Book review: FREDERIC RAPHAEL - Hitler and the hits
Ben Urwand - THE COLLABORATION
Hollywood ’s pact with Hitler
Reviewed by FREDERIC RAPHAEL
We begin, as film treatments so often say, in a screening room in Berlin in 1933. “At the front of the room was Dr. Ernst Seeger, the chief censor from long before Hitler came to power. Next to Seeger were his assistants: a conductor, a philosopher, an architect and a pastor. Further back were the representatives of a film distribution company and two expert witnesses. The movie they were about to watch came all the way from America, and it was called King Kong.”
After the projection of the film, Dr Seeger asked Professor Zeiss, from the German Health Office, “In your expert opinion could this picture be expected to damage the health of normal spectators?”. Zeiss inquired whether the company trying to sell the film was German or American. When told that it was German, “Zeiss erupted. ‘I am astounded and shocked,’ he yelled, ‘that a German company would dare to seek permission for a film that can only be damaging to the health of its viewers . . . this film is NOTHING LESS THAN AN ATTACK ON THE NERVES OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE! . . . It provokes our racial instincts to show a blonde woman of the Germanic type in the hands of an ape. Itharms the healthy racial feelings of the German people’”.
Ben Urwand pitches us directly into the ideological midden of Auden’s “low, dishonest decade” in which Adolf Hitler and his acolytes nationalized anti-Semitism, mesmerized Europe and – are we that amazed to discover? – intimidated Hollywood. German resentment stemmed, so Urwand would have it, from Allied propaganda in the First World War, in which German soldiers were portrayed as “gorillas who threatened the purity of innocent white women. This campaign had incensed many young Germans who went on to become Nazis. But it did not seem to be on anyone’s mind anymore”.
No source is offered for this quasi-historical amalgam, but it segues (as movie people tend to say) into the revelation that King Kong was “one of Hitler’s favourite films . . . . He was captivated by this atrocious story. He spoke of it often and had it screened several times”. Given the double-edged charm, scandal and lure of the film (remade in 1976 with Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange and again in 2005 by Peter Jackson), the old Hollywood question “Who are we rooting for?” takes on Freudian overtones. Alone in the dark, who did Hitler think, or wish, he was?
Back in 1931, Dorothy Thompson had written, in William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, of the Nazi leader’s “startling insignificance . . . . He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature . . . whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones . . . . The very prototype of the Little Man . . . . I bet he crooks his little finger when he drinks a cup of tea”. Antiquarians will match Hitler’s bonelessness with Thomas Hodgkin’s description of Theodoric’s predecessor Odoacer, who was said to have been cleaved from top to bottom by a single stroke while at prayer. His last words were “Where is God?” It remains a good question.
Dorothy Thompson failed to guess at the power of publicity to boost a nobody into Germany’s saviour: Hitler became the impersonation of national vanity, at once the irresistible beast and, in his own secret view perhaps, the brutalized victim. Among the first to realize that visual images were more persuasive, easier to assimilate, and less questionable than any written manifesto, he came to think that Mein Kampf had given a dangerously unconcealed account of his intentions. Fortunately for him, as Franklin Roosevelt noticed, the English translation toned down the raging paranoia. Nazism was the triumph not so much of the Will as of modern sales techniques as conceived by Edward Bernays, a smart Jew who had emigrated to Madison Avenue but whose genius the Führer did not deny or disdain. Film proved the twentieth century’s hottest medium for recruiting emotions, commercializing appetites and swelling vanities.
Josef Goebbels’s opening move, when put in charge of propaganda, was to constitute himself producer-in-chief to the German film industry. It gave him – another little man, a clever cripple scarcely five feet tall, and a failed novelist – a ladder to glamorous company and an impresario’s supervisory clout... read more:
