Goebbels: A Biography (47 page)

In the last months of 1936, criticism of German film’s insufficient propaganda content runs like a thread through Goebbels’s diaries.
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What was most alarming for him was the dissatisfaction with German films that Hitler expressed to him; they were not “national socialist” enough.
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Consequently Goebbels demanded that his producers and directors should make “more use of contemporary subject matter.”
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What he wanted, he wrote, was “the new political film,” but the film industry brought forward no usable suggestions of appropriate
topics.
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He subjected the colleagues closest to him in the film sector to rebukes of varying severity.
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Since all the instruments he had devised—film dramaturgy, the Film Chamber, a system of awards, and so on—had failed to produce the desired results, he decided to take the film industry directly under his control.

The idea of a “great new film company with the state as majority stake-holder” first appears in the diaries in June 1936.
¹⁰²
In autumn 1936 the plan took concrete shape, and Goebbels initiated takeover negotiations with Ufa. Even during the negotiations he tried to impose an “artistic committee” on Ufa in order to have a body that could bypass the management and exert its influence on the content of productions.
¹⁰³
At Tobis
*
he had already instituted just such a committee.
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In early March he received a “long letter” from Alfred Hugenberg, whose group of companies owned Ufa. Hugenberg wrote that “at least for the time being” (as Goebbels noted) he rejected “artistic boards.” Goebbels was now determined to apply ruthless pressure. This letter, he asserted, would cost the “Hugenbergers” “at least 3 million marks.” More effective was a “general attack” by the media on the insubordinate film company. The first target was the Ufa film
Menschen ohne Vaterland
(People Without a Fatherland), which was now savagely criticized throughout the press.
¹⁰⁵
Just a few days after having “worn Ufa down,” he exulted in the fact that the “biggest film, media, theater and radio concern in the world” was about to be born.
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On March 20 it was all over: The Ufa company had “finally been bought out,” and Goebbels wanted to get rid of the old supervisory board (“German Nationalist uncles”) as quickly as possible.
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It goes without saying that the press campaign against
Menschen ohne Vaterland
was now instantly dropped.
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Shortly after nationalizing the most important film companies, Goebbels gave another big speech in the Kroll Opera to the “film creators.”
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Hypocritically, Goebbels put himself forward as a “warm-hearted but ultimately neutral observer” of German film, and he asserted with regret that in contemporary German film “the purely commercial tendencies” had displaced “the artistic element,” so that it was “more accurate today to speak of the film industry than of cinematic
art.” As a counterweight he praised the model already introduced at Tobis: placing artists on the supervisory boards of the film industry.

As Goebbels went on with his speech, his message was clear: When he talked of orientating the film along “artistic” lines, he meant “I want […] an art which expresses an attitude through its national-socialist character and by taking up national-socialist problems.” But this orientation should not “appear deliberate”; propaganda only worked when it “remains in the background as a tendency, as character, as attitude, and only becomes apparent in action, unfolding events, processes, in the contrast between individuals.”

Ewald von Demandowsky, who took over the office of film dramaturge in May 1937, became Goebbels’s most important collaborator in his bid to radically reorganize German film.
¹¹⁰
Ernst von Liechtenstein, from the Reich propaganda office, took over management of the film department from the beginning of 1938 and was followed by Fritz Hippler in August 1939.
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Not only did Goebbels largely replace the supervisory boards of Ufa and Tobis, he also involved himself directly in these companies’ productions:
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He reserved the right to approve the acquisition of individual artists;
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made casting decisions;
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assigned directing contracts; imposed bans on filming
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and directing;
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and evaluated screenplays.
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In short, he was determined “to intervene more firmly in film production by giving orders.”
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At the end of July 1937 he forbade “this everlasting singsong in entertainment films,” and he tasked Demandowsky with “cutting out never-never settings from films.”
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A few days later, angry at the “lack of quality in film,” Goebbels pulled a few directors off various projects.
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Obviously alarmed by Hitler’s “very stinging verdict” on these “bad films,”
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he summoned the heads of production and the artistic directors of the film companies and complained about “recent banal and uninspired kitsch films.”
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He ordered that films from the Weimar period in which “Jews are still to be seen” should be banned “lock, stock, and barrel.”
¹²³
He also set about the “de-jewification [
Entjudung
] of film exports”: The Party’s organization abroad ought to intervene in film sales to foreign countries.
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Together with Demandowsky he compiled a list of actors, directors, and screenwriters who were especially
worth backing.
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He made a sustained effort (though clearly without striking success) to develop guidelines to limit salaries.
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He also developed his own subject matter: He closely supervised the production of the “autobahn film”
Die Stimme aus dem Äther
(The Voice from the Ether).
¹²⁷
In 1939 he developed an idea for a “press film”; the project, never realized, went under the working title “Die 7. Grossmacht” (The Seventh Great Power).
¹²⁸

Goebbels pronounced a mainly negative verdict on the “national-political” films that were made before the takeover of the big studios and reached the cinemas in the early months of 1937.
¹²⁹
The anticommunist films made in 1936–37 were not biting enough for him either.
¹³⁰
He was boundlessly enthusiastic—admittedly, after a good many improvements had been made to the screenplay
¹³¹
—about the film
Patrioten
(Patriots; his lover Lida Baarová starred in it), as he also was about Veit Harlan’s
Der Herrscher
(The Ruler), a picture about a captain of industry with a social conscience who bequeaths his capital to the state.
¹³²
Among the films appearing later in the year, he liked, up to a point, the satire
Mein Sohn der Herr Minister
¹³³
(My Son the Minister) and the First World War epic
Unternehmen Michael
(Operation Michael), but he had reservations about both films.
¹³⁴
However, there was no end to his praise for
Urlaub auf Ehrenwort
(Leave on Parole).
¹³⁵
On the other hand, the project of a film “about Spain” that he was promoting came to nothing,
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as did an anticlerical Lola Montez film.
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In mid-1937 he managed to add the film company Terra to his stable.
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He wanted originally to liquidate Bavaria Film in Munich, but—with Hitler’s support and against Goebbels’s will—Gauleiter Adolf Wagner pushed through a re-founding of the company early in 1938 in order to preserve filmmaking in Munich.
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Goebbels now continued to pursue his objective of steering the film companies’ productions with the help of “artistic committees,” designed as a counterweight to the supervisory boards, with their predominantly commercial interests. At Ufa, this role was taken on by the director Carl Froelich and the actors Mathias Wieman and Paul Hartmann;
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at Tobis
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there were Emil Jannings and Willi Forst (Gustave Gründgens once again declined on grounds of overcommitment);
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and at Terra, most notably, Heinrich George.
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Yet complaints soon proliferated in Goebbels’s diary about the ineffectiveness
of this system.
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While the number of filmgoers continued to rise in 1937, production costs were spiraling out of control, and film exports continued the steep decline that had begun in 1933.
¹⁴⁵

By the end of 1937 Goebbels was becoming increasingly critical of film production,
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and after a long discussion with Demandowsky he came to a terse and sobering conclusion: “Our films are just very bad.”
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At the end of November he gave a talk to leading film people to point out “mistakes and failings.”
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The comedies produced in the following few months he found particularly unappealing.
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In general it is striking that film production in 1938–39 was not primarily concerned with preparing for war: Only a handful of films from each year dealt with political themes. Neither do Goebbels’s diary entries suggest that he wanted to use film purposefully and extensively as psychological preparation for war.
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Apart from his direct influence on the film companies, Goebbels was ambitious to secure the quality of filmmaking in the long run by nurturing talent. In March 1938 he established the cornerstone of a film academy in Babelsberg.
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Within a two-year course of study, the training of future specialists in the artistic, technical, and financial aspects of cinema was to be carried out by three faculties.
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But Goebbels was soon expressing doubts about the head of the academy, Wilhelm Müller-Scheldt. Most of all he objected to Müller-Scheldt’s admissions policy,
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so he issued “a clear directive to select candidates suited to our time and our taste, i.e. beautiful women and manly men.”
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At the end of 1938 Goebbels concluded that the system of artistic committees he had been sponsoring so far was unproductive.
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After lengthy consultations
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he placed heads of production in all the film companies, to whom he issued instructions directly,
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in order at last to achieve total control over the production companies.
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In March 1937, in a further speech to filmmakers, Goebbels gave his reasons for appointing “independently responsible heads of production” and ending the experiment of artistic committees: The committees had not been able to prevail against the supervisory boards, representing as they did narrow financial concerns.
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Yet despite all his efforts, in June 1939 Hitler pronounced himself still “somewhat dissatisfied,” and Goebbels decided to take the problem in hand by changing the heads of production where appropriate.
¹⁶⁰
The propaganda minister continued to be skeptical about the
effectiveness of his far-reaching interference in the German film industry, but at the same time he was not prepared to admit to himself the reasons for this. For all his general demand for improvements to the quality of pictures and for all his hectic giving of “orders” to the film industry and his personal intervention, Goebbels the film tycoon had not been able to give the huge conglomerate he had been running for two years clear and practical guidelines for adapting their film production in the medium term. An industry in which the gestation of a film normally took a year, from conception to finished product, could not be steered by “orders” and interventions à la Goebbels.

In summer 1937 Goebbels was completely taken up with the reorientation of German art. His diary entries show clearly how strenuously he tried in these months to adjust to the dictator’s taste in art. Hitler, for his part, was evidently eager to put his propaganda minister (who in the early phase of the regime had not entirely rejected “modern” artistic tendencies as a matter of principle) on the right track by his very own efforts.

Goebbels flew with Hitler in June to Munich to view the almost-completed “Führer building” on the Königsplatz as well as the recently finished House of German Art. Together with his propaganda minister, Hitler went on to inspect the works chosen by a jury headed by the president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Art, Adolf Ziegler, for display in the “Great German Art Exhibition” with which the building was to be opened. Hitler was appalled, as Goebbels noted: “They’ve hung works here that make your flesh creep. […] The Führer is seething with rage.”
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The next day—they were both en route to Regensburg by now—Hitler returned to the subject: He would rather postpone the exhibition for a year than “display such muck.”
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Eventually Hitler decided to reduce the number of works to five hundred and left the selection to his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann.
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Alongside the Great German Art Exhibition intended to represent art in the Third Reich, in 1937 Goebbels planned an “Exhibition of Art from the Age of Decadence.” Initially meant for Berlin, it was
moved to Munich. It was precisely the difficulties that had arisen over the selection of works for the Great German Art Exhibition that made it seem appropriate to define in a parallel exhibition exactly what art was
not
wanted in the Third Reich.
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At the end of June Goebbels gained Hitler’s official approval for the plan. The exhibition was to be curated by Ziegler and Schweitzer, although Hitler forcibly expressed his reservations about the former
Angriff
caricaturist.
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In order to requisition the relevant works, Goebbels gave Ziegler special permission, on the basis of “specially conferred Führer-powers,” to “take custody” of works of art from any public museum in Germany that fit his description of “German decadent art since 1910.”
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In haste, the commission in July 1937 visited thirty-two collections in twenty-eight towns, and requisitioned seven hundred works of art.
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This looting of art museums represented an affront to Education Minister Rust, with whom Goebbels was on a war footing. The offense was compounded by the fact that on Goebbels’s initiative artists shown in the Munich “Decadence Exhibition” were branded as “degenerate” even though they were teaching at state art schools or were members of the Prussian Academy of Fine Art.
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Goebbels’s strategy was clear: Rust was to be pushed into an untenable defensive position in the area of culture policy and his academy forced to close down, so that Goebbels could set up a “German Academy” under his own direction. Thus the threatened loss of prestige with Hitler over the business of the Munich art exhibition would be compensated for by a brilliant success.
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At the beginning of July the Goebbels family began their vacation preparations: They were off to Heiligendamm again. While Goebbels was supervising the packing in his Berlin house, he received a surprise call: “Führer’s on the phone: Wants to visit us on Schwanenwerder.” So the Goebbelses drove with their children back to Schwanenwerder to enjoy “a wonderful afternoon out there with the Führer.”
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The next day, July 3, the Goebbels family flew to the Baltic: “Wonderful rest. And I certainly need it,” confided Goebbels to his diary.
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After the family had just gotten settled in at Heiligendamm, there was another change in their vacation plans. Hitler urged them by phone to spend their vacation with him on the Obersalzberg; an invitation to do so had already gone out a few weeks earlier.
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So they packed up again and—with a short stop in Berlin—flew to Bavaria.
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The Goebbels family arrived on the Obersalzberg on July 9, where Hitler, as Goebbels recorded with pride, was “already waiting [for them] on the steps.”
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The following days were passed in all sorts of conversations, card games, and the obligatory home cinema. But the real reason for the pressing invitation was that Hitler wanted to instruct his propaganda minister thoroughly on the required direction of travel in cultural policy. On July 11 Hitler went with Goebbels to Munich; this time, Hitler was much happier about the works chosen for the Great German Art Exhibition.

On July 12 Goebbels left the Obersalzberg to fly to Berlin; Magda and the children stayed on in Berchtesgaden. On July 16 he flew back to Munich
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to visit, together with Hitler, the “Exhibition of Degenerate Art,” which opened a few days later in the Hofgarten Arcades, not far from the House of German Art. The show displayed six hundred works, including those by Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lyonel Feininger, and Franz Marc. In order to reduce the impact of the paintings, they were hung very close together, with an effect of randomness; titles of and commentaries to the pictures were written on the walls. By the end of November 1937, over two million people had seen this exhibition.
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After their joint visit to the exhibition, Goebbels spoke in Hitler’s presence at the annual conference of the Reich Chamber of Fine Art, and took part the next day, July 18, in the grand opening of the House of German Art.
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In the specially commissioned opening exhibition there were 1,200 predominantly conventional works of art on display, which, however, scarcely lived up to the exhibition’s claim to be the artistic expression of National Socialism and, in terms of quality, to continue the tradition of nineteenth-century art. But how could this claim possibly have been fulfilled?

What was on display were overwhelmingly historical and genre pieces, monumental landscapes, various “blood and soil” motifs, heroic representations of an “awakening” Germany, and portraits of the Führer. In Hitler’s and Goebbels’s opening speeches, there were signs of dissatisfaction with what was on display,
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which did not prevent Goebbels and Magda from acquiring pictures for the total value of 50,000 Reichsmarks on behalf of the Propaganda Ministry.
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Some months later, at the annual conference of the Reich Culture Chamber, Goebbels was even more open about the lack of quality in
Nazi art, with regard not only to pictorial art but also to literature. The “great ideological ideas” of the National Socialist revolution, he said, had “for the moment such a spontaneous and eruptive effect […] that they are not yet ready for artistic treatment. The problems are too fresh and too new to lend themselves to artistic, dramatic, or fictional form. We must wait for the next generation to take on this task.”
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Taking what we may call the “lack of maturity” of Nazi art into account, it is not hard to see why Goebbels and Hitler opened both exhibitions almost in parallel. Since official cultural policy had trouble providing examples of what the new “national-socialist” art was supposed to be, it had to fall back on help from an exhibition showing what “decadence” in art was.

At the end of July Hitler declared himself pleased with the success of the Degenerate Art exhibition and ordered a catalogue to be published.
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The exhibition stayed in Munich until November and was then sent on tour around Germany: to Berlin first of all, where it could be seen for three months in 1938, after Goebbels himself had made a few changes.
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At the end of July, Hitler had given Ziegler the job of thoroughly “cleansing” the German art museums once and for all of these incriminating works of art. On his own initiative, Goebbels had already handed him the same assignment just a few days earlier.
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Ziegler’s commission then scoured the galleries, and presented the requisitioned works to Goebbels in November 1938.
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What he had in mind for them became clear at the end of 1938: “The saleable pictures will be sold abroad, the others collected together in horror exhibitions or destroyed.”
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Goebbels had begun to put requisitioning on a legal footing by January 1938. The law on taking possession of “degenerate art” products gave the power to requisition to a commission headed by him; the selected works were subsequently sold on the international art market.
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One of his appointments indicates how determined Goebbels was to adhere rigidly to Hitler’s taste in art: In autumn 1937 he made Franz Hofmann head of the Fine Art Department in the Propaganda Ministry. Hofmann was a hard-liner in artistic matters, who among other things had made a name for himself as art critic of the
Völkischer Beobachter
and had been a member of Ziegler’s commission since
August 1937.
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Ever since 1934, when Goebbels was obliged to withdraw his first appointee, Weidemann, the Fine Art Department of his ministry had been leading a shadowy existence.
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In December 1937, furthermore, Goebbels ordered that foreign art exhibitions in Germany would in future require approval from him: Quite obviously, he wanted to close this kind of backdoor access for undesirable art.
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