean Boudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in his Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–42;
John Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 23–35;
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 128–129;
Friedrich Kittler, Typewriter, Gramophone, Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 117–118;
Jürgen Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1973), 10–12;
Detlev Peukert, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 55–71.
The term “conversion” was famously borrowed from the realm of alchemy to metaphorically indicate the utter transformation of a substance into a different one. Lewis Rambo argues that “authentic conversion” involves a “total transformation of a person.” Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xii, 5–7. In reality, of course, the practice of conversion often fell short of this “radical transformation.” Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500 – 1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
As Anton Kaes rightly points out, most Weimar filmmakers belonged to the “lost generation” (born 1880–1900), which experienced the war as a critical break from the world in which it had grown up. Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 88.
John Willet regards this as a political appointment, related to Jessner’s reputation as a vocal supporter of the republic and to his membership in the ruling Social Democrat Party. John Willet, The Theatre of the Weimar Republic (London: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 66.
Leopold Jessner, “Film und Bühne,” Die Deutsche Bühne, September 25, 1922.
On this film and its innovative exploitation of cinematic spaces, see: Ellen Risholm, “Formation of the Chamber: A Reading of Backstairs” in Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema, ed. Kenneth S. Calhoon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 121–144.
Wedekind is cited in: Frank Gehler, “Erdgeist,” in Deutsche Spielfilme von den Anfängen bis 1933, ed. Günther Dahlke (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1988), 86.
Critics used this film to reflect on the “essence” of (the silent) film in general. Hans Wollenberg wrote in the Die Lichtbild-Bühne that Jessner’s film was “a sin against the spirit of film.” Béla Balázs, on the other hand, maintained that the shots of Asta Nielsen’s facial expressions proved once and for all that film was an independent art form. The Film-Kurier depicts the film as a pioneering journey into the depths of the human soul, whereas the conservative Der Film argued that the film’s attempt to explore Lulu’s soul ends with a superficial, artificial image (an inevitable result within this medium, it states). Hans Wollenberg, “Erdgeist,” Die Lichtbild-Bühne, February 24, 1923; Béla Balázs, “Asta Nielsen, wie sie liebt,” Schrifen zum Film (München: Carl Hanser, 1987), 139; Anonymous, “Erdgeist,” Film-Kurier, February 23, 1923; Anonymous, “Erdgeist,” Der Film, February 25, 1923.
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© 2012 Ofer Ashkenazi
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Ashkenazi, O. (2012). A Man in The Street, a Jew at Home: Identity and Performance in Weimar Domestic Melodramas. In: Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010841_3
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