Performing Politics: (review)

 
The usual approach to writing about film culture in postwar Germany is to restrict the discussion to films made by Germans, in order, as Jennifer Fay puts it in the introduction to Theaters of Occupation, “to assess how they negotiate Germany’s complicated relationship to anti-Semitism and to the country’s National Socialist past” (xxvi).¹ Fay, however, is more interested in the postwar Germans’ sense of the present than in their relation to the past; and she’s less interested in postwar German films per se than in the ways those films functioned, along with the American movies screened as part of the Allies’ efforts at reeducating the German public, in the staging of the encounter between a shattered Germany and a politically and culturally ascendant United States.² Indeed, although much of the book’s time and space are devoted to the examination of individual films and their reception, with all but one of the chapters turning around the consideration of what Fay calls a “nodal film” (144), Theaters of Occupation is less concerned with film than with ideology, cultural politics, policy, and political theory.³ Fay’s main aims are to lay out a critique of American ideological commitments—especially, but not exclusively, those informing U.S. policy during the occupation; and to argue, in the course of laying out that critique,⁴ first, that the U.S. effort to reeducate the Germans, at least insofar as Hollywood fiction films and American-made documentaries figured in that effort, failed to produce the desired effects; and, second, that the German experience of America’s reeducation campaign nonetheless promoted—inadvertently and in quite ironic ways—the development within Germany of a more genuinely democratic sensibility than the one the Americans were self-consciously aiming at.
 
This redefining of the discursive terrain is on the whole very productive. As Fay’s analysis consistently demonstrates, a consideration of U.S. occupation policy regarding the reeducation of the postwar German population brings American ideologies into stark relief—mainly because the process of promoting American cultural identity more or less forced the Americans into wearing their ideological positions, as it were, on their sleeve. Moreover, the interdisciplinary nature of Fay’s work—which masterfully weaves together elements from an array of disparate fields—produces treatments of individual films that are at once novel, compelling, and persuasive. Helmut Käutner’s Der apfel ist ab (The Apple Fell, 1948), for example, has previously been thought to be of interest mainly because of the objections it raised among the clergy both before and during its release. Fay mostly sidesteps discussion of both the blurred religious allegory the film suggests and the cultural controversy that that allegory engendered. Instead, she presents Der apfel ist ab as a parody of democratic origins and as a political allegory satirizing the paucity of choices being made available to Germans as tensions between East and West began to rise. Her reading of this film is set in the context of a broader discussion of American cold-war propaganda as represented by Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), which the Americans put into heavy rotation in Germany in 1948, the same year Der apfel ist ab premiered, and by the Welt im Film (World in Film) newsreels that were a principal tool in the reeducation effort (and whose screening was, as Fay notes, “compulsory for all exhibitors in the U.S. and British zones until January 1950” [46]). As Europe generally and Germany particularly became staging grounds for the conflicts between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, both Lubitsch’s film and the newsreels, Fay argues, presented reductive images of the competing political systems and of the distinctions between them—and by so doing worked to make the political choices before the Germans seem clear and straightforward. In Ninotchka, the choice between capitalism and communism is simplified to “one between embodied enjoyment and the suppression of desire, affect, and appetite” (90-91); the newsreels, simplifying further, offer a decision “between pleasure and unpleasure, survival and starvation, freedom and unfreedom” (112). Der apfel ist ab highlights the absurdity of these sorts of impossible choices where there is really no choice to make. And in its depiction of a protagonist unable to choose between a pair of polar opposites, figured as potential mates, the film raises questions about the very possibilities of self-government. Theaters of Occupation‘s analysis of the films and their relations, and of the cultural situation in which their interplay occurred, is rich, informative, nuanced, and clever.
 
Cagier still is Fay’s work on, and with, George Cukor’s female gothic film Gaslight (1944), which surveys revealed to be highly popular among German audiences when it was released in Germany in 1948 (152). Fay doesn’t offer a reading of the film. Rather, by way of explaining its popularity, she teases out what she takes to be the various ways it resonates with occupation experience. She then uses it to build a portrait of “democratic subjectivity” (169). Citing studies by several scholars doing work on gothic literature, Fay argues that, historically, the gothic as literary genre is tied to concerns about “democracy … foreign invasion, loss of sovereignty, and violent regime change” (147). These ties make the genre amenable to analysis in the context of military occupation. Female gothic fictions and films, moreover, which center around images of disempowered women victimized by men who, shortly after the women marry them, turn out to be exploitative and murderous, would have appealed, Fay suggests, to an audience that was comprised largely of women; that as a whole, including both men and women, had been feminized—and made critical of masculine authority—by the experiences of war and occupation; and that felt betrayed—regardless of whatever commitments to National Socialism there might have been before the war—by Hitler and the Nazis. As for Gaslight: on Fay’s account, it can be, and might well have been, seen as having an almost allegorical relation to occupation history: there’s the paranoia inducing experience of the main character Paula’s relation to her “mystifying East European husband” (161), onto whom “we could variously map the Hitlers and Stalins of Europe” (162); there’s the “demystifying American rescuer” (161-62); there’s the threat of loss of identity, with Paula’s psychic disintegration paralleling German cultural disintegration; there’s the general sense of anxiety generated by the possibility that the present will collapse into a repetition of the past (“that Paula is fated to end as her mother did: alone in an asylum” [163]; that “the injunction that Germans imitate Americans and reproduce their popular culture,” given the “racism, xenophobia, militarism, and anticommunism” encoded in that popular culture, “could be interpreted as a terrifying call to reenact the very kinds of violence that prompted the occupation in the first place” [142]). “We could say,” Fay notes, “that Gaslight offers its German spectators a national script of female victimization, authoritarian manipulation, and perhaps also liberation that could find wide historical application” (163).
 
In addition to capturing postwar German concerns and resonating with occupation experience, Gaslight also serves, according to Fay, an educational function—mainly by endorsing Paula’s mistrust of the male authority figures in her life. In female gothic plots, that is, the sanity of the protagonist is typically put into question: shortly after marrying a mysterious and charismatic man she doesn’t know well enough, the heroine comes to believe that the man is trying to kill her; but circumstances are usually such that the legitimacy of the heroine’s suspicions remains in doubt. There is a history of insanity she may be repeating. She may simply be paranoid, her sense of victimization a delusion. And in some female gothic films—Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), for example—the heroine’s concerns do turn out to be a fantasy. Not so in the case of Gaslight: Paula is right to be suspicious of her husband; he is, in fact, trying to drive her mad and destroy her. Moreover, Paula’s mistrust—a “gothic skepticism” (172)—carries over into her relation to the man who helps save her—from whom she accepts, not a proposal of marriage, but of friendship. “Paula learns the folly of falling too quickly and too completely for the man who would rescue her from her dark past, and she learns that the only way to avoid history’s return is by knowing that history to the best of her ability” (171). The implications, in terms of political allegory, are clear: “where Ninotchka allows herself to be seduced by capitalism, the gothic heroine would be suspicious of the regime that lures her. She would be wary that this new government may harbor a violent history and may be just as untrustworthy as the regime it replaces” (171). The suffering the Germans endured as a consequence of their allegiances to Hitler and National Socialism has, in other words, predisposed the population toward a healthy skepticism concerning authority and an acute awareness of the violence necessarily associated with the institution of law. The American effort at reeducating the Germans—at least where the use of films is concerned—only served to reinforce the Germans’ wariness: the Welt im Film newsreels recalled Nazi propaganda; Hollywood movies, made ambiguous by their efforts to abide by censorship codes, often contained material that could be seen as signaling similarities between American history and the history of Nazi Germany (both of which are marked by genocidal violence) and between Nazi Germany’s and America’s ideological commitments (a shared faith in capitalism and fear of communism, shared anxieties about race that translate into the production and promotion of a white national identity, a shared veneration of military valor and the glories of war). “Rather than feeling propelled forward into a new political reality,” Fay writes, “there is a sense that Germans may have experienced the occupation as history’s uncanny return, or perhaps the return of uncanny history” (142)—a circumstance that produced in Germany, however, a productive paranoia, a suspiciousness about power and those who seek and wield it. Gaslight thus reflects German postwar dispositions and predispositions, but it can also be said to “foster,” Fay argues, “a democratic subjectivity” (169).
 
What’s most striking about Fay’s analysis is the facility with which she organizes insights drawn from a diverse array of disciplines—literary criticism, literary theory, film studies, political theory and history—into a coherent whole. It’s a very rich tapestry that she weaves. But as smart as the analysis surely is, it does raise, for me a least, a few questions. The first has to do with the methodology Fay uses, not just here—in the chapter on the political implications for Germany of the reception of the female gothic film—but throughout the book.
 
Much of Theaters of Occupation—most of the discussion of Hollywood films, parts of the chapters dealing mainly with films made in Germany—presents itself as a contribution to film reception history. That is, one of Fay’s chief concerns is to identify the ways Germans living under the American occupation were responding to particular films and to particular types of films. The persuasiveness of her claims on that score is an issue in its own right. But the force of what she has to say about U.S. foreign policy—that the reeducation effort failed to deliver the results the Americans desired but did produce a sort of inadvertent success when looked at from the standpoint of the Germans—depends at least in part on how convincing she is on the issue of reception: if the Germans aren’t seeing echoes of their disastrous National Socialist past in the American films they are watching, then they don’t acquire the “gothic skepticism” that is, for Fay, a key to the evolution of democracy in Germany after the war. And if the specifics involved in Fay’s account of Germany’s transformation into a democracy don’t hold up, either we’re left with a historical conundrum or we’re forced to return to a more conventional assessment of the historical situation (that, however flawed in details, U.S. occupation policies succeeded in laying the groundwork for the development of a democratic Germany).⁵
 
The problem, of course, is that, in the absence of some sort of hard evidence—detailed surveys of audience reactions, collections of response cards filled out at the time of the viewing, broad cultural discussion (in the form, say, of editorials or letters to editors), or extensive review—it is difficult to make fully convincing claims about the ways actual viewers respond, or have responded, to films. In the case of films shown to German audiences during the occupation, as Fay herself admits, there is little hard evidence concerning audience attitudes to work with.⁶ Her chapter on Gaslight cites surveys and some contemporary reviews (both of Gaslight and of a few other films whose reception, according to Fay, bears on our understanding of the reception of Cukor’s film). While the survey results do tell us that Gaslight was the most popular film shown in Germany in 1948, they have nothing to say (going by Fay’s presentation of the material) about the reasons for its popularity. And the reviews Fay quotes don’t really speak to the issues at the core of her analysis. They do, in a sort of loose way, support her claim that “film reviewers in occupied Germany conspicuously engaged films … as ideological and even ethnographic texts that were meaningful within the wider discursive environment of occupation” (155), but the ideological and ethnographic concerns most on display in the passages she quotes have to do, not with worries about the possible reestablishment of a totalitarian regime in Germany (a gothic suspicion that history is repeating itself), but with German anxieties about the vulgarity or banality of an encroaching American culture.
 
Given the lack of hard evidence and the vagueness of the evidence that does exist, Fay’s representation of postwar German responses to the films in circulation has to remain highly conjectural—a problem made more acute by the sometimes circular reasoning involved in Fay’s efforts at reconstructing the probable interplay between viewers and films. To return to the discussion of Gaslight and the female gothic: Fay asserts that for the Germans living under the occupation, the fear arose “that your Allied protector—this emissary of democracy—[was] in fact out to harm you, steal your property, commandeer (literally occupy) your body and house, and drive you mad” (150). She offers little in the way of support for the assertion.⁷ Rather, it’s the popularity of Cukor’s film that serves to justify the positing of this gothic occupation subjectivity. But then the existence of that subjectivity in turn serves to explain the popularity of the film. Given the number and the heterogeneity of the Hollywood films shown in Germany during the occupation, and given the almost willful indeterminacy of those films, one could probably use such a process of reasoning to justify just about any statements one might be inclined to make about the postwar German world. And there are aspects of Fay’s own analysis that raise questions about the conclusions she draws. Assuming that Fay is right that the Germans’ experience of occupation resonated with the experience of the heroines of female gothic films, and assuming that such resonance explains the popularity of Gaslight, it seems to stand to reason that gothic films generally would have enjoyed a marked popularity. Fay notes that several such films were shown in occupied Germany. But of the three she mentions by name (aside from Gaslight), only one—Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941)—was well received. German critics, according to Fay, lambasted The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1945) and found Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1944) to be laughable. Thus in the context of an argument for the centrality of the female gothic film to postwar German experience, the author’s own research forces the reader to wrangle with the troubling fact that the Germans apparently liked only half of the female gothic movies the author discusses.
 
This sort of tenuousness marks other moments of the analysis as well. I’ll mention just one. Fay contends, plausibly enough, that given their awareness of the aims of the Allied reeducation campaign, German audiences during the occupation would have been inclined to read the Hollywood films for their encoded political messages. She also contends, with equal plausibility, that Hollywood films, which, because of the pressures of the censorship codes, were forced to be highly ambiguous, encoded political messages quite at odds with the aims of reeducation. American films, Fay writes, produced an “unruly image world of America’s democratic unconscious” that “revealed in its fissures, obscurities, and curious asides a darker side of American politics to those audiences open to alternative readings, as indeed Germans were” (58). Fay unveils this “darker side of American politics” in the course of a series of brief readings of particular films, all of the readings focusing on some aspect of American racial politics or America’s racist past: the Sonja Henie star vehicle Sun Valley Serenade (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941) exposes the exclusionary aspects of America’s assimilationist mythologies; John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Across the Pacific (1942) “are shot through with national and racial substitutions that were animated by America’s pernicious orientalism” (64); John Ford’s Drum’s along the Mohawk (1939) and Fritz Lang’s Western Union (1941) reveal (by seeking “to authorize”) “the genocide that made possible America’s democratic founding” and “implicitly question the costs of cultural conformity by working through the outsider’s relationship to America’s civilizing mission” (75). These readings are, while not especially original, surely tenable. They would have been available, that is, to German viewers. But, again, Fay has no real evidence to suggest that the Germans did in fact read these films as she reads them. Maybe they did. But, then again, maybe not.
 
My second concern about Theaters of Occupation has to do with some of the juxtapositions in play throughout the work. Inasmuch as Fay’s thesis is that the Germans living under occupation came to experience American efforts at reeducation as an eerie re-imposition of their fascist past, the whole of the work serves as something of an extended meditation on the analogy to be drawn between the U.S. and Nazi Germany. A host of specific comparisons punctuate the text. In the first chapter, for example, in the course of a discussion of an American movie, Tomorrow—the World! (Leslie Fenton, 1944), that was released shortly before the end of the war and that was designed to show how the soon-to-be conquered German people could be rehabilitated, Fay remarks on the similarity of Fenton’s film to a Nazi-era propaganda piece entitled Hitlerjunge Quex (Hans Steinhoff, 1933), which concerns the political conversion of a young German boy to Nazism and his eventual murder by communists. Referring to the latter as “[a]lmost a prequel to” (27) the former, Fay notes: “the similarities between Hitlerjunge Quex and Tomorrow—the World! leave little doubt that American cinema is not Weimar or even Nazi cinema’s opposite but its shadow” (32). In the following chapter, Fay offers a comparable correlation between Across the Pacific and another Nazi propaganda film. “What is interesting about [Across the Pacific] in the German context is that its representation of Japanese otherness bears comparison to the stereotypes of Jewish culture in Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (Jew Süss, 1940), a Nazi-era film that likewise dramatizes the danger of assimilating the ethnic minority” (74). Fay goes on to note that just as Jud Süß “enables a ‘consent to genocide'” (Fay is citing Katrin Sieg here [Sieg 85]), Across the Pacific “foments a consent to internment” (74). In the concluding paragraph of this same chapter, Fay states that the film program that was put together by the American Military Government (and that Fay has, in some sense, briefly reviewed) “suggests that even the American occupiers sensed a disturbing similarity between themselves and their Nazi-era German wards” (82). The end of Chapter 3 sounds the same refrain. After examining the propaganda purposes to which Ninotchka was put by the Americans as the cold war began, Fay writes: “[t]hat Goebbels also celebrated Ninotchka … raises the possibility that in choosing as Ninotchka does, Germans may in fact restore themselves to ideals of Nazi citizenship” (113). As I noted earlier, these sorts of comparisons are common in Theaters of Occupation; and many more examples could be adduced. My aim in drawing attention to them is not to question the legitimacy of any of the particulars but to suggest that in their totality—in their number and in their insistency—they work over the course of the book to insinuate that there isn’t finally much to distinguish the United States from Nazi Germany. Such a flattening of meaningful distinctions is a problem in its own right. But the distraction it produces also makes it difficult to attend fully to the moments in Fay’s book of more trenchant analysis.
 
I want briefly to discuss one of those moments. In the introduction and first chapter of Theaters of Occupation, Fay lays out the logic of the American reeducation campaign in Germany. U.S. policy, Fay argues, was grounded in the ideas—promulgated by a number of academics working in the emergent field of psychoculturalism—that each country possesses “a unified ‘national character structure'” and that this structure is mutable (3): “[a] product of traditions passed on from one generation to the next, character structure was an evolving cultural construct that, while manifested and reinforced in all aspects of a national, social, and psychic life, could nonetheless be changed” (3). Germany’s national character, according to the psychoculturalists, was diseased, paranoid, primitive. America’s national character is democratic. Since, for the Americans, democracy was less a matter of institutions and political practices than “a type of behavior, a public attitude, and an affective relationship to the state” (xiv), reeducating the Germans would involve getting them to learn, by miming, these behaviors and attitudes. The “master trope” for the process of reeducation (58), Fay maintains, was immigrant assimilation. Germans living under the occupation could learn, just as Germans who immigrate to the States learn, to be good democratic citizens. In order to accomplish this transformation, the Germans in the old country, like those in the new, would be required to give up their ethnic and cultural distinctiveness. In effect, they would have to become Americans. “The logic of reeducation,” Fay writes, “is that ‘democracy’ depends on a mimesis that erases difference” (xvi): as the Americans conceive it, that is, “democracy is not an enlightened pluralistic philosophy so much as a homogenizing force” (xvi).
 
This homogenizing aspect of American culture and of the reeducation policy the U.S. pursued, this intolerance of difference, is one of the central failings, according to Fay, of both the country’s political culture and of its policy in postwar Germany. It’s a chief preoccupation of Fay’s work. To be sure, the idea that American democracy—which, as Fay suggests, is majoritarian in principle and tends to reduce the idea of freedom to market choice—functions as a sort of machine for producing sameness is not original to Fay’s book. But the particular focus of her study, as I’ve said, brings the country’s ideological operations into the open. Fay’s concern with culture loss and with the elimination of difference, moreover, acquires considerable weight as a consequence of more recent historical developments. As Fay points out, the administration of George W. Bush presented America’s occupation of Germany as a context for its invasion and occupation of Iraq.
 
The universalizing impulses that motivated the reeducation campaign in Germany, and the assumption of a universality of human being that made sense of the effort, were in play as well in the case of Iraq. Given the ways they worked and were worked to make possible that still ongoing catastrophe in the Middle East, these impulses and assumptions are not just troubling but dangerous. Theaters of Occupations provides a valuable service in drawing attention to them.
 
The question of how—and to what extent—to accommodate difference is, however, vexed and vexing. And Theaters of Occupation doesn’t really acknowledge the problems the issue presents. There’s a point, for example, near the end of the book, where Fay, summarizing a critique of American liberalism presented by Eric Erikson in 1950, notes that American “majoritarianism” is not really interested in “universal justice or pluralism” (181).⁸ This easy yoking of those two terms suggests there is no tension between them. They aren’t, I think (and hope), antithetical, but the ideas (that we ought to aim at producing “universal justice”; that we need to value “pluralism”) don’t reconcile easily. If, in the face of the homogenizing force of a metastasizing American market empire, our central commitment needs to be, as Fay suggests, to foster different cultural modes of being, we will be hard pressed to promote universal justice. Local cultures generate local forms of justice—which are not infrequently at odds with one another. In certain cases, in relation to certain sets of issues, celebrating the local becomes problematic. The limit case, of course, is genocide. One of the features of the local culture Hitler governed was the belief that dispossessing and murdering Jews constituted a form of justice. And while it is true that preventing this distinctive cultural practice was not the reason the U.S. (or any other country) went to war with Germany, one of the lessons the world seemed to think it learned from its encounter with the camps (as measured most clearly by the United Nation’s adoption in 1948 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) was that interfering with the expression of cultural difference is, in this instance at any rate, a moral imperative.
 
Arguments can be, indeed have been, made for seeing one culture’s interfering with another culture as always illegitimate, even in the case of genocide. Perhaps a really thoroughgoing commitment to the value of difference is our primary ethical obligation.⁹ But the counter-arguments (those critical of the notion of sovereignty, for example, or those in favor of the enforcement of international law) are also compelling—especially at a time when it is possible to imagine Bush administration officials being indicted for crimes against humanity. We are—at this moment when the forces of an inevitable globalization produce increasing cultural conflict—just at the beginning, I believe, of what will be a protracted international, multicultural, and multidimensional negotiation of just these tensions: between sameness and difference, between the belief, on the one hand in the principle of universal justice, and the desire, on the other, to embrace diversity. Although Theaters of Occupation doesn’t fully register the difficulties involved in that negotiation, it is a rich and engaging contribution to the discussion.