Perhaps to distract me from the coronavirus pandemic, I have been watching numerous clips on YouTube about World War II: newsreels from both British and German sources on dogfights and artillery, on ruins and the occupation of towns, on ceremonial occasions, such as V-E Day, as well as excerpts from the musicals made in Nazi Germany well into the war, the last one I could find a production number with loads of chorus boys in top hats and tails leading the very elegantly gowned Marika Rokk around a dance floor. That one, “The Woman of My Dreams”, was released in August of 1944, at the same time that Paris was liberated, the war already clearly lost by the Germans.
Yes, this all appeals to my preoccupation with World War II and it is not an attempt to find a simpler time. World War II was not a simple time, given that we threw ourselves into alliance with the Russians and cultivated even some of the Vichy French generals and admirals and made so many devastating decisions, such as to demand unconditional surrender when that would mean increased allied casualties, so many of those leadership decisions proving to be right on the button, which is different from the present situation, where so many of the leadership decisions are clearly wrong. I do notice as a result osf my present vantage point that there were huge crowds in front of Buckingham Palace on V-E Day, nobody afraid of crowds, and that will not return to the contemporary world for a while. Still, the suffering and displacements of World War II are not to be sneezed at, but rather taken as a disaster which the world somehow survived, as we will the current one.
The production levels of these German musicals was quite high, even the later ones. In one, Rokk appears outdoors with, again, many a chorus boy and chorus girl in matching costumes in a period piece. A number, “A Waltz for You and Me”, is shot outdoors and in a quality of color that Hollywood would not reach until the Fifties, and this in 1941, in the midst of a wartime economy but where the German borders are not yet crashing around them. Moreover, the choreography and settings are superior to anything in Busby Berkeley’s arsenal, he heavy on titillation and doing things that couldn’t be done on a stage and only through film cutting, while the Germans had more traditional sets however ravishing and eye engulfing they were. Zarah Leander in “The Great Love”, from 1942, shows herself to be sophisticated, charming, self-possessed, and equipped with a number of gestures and facial expressions to establish her presence. In another of her films, there is an oversize piano from which emerge numerous chorines. It is worth noting that film techniques were not so much at variance with Hollywood as just doing them better. There were still reaction shots from friends in the wings and from the conductor, although Jose Iturbi played the friendly conductor much better in the Hollywood versions. It is just that the German stars shone more brightly.
That is worth noting, Marika Rokk was easily rehabilitated after the war because she had passed German secrets onto the Russians, but Zarah Leander, who had been a major star since the mid-Thirties, did not recover much of a movie career after the war because of her associations with the Nazis. Leander was, however, was lauded by her adoring public for a considerable time after the war was overwell after the war was over, just the way Vera Lynn became a symbol of the war for fifty years after it was over because of the nostalgia for those times when Britons pulled together under the mantle of the songs that she had sung. But it should be said that the two German entertainers were better than their equivalents in the English speaking world. Lynn did not sing as well as Leander nor could she dance nor act. Betty Grable was, like Rokk, a bit on the chubby side, but did not have her dancing or singing skills, and Marleine Dietrich, having resisted Goebbels’ attempts to win her back to Germany, and so a heroine for that reason alone, was not as strong a singer or presence as either of the two German stars. The two German stars were not as good, in my mind, as Greer Garson, who was British, nor Bette Davis, neither of those two either singers or dancers however much their presence galvanized the eyes of an audience, and Judy Garland was always, even in her younger years, something else entirely, a waif even when in good health, always not very distant from pathos.
Compare the excerpts of Nazi musicals I have seen to the Hollywood musicals of the war years rather than to the Busby Berkeley musicals of the previous decade. The American musicals are not that much. They include “Meet Me in Saint Louis'', from 1943, with Judy Garland, the movie just a creampuff of sentimentality set at the turn into the Twentieth Century and so far removed from the ongoing war. Also set remotely was “The Pirate”, also a costume drama starring Judy Garland. (Remember that “The Wizard of Oz” was a pre-war production.) Early on, in 1942, there had been the James Cagney portrayal of George M. Cohan in the biopic “Yankee Doodle Dandy” with an added on patriotic post-script in which Cohan is invited to the White House so that FDR, filmed from behind, can tell him to keep up the nation’s morale, just as Cagney had done in the previous war. And at the end of the war, in 1945, there was “State Fair”, which is as corny as “Oklahoma”, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that appeared on Broadway in 1943. In 1943 there had also been “The Gang’s All Here”, wherein a pastiche of film stars, including Carmen Miranda, found themselves in Latin America, a place at the time idealized by Hollywood as a prosperous and friendly place, however much Brazil and Argentina were not trusted partners in the war against Naziism. The only musicals that carry their weight are “Thousands Cheer” where the young Katheryn Grayson sings with a symphony orchestra conducted by Jose Iturbi, her job apparently a regular gig that does not require her to leave Los Angeles. The only conflict in the movie is created by her having to encourage her sloucher sailor boyfriend Gene Kelly to shape up and do his part in the war effort, just the way she does, Hollywood portraying women as carrying their load, though my perspective not long after that was that girls didn’t get drafted, and that wasn’t fair. And there was “Music for the Millions”, from 1944, another attempt to blend high class music with a popular audience and that I have already posted about because it showed a nation on the brink of losing its nerve by replacing realism with a vague religious faith.
Beyond the production values and the star power of the German musicals, is their insularity. They barely notice the war, except to show some bandaged soldiers in the auditoriums of soldiers in front of which musical performances take place. The films are fantasies that show Germans living the normal lives of the rich, the street scenes from newsreels of the major cities in Germany showing a prosperous society walking through streets both charming and impressive. All this while the enemy was far away, at least until intensive allied bombing began in 1943, and Soviet troops reached the outskirts of Warsaw in August, 1944, after which there were still battles on the Eastern Front where German troops threw back Soviet attacks, and so delayed the Soviet advance, though by that time the writing was on the wall, however much Hitler was in denial of the fact that he had lost the war. You wonder why Hitler put at risk all of this prosperity, for which he could take credit, except you know that he was more interested in his nationalist and militarist ideology than in anything else. He was not a very sophisticated man despite his great ability to manipulate the strands of power so that he could stay in charge, keeping hold of the military, the corporations, putting down the SA, and using the display of those large red Nazi flags hanging everywhere as well as the Nazi salute to convince people that they were living in new times, after the revolution. Hitler had no plan B for what would happen if the war went wrong and so the object of late war propaganda was to make Germany ever more Insular as its boundaries contracted, German civil life continuing what with deserters being shot in the streets of Berlin even as the Soviet Army was on its outskirts.
I should qualify my point about insularity because I really don’t have enough of a basis for the comparison of German and American film production. I haven’t been able to see even excerpts from the films where Leander pals around with SS people and I have no access to any of the dramatic films made in Germany during the war. They seem to be embargoed, though it has been suggested to me that they are locked up in someone’s vaults somewhere waiting for the right time for their release. And when, I muse, would that be? The war has been over for three quarters of a century and we have moved onto other issues, but that fact is only part of what suggests that World War II is still a fresh scar, a blight from which the world has not spiritually recovered even if Germany has for a long time now been a peaceful and responsible democracy.
What to make of this insularity, should it be an accurate description of German film making during the war? Is it, perhaps, a tribute to the fact that society survives even under the most appalling of conditions? Or a reflection on how well a totalitarian regime is able to preserve itself because it will go to any extremes to do so? The Confederacy surrendered when its armies were no longer able to defend themselves, not because all its territory had been conquered. The Confederacy did not dream positively of an apocalypse, while some Germans wanted either victory or total self immolation.
I wonder how the American media would have reacted if the shoe were on the other foot and the United States had been on the verge of defeat? A clue to that is something shared by both German and American culture at the time: their music was highly sentimental, both nations sharing the Big Band sound and lyrics of requited love-- even as Black American music was about unrequited or bittersweet reflection on love. The upbeat “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else But Me” just makes light of the anxiety of servicemen that their girls were indeed fooling around with guys still on the homefront. The Netflix version of “The Man in the High Tower” gets a number of things right about an America occupied by the Japanese and Germans including that there would still be June Allyson movies. The tone about the current coronavirus epidemic is very different. It is either anxiety about spread or bitterness about insufficient government action, not an attempt to make things seem normal and nice in spite of what is going on.
Here is the big takeaway. German films were not filled with dread about what might happen in Germany for the understandable reason that the films were, by and large, not meant to prepare Germans for a defeat even if it was just around the corner. An exception to this rule was a German film made late in the war which showed soldiers on leave attending a musical performance and swaying back and forth with their row in the audience, as is the case in so many German musicals of the period, but this time they are preparing to go off to the front and be killed. Goebbels, to the last, was doing the best he could for the cause. In contrast, American movies were filled with dread about what might happen if the war was not waged successfully. Americans would be subject to Nazi gangsters and aristocrats who were now just on the periphery of society as spies and sabateurs. American movies recounted early defeats as a holding action before the impending counterattack, which was true enough to the facts of what would happen. The war followed the American, not the German, script.