Visions of Vienna: Narrating the City in 1920s and 1930s Cinema 9789048531684

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Visions of Vienna

Visions of Vienna Narrating the City in 1920s and 1930s Cinema

Alexandra Seibel

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustrations: Front: Production still from Ein Walzertraum (The Waltz Dream) by Ludwig Berger, Germany 1925. The woman is Mady Christians, her suitor Willy Fritsch. © Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna. Back: Erich von Stroheim and Fay Wray in The Wedding March (1928). © Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press Epnglish-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6298 189 8 e-isbn 978 90 4853 168 4 doi 10.5117/9789462981898 nur 670 © A. Seibel / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents 1. Introduction Viennese Modernity and the Impact on Cinema The Structure of the Cinematic City

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2. Fairgrounds and Vineyards: Urban Topographies in the Viennese Films of Erich von Stroheim Introduction 25 Reflections at the Fairground: Erich von Stroheim’s and Rupert Julian’s Merry-Go-Round (1923) 28 Melodrama, Mass Culture, and Social Masquerade 35 Deception and Reflection: The Entertainment Machinery 39 Sex, Romance, and Spectacle: Leaving the Prater Behind 40 Excess and Analysis: Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928) 43 Concentric City: Center, Circle, and Suburbs 48 Baroque Modernity: The Aesthetics of the Rotten 50 Repressed and Restricted Looks: A Geography of the Gaze 55 Meet Me at the ‘Heuriger’: Tales of the Iron Man 58 3. Critical, Controversial, Conventional: Viennese Girls in Films by Ophüls, Feyder, Hochbaum, and Forst Introduction 65 Arthur Schnitzler’s Sweet Young Thing: Male Fantasy and Female Misery 69 The Viennese Girl vs. the Femme Fatale 71 The Viennese Girl in International Cinema 74 Max Ophüls, Vienna, and Liebelei (1933) 76 Variations of Reality in Liebelei: The Military and the Theater 79 The Gaze of Oppressive Masculinity and the Need for Disguise 83 The Kaiser and The Viennese Girl: Doing Away with the Habsburg Myth in Liebelei and De Mayerling à Sarajevo (1938) 86 Happy Endings in Hollywood: Sidney Franklin’s Reunion in Vienna (1933) and Jacques Feyder’s Daybreak (1931) 89 The Viennese Girl and the Truth of Music in Liebelei 95 The Viennese Girl on Stage: Werner Hochbaum’s Vorstadtvarieté (1935) 97

Willi Forst’s Maskerade (1934): The Viennese Girl and Social Folklore 101 Living Backstage, Dying in the Backyard: The Drama of Marginalization in Liebelei 105 4. Women and the Market of Modernity: G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925) Introduction 109 Leaving the Habsburg Myth Behind: Postwar Misery, Hugo Bettauer, and the Literature of Inflation 111 A Taste for the Real: New Objectivity, Cynicism, and the Cult of Distance in Weimar Modernity 113 The Weimar Street Film, the Street, and The Joyless Street 116 The Semi-Public Hotel: In the Realm of Purchasing Power 120 The Public Street: Taking a Walk in Melchiorgasse 123 Upstairs, Downstairs: Social Climbing Along a Vertical Axis 130 Mother and Whore: The Convolution of the Inside and the Outside World 134 Challenging the Male Gaze: The Female Subject in Armor 138 The Transfer of Agency: Reclaiming the Joyless Streets 141 Pabst’s Film Adaptation of Bettauer’s Book: Omitting the (Anti-)Semitic Discourse in The Joyless Street 142 Death in the Mirror: The Killing of a Jewish Femme Fatale 150 5. The Sound of Make-Believe: Ernst Lubitsch and the World of the Operetta Introduction 155 ‘Retrospective Utopia’: The Myth of Vienna and the Operetta 157 The Meaning of the Waltz: The High, the Low, and the Great Fall 162 Contested Territory: The Operetta and Its Allure for Cinema 165 Becoming Viennese: Music and Sexual Agency 166 Ernst Lubitsch and the Naughty Operetta Tradition 174 ‘What a Speller!’: Noise and Speech versus Song and Dance 181 Making Love on a Park Bench: Private Boredom and Public Bliss 186 The Taste of Mandelbaum and Greenstein: The Masquerade of Otherness 192 Jewish Sophistication and the Viennese Operetta 196 Coda 201 6. Conclusion

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Acknowledgements 213 Notes 215 Illustration Credits

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Filmography 231 Bibliography 235 Index of Film Titles

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Index of Names and Subjects

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1. Introduction Vienna in Cinema: A Traveling Image, 1920–40 In his rather curious and little-known short film from 1968, Orson Welles’ Vienna, Orson Welles plays a tour guide who introduces Vienna to his imaginary audience. Dressed in a black cape, with a black hat, and a cigar in his hand, Welles presents monuments of imperial Vienna, while on the soundtrack the famous zither tune evokes Welles’ character Harry Lime from the The Third Man. In a couple of long shots, we see Welles gazing at the imperial castle of the Belvedere, strolling through the royal park, standing in front of a Catholic church, and then strolling through the park again. The continuity of the shots, with Welles walking through them, suggests proximity between various imperial sites that, in actuality, are far away from each other. Within the first minutes, an imaginary geography of baroque Vienna is thus established, introducing the city as old and imperial, resistant to the winds of time—after all, the film takes place in 1968! Welles strolls down crooked, medieval-looking streets, deliberately leaving out suburban, industrial, and lower-class areas of the town. A little later, he expounds, looking directly into the camera: ‘This is a town for a sweet tooth. Sweet things to listen to, sweet things to…,’ Welles pauses to glance at two passing young women and then continues, ‘look at…sweet things to eat’. His statement is followed by a series of zoom-ins on pastries, cakes, and cookies offered on display in shop windows. Next, we cut to a monument to Johann Strauss, king of the waltz, while on the soundtrack a waltz plays. Change of location: Orson Welles is now in a heavily decorated room in the famous and prestigious Hotel Sacher, located in the inner city. Red curtains cover the back of the room and oil paintings with golden frames decorate the walls. Welles, in a medium shot, sits behind a huge desk and admires the grandiose style of furniture that makes him think of the film set extravaganzas of Ernst Lubitsch. He muses about the amount of champagne enjoyed by playboys and their ladies in this room, after a theater outing or a visit to the opera. His contemplations are illustrated by inserted shots of several historical photographs, showing Austrian lieutenants saluting in their royal uniforms, a lady in a horse-drawn carriage, and a lieutenant flirting with a young woman. The next cut, however, changes the setting. Welles stands in front of the Ferris wheel in the Viennese Prater, and announces, ‘Well this town, of course, isn’t all whipped cream and waltzes. There was a time at least

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when Vienna was to the spy industry what Detroit is to automobiles.’ After declaring Vienna the city of espionage, the film ends with Orson Welles on a theater stage, doing magic tricks with the Austrian actress Senta Berger. In this nine-minute short film, Orson Welles conjures up the two prevailing traditions of Viennese imagery that have dominated, and continue to dominate, the representation of the city in international cinema. On the one hand, he points to the nostalgic picture of Habsburg Vienna from the turn of the century, the ‘whipped cream Vienna’ of dashing lieutenants and frivolous girls, of the operetta and the waltz. On the other, he refers to the ‘noir Vienna’ from after World War II, the bombed and divided city. With its dirty underground sewer system and war ruins, the city was a playground for international intrigue, inextricably bound up with Orson Welles himself and his part as the racketeer Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). Indeed, it was Carol Reed’s The Third Man that marked a break with a global myth of Vienna, which circulated in the f irst part of the last century and proved durable in international cinema. Such a break could only occur because the image of cinematic Vienna had been so firmly and well established in the preceding decades. Visions of Vienna. Narrating the City in 1920s and 1930s Cinema examines the representations of Vienna in canonized works of American and European filmmaking up until that break. It explores the ways in which the cinematic image of the city was constructed, undone, and remade by (mostly) Austro-Hungarian and German directors who relocated—voluntarily or involuntarily—to various places along a migratory route linking Vienna to Berlin, Hollywood, Paris, and London. During the decades from 1920 to 1940, the image of the city came to take on different meanings, depending on the experiences of the migrating directors, the specific moment and location of production, and the geographical and cultural contexts of the respective productions. My overall argument alleges that Vienna’s common association with seemingly anti-modern imagery of the nostalgic glorification of the Habsburg Myth is closely bound up with crucial issues of modernity. Displacement due to emigration, changing gender relations, an increasing commodification of social relationships, growing political tensions, and anti-Semitism become tangible in the various representations of this city on film. In starting to address the actual representation of Vienna as a specific location in time, it is essential to bear in mind that the construction of geographical space is always a discursive one. As Colin McArthur has argued: It is never a question of a discursive view of geographical space giving way to a more ‘realistic’ view. There is only the possibility of other discourses

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arising to compete with existing ones. Put another way, realism is itself a discourse, a convention of representation which might perhaps be better described as ‘the realist effect’ (McArthur 1997: 35).

The conventions governing the representation of Vienna, it seems, are first and foremost concerned with freezing the image of the city in time. As my opening example suggests, Vienna registers primarily—with a few exceptions to be discussed later on—as an old and imperial city within an international cinematic geography. In this respect, it is comparable to cinematic London, which, as Charlotte Brunsdon argues in London in Cinema, also predominantly represents a past time, ‘a time before cinema’ (Brunsdon 2007: 9). Before entering the realm of cinema, in other words, the image of the city is already enriched with stories and pictures. In the case of Vienna, the origins of existing urban narratives are rooted in the musical and literary genres of the nineteenth century (Hake 2001: 151).1 As James Hay argues, following the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on the literary chronotope, it is the chronotopic frame of reference ‘which has been relatively established through preceding texts and which has thus already conditioned the context wherein new narrative spaces (and topographical models) are produced’ (Hay 1997: 220). Vienna’s relentless self-promotion as a ‘musical city’, both as the locus of classical music by Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart, but also of the Strauss dynasty, the operetta, and the waltz, extensively contributed to the identification of the city with music in general, and with the operetta in particular, in popular discourses. It significantly shaped the international conception of Vienna as a dreamy and sentimental pleasure garden and arrested the city’s image in the stereotypes of Vienna as the cradle of music, baroque grandeur, and days gone by. Prominent writers such as Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig likewise fixed the fin-de-siècle image of the city in their literature, adding undercurrents such as depression, darkness, and recession to it. But the popular imagination of Vienna in the first part of the twentieth century, and perhaps later as well, and the city’s dominant mode of representation in cinema, was deeply bound up with its role as the capital of the Habsburg monarchy, its figure of the old emperor, baroque architecture, Viennese pastries and coziness, dashing lieutenants and seductive girls, singing and wine-drinking folks, and, most of all, music. The image of Vienna as a noir city was first coined by Carol Reed’s The Third Man, in which postwar Vienna figures as a divided city in ruins. Certainly, on an imaginary film list, surveying all the films ever set in Vienna, The Third Man would have a prominent place. Similarly, Max

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Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), based on Stefan Zweig’s novel, counts as a most beautiful and seminal ‘Vienna film’ within the canon of international filmmaking. But as the time period within which I analyze the body of films indicates, neither film is part of this book. I have chosen to focus on works directed in the 1920s and 1930s (with the exception of one reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt from 1943), in order to investigate the representation of Vienna before the outbreak of World War II and before mass annihilation. In this respect, it is my concern to trace the impact of what is dubbed ‘Viennese modernity’ on the cinematic representation of the city. I am particularly interested in the productive relationship between the ‘material city’ of the fin-de-siècle and its projection on international movie screens: What did Vienna mean to directors, who had left the city at different stages in their lives and went on to reconstruct it in their new homelands; in other words, what did it mean to exiles? How did the experience of emigration, political turmoil, the rise of fascism, and anti-Semitism register in the works of expatriates? Is Vienna really only a repository for sentimental yearning and nostalgic glorification of a time gone by? In this respect, my focus is on the ‘wandering image’ of the city that circulated extraterritorially and was reworked in the ‘transcultural machinery of the modern world’ (Rentschler 1990: 23). It is interesting to note that Thomas Elsaesser has made the case for considering Austria as an example of an extraterritorial cinema. Elsaesser argues that, due to the travels of its creative personnel, Austrian cinema transcended its national boundaries early on. One of the reasons for this can be found in the deep, if asymmetrical, economic connection between Austria’s unstable and weak film industry, and that of Germany, especially from the mid-1920s onwards. Even though Austrian cinema had cultivated a distinct cinematic tradition since its inauguration in the 1910s, its dependence on the German market nevertheless became increasingly pronounced, especially from the mid-1920s, when the domestic film industry suffered a profound financial crisis. Not only did Austria become dependent upon German distributors for whom the country was an export market, but it also proved a talent pool from which Ufa, Germany’s largest film company, drew a considerable number of filmmakers to Berlin. Some of them—like Mihály Kertész (Michael Curtiz) or Sandór (Alexander) Korda—had first come from Budapest to Vienna before moving on to Berlin, a city that, from 1920, had developed into the most advanced film industry in Europe. Others left directly from Vienna: Joe and Mia May, G.W. Pabst, Karl Grune, Robert Wiene, Fritz Kortner, Richard Tauber, Franz Planer, and so forth. Since so many Austro-Hungarian filmmakers participated in the

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success of German films, their imaginations ‘colonized’ the product to the same extent as the work of native Germans. But the creative axis of Budapest—Vienna—Berlin did not terminate in Europe. Instead, it expanded to Hollywood for various reasons. At times, filmmakers followed the appeal of technological know-how, such as Ernst Lubitsch, who responded to a call from Hollywood. Increasingly, they also reacted to growing anti-Semitism and political pressure created by the rise of Nazism, as did Max Ophüls. The so-called German invasion of Hollywood in the 1930s comprised many emigrants who had originally come from Austria, such as Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Bertolt Viertel, Paul Henreid, Edgar Ulmer, Fritz Lang, Walter and Liesl Reisch, Max Steiner, Robert Stolz, and Hedi Lamarr, to name only a few. In other words, even before the annexation of Austria to Germany in 1938, the image of Vienna had begun to be fabricated and circulated through an extraterritorial cinema (Elsaesser 1995: 21–24).2 For the shaping of the global myth of Vienna, it is also noteworthy to point out that especially since the beginning of the sound period, Austrian film productions were not only based on primarily visual signifiers, but on aural ones as well—hence the flourishing of Viennese operetta films and musicians’ biographies. Such productions fueled national stereotypes and cultural clichés, which circulated back and forth between the old and the new world. In that sense, the notion of an ‘extraterritorial cinema’ functions as both a spatial and a metaphorical heuristic device: spatially, it refers to the actual routes of migrating Austro-Hungarians and their often enforced transit through Europe and America; metaphorically, the ‘extraterritorial’ appoints expatriates and non-Austrians to the imageproduction of a ‘mythic Vienna’. Erich von Stroheim, for example, born in Vienna to middle-class parents of Jewish descent, converted to Catholicism and emigrated to the United States in 1909. In America, he cultivated the image of an Austrian aristocrat of high military rank, a fictional identity he continued in his Viennese films. He capitalized on America’s enthusiasm for European lifestyle and promoted his films through his eccentric star persona, spoon-feeding the media with nostalgic and bittersweet memories of ‘Old Vienna’. Similarly, Ernst Lubitsch, a Berliner from tip to toe, was perceived by Americans as a quintessential European filmmaker; in order to satisfy their expectations for old European lifestyle, Lubitsch contributed to the Vienna myth by repeatedly drawing on the Viennese operetta tradition and by staging Vienna and ‘Ruritania’ motifs over and over again (Elsaesser 1999, 111 ff.). On a more general level, as Elsaesser has suggested, these mutually sustained projections operating between Hollywood and Europe, i.e. the

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outsiders’ view of America and the view that America had of the émigrés’ land of birth, generated specific historical ‘imaginaries’ of their own. The émigrés’ ‘cultural camouflage’ in their places of exile instigated a sense of self-consciousness, of double reflection, and of irony, that become ‘tangible’ in the films of the émigré directors. As a prime example of his ‘historical take on “émigrés and representation”,’ Elsaesser elaborates on the work of the Austrian-born, Jewish writer-director Walter Reisch. Reisch, a specialist of ‘Viennese schmaltz’, the operetta genre and the musical film, significantly contributed to the construction and circulation of the Vienna myth, first in Berlin, and later in London and Hollywood. In films written by Reisch, such as the German musical film Das Lied ist aus (The Song is Ended, 1930), or the court-intrigue melodrama Das Flötenkonzert von Sans-souci (The Flute Concert of Sans Souci, 1930), both based on the grammar of the operetta genre, he cleverly pushes the operetta’s affinity to the principle of make-believe, to deception, and to ironic detachment from reality, to self-reflexive and critical ends. While at first sight, Reisch’s films seem to perpetuate the enduring Vienna myth of charming and irrelevant Austrian and Viennese (court) life, he nonetheless contributed to a ‘a “culture”: of irony and double reference, sustained by a rhetoric of indirection and double negation’ (Elsaesser 2000: 348). Obviously, the Vienna myth takes on very different shapes in the respective works of different filmmakers and script writers; however, as I argue throughout this study, the cultural clichés of the Vienna myth, reworked extraterritorially, consistently exhibited the multifaceted signs of displacement, as well as individualized experiences of rupture and alienation.

Viennese Modernity and the Impact on Cinema Ultimately, the goal is to add a new contribution to the study of Viennese modernity and to show its relevance for the realm of cinema studies and the investigation of modern European metropolitan life in the 1920s and 1930s. In analyzing selected films, I regard the city as an ‘optical tool’ with different focal points through which crucial experiences of modernity come into sight. Thus, I am methodologically following James Donald, who argued in his study on modernity and the imagination of the modern city that the manner in which the city is depicted on screen reflects ‘certain states of minds and styles of imagining’ (Donald 1999: 63). Donald claims that the city can be understood ‘at least in one of its aspects as a historically specific mode of seeing’ (Ibid.: 92). It is precisely this mode of seeing—the manner

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in which ‘looking at Vienna’ engenders certain narratives and structures representation—that is a central organizational principle of this book. Due to the extensive study of the writings of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer within the fields of Cinema Studies and Cultural Studies, it has been specifically Paris and Berlin that have been prominently associated with the experience of modernity and the birth of cinema. This certainly relates to the fact that the metropolis came to play a decisive role in scholarship for exploring the experience of modernity, and, as a related phenomenon, the emergence of cinema.3 Simmel and, a little later, Benjamin and Kracauer, conceived modernity as a neurological experience that realigned the relationship between sensory perception and the urban milieu. For Kracauer and Benjamin, the heightened stimulation of modern life instigated the urge for distraction, for spectacular amusement and strong sensations, enjoyed by the metropolitan masses. In their understanding, cinema is a part of modernity, interrelated with a variety of new phenomena, which intensified around the turn of the century (Singer 2001: 103). As Benjamin put it, ‘film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus—changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen’ (Benjamin 1969: n250). The power of the medium of film, in particular, rested on the capacity for audiovisual fragmentation, aesthetic simulation of discontinuity, thrills and shocks that matched the fabric of everyday modern life. Following this argument, one could contend that ‘[C]inema is the quintessential product of fin-de-siècle society’ (Singer 2001: 102). When thinking of fin-de-siècle Vienna, of course, cinema is probably the last invention that comes to mind. Considering that at the turn of the century Vienna was an extremely important center of early modernism— with artists and intellectuals such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Arnold Schönberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Schnitzler, to name just a few—this radicality seems to have left few marks on the cinema. Liberating avant-garde practices did not register in the representation of Vienna in film. The new mode of perception exercised a great influence on the development of cinema and its potential to express the characteristics of the city. In a city film like Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), ‘the shock of the new’ is evoked through montage editing, a distinctively modernist technique (Weihsmann 1997: 10, 25). The film thereby encapsulates the new sensory experience of fragmentation and discontinuity typical for the urban experience in the modern metropolis of Berlin (or Paris, Moscow, and so forth). Significantly, there exists no

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such filmic document of Vienna from that particular time period. Rather, as Siegfried Kracauer pointed out relentlessly in his writing, Vienna came to signify the epitome of the anti-modern city in cinema. In its preference for historical settings, and its tight connection with music and the operetta genre, Vienna was unthinkable without ‘gentle archdukes, tender flirtations, baroque décors, Biedermeier rooms, people singing and drinking in a suburban garden restaurant, Johann Strauss, Schubert and the venerable old Emperor’ (Kracauer 1974: 141). Indeed, it is precisely the fin-de-siècle image of Vienna, paying its emotional tribute to the Habsburg dynasty that crucially informed the city’s cinematic representation in the 1920s and 1930s. However, what can be equally detected within this dominant mode of representation is a peculiar, overdetermined position of a multicultural and ideologically anti-modern monarchy, which was at odds with the demands of a modern society. It was exactly the struggle between the decadence of the anachronistic empire and the rise of mass movements, the tension between an old declining monarchy and a growing commercial culture, that crucially contributed to the fascination filmmakers and the public felt for this city. Typically, when thinking of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the Viennese version of aesthetic modernity comes to mind, associated with early modernist achievements in architecture, literature, music, and philosophy. It was Carl Schorske’s seminal study on Fin-de-siècle Vienna (1981), mostly concerned with bourgeois high culture, which became very suggestive for the scholarly interest in that time period.4 Schorske invoked an elegant and most intriguing portrait of the belle époque, assuming high culture as culture proper, and mapped out an intellectual milieu that nurtured the liberal artistic endeavors of the time. Most notably, he put forth the argument that culture in fin-de-siècle Vienna functioned as a surrogate for a liberal bourgeoisie that was unable to assume political power. Vienna’s upper middle class, Schorske claims, had neither been able to destroy, nor to fuse entirely with the aristocracy. Instead, it remained weak and thus dependent and loyal to Emperor Franz Joseph (reign from 1848–1916), who was regarded as an indispensable father-protector. In other words, culture for the fin-de-siècle bourgeoisie—especially architecture, theater, and music—was a surrogate form of assimilation to aristocracy (Schorske 1981: 7). By the turn of the century, art for the liberal bourgeoisie became a refuge from political impotence and a threatening political reality; for example, in 1897, after Emperor Franz Joseph had to ratify the appointment of antiSemitic Catholic mayor Karl Lueger, a member of the Christian Social party:

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The Christian Social demagogue began a decade of rule in Vienna which combined all that was anathema to classical liberalism: anti-Semitism, clericalism, and municipal socialism. On the national level as well, the liberals were broken as a parliamentary political power by 1900, never to revive. They had been crushed by modern mass movements, Christian, anti-Semitic, socialist, and nationalist (Schorske 1981: 6).

The picture Schorske paints of 1900s Vienna, however, is confined to its bourgeoisie and high culture. Schorske also fails, according to Steven Beller, to acknowledge the eminent role of Jewish intellectuals participating in Viennese modern culture: ‘[M]ost of the best known names in Viennese fin-de-siècle culture, with the exception of art and architecture, are people of Jewish descent.’ (Beller 1989: 4). Freud, Schönberg, Schnitzler or Wittgenstein—‘Viennese modern culture was essentially a product of the Jewish bourgeoisie.’ (Ibid.: 6). Hence, in Beller’s view, Schorske underrates the devastating effect on Jews exposed to Viennese anti-Semitism, which became even more pertinent when Lueger was elected in 1897 and introduced a new style of anti-Semitic demagogy into politics. Thus, the experience of anti-Semitism and how it reverberates in the representation of cinematic Vienna is a salient aspect and will be closely examined in the chapters to follow. On a more general level, it is also important to keep in mind that Vienna was the metropolitan capital of a multicultural empire of 52 million inhabi­ tants: the monarchy encompassed fifteen ethnic groups, twelve languages, and five religions—all of which underwent significant modernization two decades prior to World War I, with Lueger playing an important part in it as mayor of Vienna between 1897 and 1910. In 1890, Vienna had expanded its city limits by incorporating the suburbs. Between 1890 and 1920, the city lived through a rapid development and industrialization of the infrastructure in terms of traffic, communication systems, the restaurant and fashion industries, booming tourism, and so on. Around the turn of the century, Vienna was a large, modern metropolis. It is interesting to note, however, that the symbolic representation of urban spaces and their social usage that was to appear on the screen remained conflicted with the modern reality of urbanism. (Horak et al. 2000, Vol.1: 10, 11) A significant feature of Viennese modernity as it is reflected in various intellectual and artistic endeavors from that era, can be found in the divorce of individual sensibility from social environment. The processes of transformation that had adapted traditional and dominant Catholic Austria to an industrialized, modern society, had left their imprint on artists and

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intellectuals: ‘Consciousness of the discrepancy between the “technical” present and the “romantic” past left the intellectuals of Vienna in a vacuum. By 20th-century standards their environment seemed so theatrical—a city of masks’ (Timms 1985: 248). According to Timms, the notion of Vienna as unreal and of Austrian public life as theatrical pervaded various artistic works of that period. The baroque architecture of the city and its opulence were one of the major sources enhancing the sense of unreality and theatricality. Evidence for this, as well as an important dimension concerning the topography of the city, can be found in the contemporary debates surrounding the construction of the Ringstraße. Comparable to the modernization of Paris by Baron Haussmann, who in the second half of the nineteenth century made the most significant attempt to redesign the city and establish a new spatial order, the Ringstraße came to play a similarly important role for Vienna. After the liberals of Austria had won political power and gained control of the capital in 1860, they decided to change the face of the city, despite the fact that their power was fragile and the conservatism of the Habsburg dynasty steadfast. The showpiece of their reconstruction, and the birth of modern urbanism in Vienna, was the Ringstraße. The broad circular boulevard was built in the 1860s, and entailed razing the fortification enclosing the inner city. It separated the proletarian quarters from the inner city, which functioned very much like an isolation belt. The center of the city was the seat of political and religious power, held by an aristocratic elite who turned their backs on, and strictly segregated themselves from, the lower classes inhabiting the outskirts. The architectural hodge-podge of the Ringstraße, displaying an eclectic style steeped in historicism, sparked controversial discussions amongst contemporaries. By the end of the nineteenth century, modernist architects such as Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner rejected the traditionalism of the monumental street. They criticized the historicist façades of the Ringstraße buildings for their failure to express the values of modern, capitalist urbanity in new aesthetic forms. Instead, the façades were designed to give modern apartments the look of aristocratic palaces (Timms 1985: 249). The Ringstraße, in other words, had a fake quality, and was comparable to the backdrop of a theater set. Moreover, this preoccupation with the mask, the façade, and false appearances arose out of the discrepancy between modernist inclinations and a decadent setting. The very notions of theatricality, artificiality, (in)authenticity, playacting, and make-believe are recurrent motifs in the films I will explore below. Some of these concepts relate to the predominant genre of the operetta,

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which routinely mobilizes the semantics of false appearances, the makebelieve, and the show. In other instances, such as Max Ophüls’ film Liebelei (1933), notions like theatricality, playacting, and performance likewise take on a heightened significance. Another aspect of vital importance for this book, which also resonates with the concept of the façade, has to do with the formation of the suburbs at the periphery of Vienna. The suburbs with their concentration of factories, depots, and workshops were the industrial heart of Vienna and home to the working classes. The impoverished masses lived in rental tenements, which were often hidden behind ornamental façades, imitating the decorations of the Ringstraße buildings. Behind the embellished fronts, living conditions were miserable, and the difference between inside and outside was tremendous. In their study Die Anarchie der Vorstadt. Das andere Wien um 1900 (The Anarchy of the Suburb, the Other Vienna around 1900, 1999), the Austrian historians Maderthaner and Musner call this phenomenon the ‘glossing over’ the ‘soft signature’ of the city’s grammar: the surface appearance of the buildings ‘appears to create a homogeneous urban body […] through an aesthetics of continuity’. By contrast, the ‘hard signature’ of the city established and fixed an ‘apparently unchangeable order of center and periphery, of inclusion and exclusion of space and social status, in which it announces the suburb as the chaotic opposite of urban order’. The suburbs, in other words, figured in contemporary reports as ‘the “other” of civilization’ (quoted in Frisby 2001: 220–221). It is precisely the Viennese suburbs, outer districts, or outskirts—I use these terms synonymously—that in literature and film alike become the playground for staging the life of the ‘other’, the proletarian masses, and sexual encounters (Horak et al., Vol. 1, 2000: 13). Prominent sites of mass culture, such as the amusement park and the vineyards, located in the outer districts, were imagined as spaces where different social classes could mingle and intermix and where sexual encounters could take place. In the fantasy of the all male novelists and directors, these locations were clearly gendered female. The imagination of sites of mass culture as feminine importantly registers in cinematic Vienna in narratives set in the 1900s. The outskirts in these films typically provide a resource for an upper-class male protagonist to contact lower-class people and pursue erotic diversions. He ventures to the fairgrounds and vineyards and seeks sexual and/or romantic pleasures with a woman inferior to his own social standing. In particular, the Prater, located next to the Ferris wheel, usually epitomizing the motif of circularity and repetition in Vienna films, signified a place of seduction in the works of Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Anatole Litvak, Max Ophüls,

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and others. Related to that, the Viennese girl, a female prototype famously generated in the literature of Arthur Schnitzler and a stock character in Vienna-set films, always comes from the lower classes. She is spatially located at the periphery of the city and connected to sites of commercial culture. Typically, she falls in love with an upper-class male from the inner city, as for example in Stroheim’s Merry-Go-Round (1923) and The Wedding March (1928) and Ophüls’ Liebelei, for whom the lower-class woman embodies a moment of authenticity and truth in a splintered modern world. The center-periphery divide of the Ringstraße, and its associated dichotomies, such as ‘inner city’ vs. ‘outskirts’, high vs. mass culture, crucially informed the cinematic image of fin-de-siècle Vienna. The opposition between the center and the suburbs gives way to related oppositions, such as inside vs. outside, interior vs. exterior, inclusion vs. exclusion, representation vs. marginalization, femininity vs. masculinity, etc. Like the aforementioned notion of ‘theatricality’ vs. ‘authenticity’, these highly charged oppositions inform my readings of the films to a great extent, because they define a geography of power in which class, gender, and the diegetic gaze are inscribed. With regard to Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March, I will argue that visual mastery is a recurrent motif in the narrative. The ability to look and to act is dependent upon class and gender and aligns with distinctions in the city’s spatial layout. The Viennese girl in The Wedding March, relegated to the outskirts, is able to foresee her own victimization without being able to change it. Similarly, when the lower-class Viennese girls in Max Ophüls’ Liebelei visit the opera house, they are granted—like the members of the upper classes—a free sight of the emperor, also attending the performance. Ophüls underlines the motif of spectatorship with a huge opera glass, which the girls use to get a better view. But eventually they drop the glass, and from that moment, fixed class positions fall back into place. The male aristocrat from the city center is the source of the most powerful gaze within the diegesis of Liebelei, representing the official culture of the ruling classes in ‘Old Vienna’. When he stares through his monocle, his gaze turns into a matter of life and death for those exposed to it. He indirectly kills the Viennese girl, Christine, after shooting her lover to death in a duel, thereby instigating her suicide. Throughout the narrative, the Viennese girl, as always, in love with a man superior to her own class, suffers exclusion from the official culture associated with the inner city. Her spatial relegation to the suburbs ends with her suicide in a back courtyard. The f igure of the Viennese girl provides a focal point for studying a specif ically female experience of urban modernity. Due to her close

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connection to sites of mass culture, she highlights the precarious position of women within a commercialized urban landscape, and the (threatening) proximity of this position to prostitution. Furthermore, her spatial relegation to lower-class areas draws attention to the ideological mechanisms of marginalization at work within a narrative. Through the figure of the Viennese girl, the experience of otherness and social exclusion—or, to put it differently, the experience of the extraterritorial, outside the gates of official culture— becomes manifest. In Ernst Lubitsch’s operetta film The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), for example, the Jewish experience of otherness within a dominant culture is collapsed into the figure of the girl. Similarly, in The Wedding March, the victimization of the Viennese girl in the suburbs makes tangible the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, swamping the city in 1900 and certainly witnessed by Stroheim before his departure for America. Overall, through the figure of the Viennese girl, a trope of femininity formulated and fixed within the culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, crucial experiences of modernity become articulated in cinematic Vienna.

The Structure of the Cinematic City It is important to note that the films I investigate were mostly shot in the studio. With a few exceptions, such as Ludwig Berger’s The Waltz Dream (1925), small parts of which were shot on location,5 and the occasional use of stock footage in Stroheim’s The Wedding March, the cinematic city was always (re)constructed within a studio setting. As Geoffrey NowellSmith has pointed out, studio-shot films ‘often offer a generally dystopian vision of an undifferentiated “city” which is either unidentifiable with any actual place or only loosely so’ (Nowell-Smith 2001: 101). This observation is confirmed by G.W. Pabst’s bleak depiction of postwar Vienna in The Joyless Street (1925), but is certainly not accurate with respect to Ernst Lubitsch’s fairytale version of Vienna in the operetta-based The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), two films entirely shot in the studios. Hence, my investigation is also propelled by questions such as: What is the difference between images of Vienna actually shot on location (such as, for example, stock footage) and reconstructed sets in the film studio? Which urban landmarks are introduced and how, and what do they signify? And, on the most general level: how does the topography of Vienna as built register in cinematic Vienna? This set of questions has governed my selection of films, which are all about Vienna, but were made in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and Hollywood in the

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1920s and 1930s. The directors of the films I have chosen are Austrian-born natives, Germans, and non-natives alike. They all contributed to the myth of Vienna and participated in the construction of the ‘wandering image’ and its extraterritorial circulation.6 The first chapter centers on the Vienna-based films Merry-Go-Round (1923) and The Wedding March (1928) by Erich von Stroheim and approaches Viennese modernity in terms of architecture, mass culture, and aspects of social history in imperial Vienna. Usually, Hollywood movies offer the ‘most popular and dominant representations’ (McArthur 1997: 33) of a city, ones that are often introduced by familiar landmarks. ‘Old Vienna’, typically, is established by shots of the Catholic church of St. Stephan’s, the opera house, the royal castle Schönbrunn, a monument to Johann Strauss, king of the waltz, and the Ferris wheel in the Prater. Similarly, the opening shots of The Wedding March show great and famous representational buildings, but Stroheim makes these cultural clichés productive by establishing a tension between the monumental edifices in the inner city and the sites of mass culture at the periphery. This antagonism is played out in a love story between an aristocrat and a lower-class girl. My reading of The Wedding March analyzes how Stroheim maps out the topography of cinematic Vienna and defines a field of power relations that not only localizes, but also significantly genders his narrative. It is the figure of the Viennese girl through which crucial dichotomies of modernity such as center vs. periphery, high vs. mass culture, tradition vs. progress, become articulated. Chapter two focuses on this particular character, taking as a starting point Max Ophüls’ Liebelei (1932–33), based on the Schnitzler play from 1896. In rejecting her spatial relegation to lower-class sites, the Viennese girl in Liebelei draws attention to the specter of death lying at the core of Vienna’s celebrated fin-de-siècle culture of representation. The discussion will also include other films from the 1930s featuring the Viennese girl, such as Jacques Feyder’s Hollywood version of Schitzler’s play, Daybreak, from 1931. Feyder introduced a romantic happy ending to Schnitzler’s play, thereby promoting the ideal of the petit-bourgeois family as a democratic alternative to the homosocial and patriarchal military circles associated with the Habsburg myth. Vorstadtvarieté (Suburban Cabaret, 1935), made in Austria by the German director Werner Hochbaum, exposes the precarious social position of the Viennese girl, hovering between lover and prostitute. This film also makes the pressures of politics—Austrofascism—tangible: the unfavorable depiction of soldiers and the military mobilized Austrian censors and forced Hochbaum to cut scenes shedding

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a critical perspective on militarism. By the time of the Austrian prestige picture Maskerade (1934), directed by Willi Forst, the Viennese girl seems to have lost her critical potential. Due to her complicity with the ruling classes, she reconciles differences of class and gender and is romantically rewarded, thereby affirming conventional concepts of femininity. By comparison, the cinematic construction of Vienna for films set after the breakdown of the monarchy in 1918 required a different spatial model of representation. As I show in Chapter three, in G.W. Pabst’s Weimar Cinema classic, The Joyless Street (1925), whose narrative takes place shortly after World War I in crisis-ridden postwar Vienna, the aforementioned center-periphery model has collapsed. Instead, class stratif ication is articulated through vertical differentiation and suggests a threatening proximity between the bourgeoisie and the workers. In the first part of this chapter, I consider the redefinition of public space for women due to modernization and industrialization, and extrapolate its impact on the integrity of female subjectivity. In the second part, I show that Pabst made significant changes in his adaptation of the original novel by the Viennese Jewish writer Hugo Bettauer. Pabst eliminated Bettauer’s distinct look at the Jewish population of Vienna and the virulent problems of anti-Semitism at the time. The seductive, sexually aggressive ‘loose woman’, Lia Leid (Tamara Tolstoi), who is killed by the Asta Nielsen character in The Joyless Street, had originally been conceptualized by Bettauer as a Jewess from Eastern Europe—connoted as a ‘bad woman’. In the novel, Bettauer sets her distinctively apart from the assimilated Western Jewess—‘the good woman’, Regina Rosenow, played by Gräfin Agnes Esterhazy. In Pabst’s film, however, Bettauer’s Jewish woman loses her origins and comes to signify the seductive femme fatale, a quintessential image of cinema. Lastly, in Chapter four, I consider how the distinctive Viennese affinity for the façade, false appearances, and the ‘principle of make-believe’—as explicated earlier—gains particular significance in the operetta genre. I discuss these with a special focus on Ludwig Berger’s silent operetta film The Waltz Dream (1925) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Hollywood sound remake The Smiling Lieutenant (1931). In The Waltz Dream, the Viennese girl comes to signify the operetta myth of Vienna primarily associated with waltz music and dancing. By teaching her German rival these qualities of a ‘typical’ Viennese woman, she takes on a radically modern stance: Not only does she expose femininity as a masquerade, but she also lays bare the mechanisms of deception and thus debunks the Vienna myth as a principle of make-believe. The Viennese operetta films by Lubitsch use the setting of postwar Vienna to completely different ends than those of, for example,

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Pabst. Lubitsch mobilizes the mise-en-scène of Vienna and the operetta plot to (comically) negotiate and comment upon issues of consumerism, gender, and sexuality at a time when changing gender relations initiated public debates about the idea of the so-called new companionate marriage, the meaning of the ‘New Woman’, and her status as a consumer within urban society. I also point out that the operetta, a most important part of popular mass culture in turn-of-the-century Vienna, was, to a large extent, created by Jewish authors. Hence, I argue that by drawing on the Viennese operetta as an important source for his films, Lubitsch very much participated in a ‘Jewish’ world and its sensibilities. I further open up the possibility of understanding the quintessential markers of the operetta genre—role play, make-believe, and the masquerade—as important elements that reflect the Jewish experience of assimilation and of adapting to a dominant (Catholic) culture. And again, it is the figure of the Viennese girl through which all these issues are brought into focus.

2.

Fairgrounds and Vineyards Urban Topographies in the Viennese Films of Erich von Stroheim

Introduction In 2003, on a trip through China, the Japanese film historian Komatsu Hiroshi happened to discover a film fragment in an antique shop.1 As it turned out, the approximately four minutes long piece of celluloid came from Josef von Sternberg’s vanished The Case of Lena Smith, his last silent movie from 1929, made in Hollywood. The Case of Lena Smith was considered a lost masterpiece of film history and evokes personal memories of the director’s native city. Sternberg was born in Vienna 1894 and spent his childhood there before emigrating to the United States in 1908. A central topos of Sternberg’s film, which takes place in turn-of-the-century Vienna, is the Viennese Prater, an amusement park at the eastern fringe of the metropolis, comparable to New York’s Coney Island.2 In his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, Sternberg vividly recalls his impression of the Prater, located near the lower-middle-class residence of his family: [T]he first sounds I heard were mingled with the melodies that floated into my crib from the hurdy-gurdies, calliopes and wondrously decorated mechanical music boxes that serenaded the gallantly uniformed soldiers strolling in the Prater and their servant girl companions—the latter all in the picturesque garments of their provinces, all waiting to be seduced (Sternberg 1965: 6).

Sternberg’s memories swiftly sum up what the Prater, a frequently invoked topos in Viennese literature and film, came to stand for: a space in flux, where members of different classes and genders mingled. Epitomized by the famous Ferris wheel, which was built in 1897 and became the icon of modernity in Vienna, the fairground functioned as a playground for social masquerade and seduction.3 Significantly, the recovered fragment of The Case of Lena Smith includes part of a sequence set in the Prater where an act of seduction is played out: Lena Smith (Esther Ralston), a peasant girl from Hungary trying her luck in the metropolis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the century, visits the Prater with her girlfriends. The young women admire various attractions such as merry-go-rounds, a Punch and Judy show,

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a truncated lady, and a magician who plays tricks on the audiences. Sternberg presents these phantasmagoric thrills in a highly stylized manner, with lap dissolves and superimpositions. While mixing with the crowds, the pretty Lena Smith quickly attracts a young and handsome Viennese officer (James Hall). As an intertitle suggestively reads, ‘A midsummer night in Vienna—barrel-organs—beer—and shop-girl romance!’ Sure enough, in the course of the night, the officer seduces the innocent girl who later bears his child and, by the end of the film, works as a maid for his parents. 4 The Prater as a democratic crossroads for members of different social strata was not unfamiliar to Sternberg’s contemporaries in the United States. So, for instance, in 1925 the New York Times conjured up the image of Old Vienna and the Viennese Prater quite accurately. Seven years after the end of World War I, the writer of a piece on postwar Austria described radical changes after the fall of the Empire and the formation of the new democratic republic; however, some images of Old Vienna remained very durable in American perception: In the old days of the empire officers in resplendent uniforms were every­ where—in cafés, theatres and carriages, riding proudly in the Prater, which is Vienna’s finest park. Some of them were not merely officers but even Archdukes, members of the imperial Hapsburg family, who, for all their blueness of blood, wore the ordinary regulation black kepi of the Austrian Army and smiled affably at cheerful Viennese of the proletariat, who loved to go to the Prater and combine a glance at an Archduke with a bite of sausage. For Black and Yellow Vienna was a strange blend of stiffness and democracy (quoted in Saffle 2002: 72).5

In his autobiography, Sternberg uses almost the same phrases when recalling strolls through the Prater in his early youth: And I marched with the daily parade of His Majesty’s tin soldiers, in step with the regimental band, and cheered the old emperor, who waved his hand to me whenever his open carriage, drawn by four white horses with plumes and trappings, trotted along the Hauptallee. His benign twin beard was part of my world, and he was the benevolent ruler of a society in which I was happy (Sternberg 1965: 9).

A similar recollection of the Prater comes from a contemporary of Sternberg’s and also a native citizen from Vienna, the film director Fritz Lang. One of Lang’s biographers, Patrick McGilligan, quotes from an unproduced

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script, in which Lang, born in Vienna 1890, equates the Prater with the erotic allure of girls from the lower classes: ‘Their [the girls’] faces are fresh and radiant and their breasts full and inviting under embroidered blouses’ (Lang quoted in McGilligan 1997: 15). Lang visited the Prater often as a boy, and this knowledge served him well when he directed the screen version of Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom (1934), a film that takes place at an amusement park based on the Prater. However, the main f ilmmaker who introduced turn-of-the-century Vienna and the Prater to cinema audiences in the United States was another expatriate: the exiled Viennese star director Erich von Stroheim. Stroheim’s film Merry-Go-Round,6 shot in 1923, was the first film ever to picture the city of Vienna on the American silver screen. Together with The Wedding March, Merry-Go-Round maps a topography of Vienna that subsequently came to shape the representation of the city in international filmmaking—Josef von Sternberg’s The Case of Lena Smith being a case in point.7 Erich von Stroheim’s Viennese films can be taken as a springboard to introduce the unique spatial layout of the cinematic city and to demonstrate how its specific topography informed succeeding narratives in international filmmaking. As I will argue, the rigid class structure of a highly hierarchized society and its patriarchal gender relations are inscribed in urban space and, thus, spatialize crucial dichotomies of modernity, such as center versus periphery, high versus low culture, and tradition versus progress. Stroheim’s (and Rupert Julian’s) Merry-Go-Round depict the Prater as a particular site of mass culture, where the difficult transition from a rigid class system (Europe) to a democratic, inclusive society (America) becomes tangible: in the Prater, antagonist class positions are collapsed and merged. In the course of the narrative, the Prater functions as a rehearsal ground where representatives of the high aristocracy and the lower classes can shed their origins and aspire to middle-class values. By the end, the Prater has ‘produced’ a romantic couple, who overcome the exigencies of an anti-democratic class system and, therefore, are ready to amalgamate into the great (American) middle class. As I will argue, the happy ending, executed by the director Rupert Julian against Stroheim’s original script, was an accommodation to the taste of mainstream audiences and secured the success of the film. Part of the argument relates to Stroheim’s aesthetic of ‘critical decadence’ and its impact on his mise-en-scène and camera work. I further analyze the manner in which he constructs spatial relations in order to expose how class and gender positions are firmly inscribed in the topography of the city. What I call the ‘geography of the gaze’ organizes visual economy with regard to gender and spatial positioning.

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Finally, I tackle some of the suggestions that Michael John has put forth with regard to the absence of Jewish themes in the work of Erich von Stroheim (and Josef von Sternberg): Repression? Reaction to anti-Semitism in Europe? To anti-Semitism in the US? Distancing oneself from Jewry or Jewishness? Hollywood’s power of assimilation? It could well be said to have a bit of each that accounts for the absence of Jewish themes (John 2004: 6).

In attempting to address some of these questions, I argue that the experience of anti-Semitism in Vienna may indeed have informed the work of Erich von Stroheim.

Reflections at the Fairground: Erich von Stroheim’s and Rupert Julian’s Merry-Go-Round (1923) The authorship of the US film Merry-Go-Round, a ‘super jewel’ production of Universal Pictures, is shared by two different directors. Officially, Rupert Julian was the director, and his name is listed in the opening credits. However, as Variety noted in its thoroughly enthusiastic review at the time: Although not credited with having anything to do with this picture, it is known the production was started for Universal by Erich von Stroheim. [...] In observing the picture as screened there are the unmistakable signs of the von Stroheim handiwork present in a host of scenes (Variety, 4 July 1923).

The idea for Merry-Go-Round actually came from the memories of Stroheim, who contributed the screenplay and an elaborated shooting schedule. Under his detail-obsessed eye, art director Richard Day reconstructed large portions of Old Vienna from the days before World War I on the studio lot. The heart of the film set consisted of a reconstruction of the Prater, including its most famous attractions: the giant Ferris wheel and the Kalafatti Merry-Go-Round. Stroheim wanted to play the leading role in his Viennese scenario (as he later did in The Wedding March). He was denied this pleasure by Irving Thalberg, however, Universal’s new head of production, who had just been hired by studio chief Carl Laemmle. Thalberg’s machinations were clear: if Stroheim were to play the lead in the film, he could no longer be fired. But Thalberg definitely wanted to keep that option open given Stroheim’s reputation for production delays and going over budget.

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After Stroheim had been shooting for just six weeks and was already behind schedule, Thalberg made good on his implicit threat and dismissed him on 6 October 1922. The dismissal of a top director like Stroheim by a production head was an unprecedented and dastardly deed and marked a power shift in Hollywood away from the directors and toward the studio managers (Jacobson, Belach, Grob 1994: 66). This incident gave rise to a deluge of anecdotes, rumors, and rampant speculation. At the time of his firing, Stroheim had completed about one quarter of the film. Film historians tend to agree that the introduction of the characters at the beginning of the story, the orgiastic banquet scene in the aristocratic chambers of the count, and large passages of the encounter of the young Viennese girl with her lover in a city palace are the work of Stroheim (Lennig 2000: 158). It has furthermore been demonstrated that Julian often followed Stroheim’s shooting schedule and camera instructions to the letter and thus, as Richard Koszarski argues, central ideas stemming from Stroheim survived in the final film.8 A video version of Merry-Go-Round from 2003 by David Shepard serves as the basis for the following discussion. Count Maximilian von Hohenegg (Norman Kerry), a notorious womanizer, meets the carousel organ player Agnes Urban (Mary Philbin) at Vienna’s Prater. He pretends to be a commoner and she quickly falls in love with him. On the point of telling her the truth and marrying her to overcome the class barriers between them, he is forced by none other than Emperor Franz Joseph himself to marry a woman of his own standing. The count begs for forgiveness, but Agnes casts him out and leaves him to go off to battle in World War I. After the war is over, the two lovers cross paths at the Prater again. By now widowed, divested of his noble status after the breakdown of the monarchy and impoverished, Hohenegg asks Agnes to marry him. But she has promised herself to her childhood friend, the hunchback Bartholomew (George Hackathorne) and does not want to go back on her word. When Bartholomew learns of the count’s return, he gallantly lets Agnes go, his heart broken, and the story concludes with a hastily patched-together happy ending of Agnes and the count in a romantic embrace. Although, or perhaps because, Julian flattened out Stroheim’s cruelly tragic love story into what is ultimately a glib romance, Merry-Go-Round was a worldwide success. Koszarski reports that American critics remained divided9—their opinions reflecting their varying relationships to Stroheim’s previous work—while the box-office take was sizeable.10 In the German-language reviews, the name Erich von Stroheim was not mentioned at all. The film was released in Austria under the distribution title Prater, subtitled Vienna 1914–1918, but only after the censors had

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declared the scenes ‘in which Agnes is brutally mistreated by Huber,’ her cruel employer, unfit for young audiences (Caneppele 2002: 150). Siegfried Kracauer’s verdict on Rummelplatz des Lebens (Fairground of Life), as the film was called in Germany, was scathing: The hype (Rummel) comes from America and the ‘life’ part unfolds in Vienna. The film we are talking about [...] is an American opus in which American actors are entangled eight acts long in events that could only happen in the beloved old imperial city. Viewers can thus feast their eyes without guilt on the uniforms, and indulge with great emotion in the sweet May night that in America itself is not nearly as sweet. Vienna as export location for sentimentality: ‘that puts the sugar on the icing on the cake’, is how Pallenberg would have put it (Kracauer 2004: 53).

Kracauer, in his journalism, repeatedly picks up the representation of imperial Old Vienna in a variety of films produced in the 1920s and 1930s, in order to demonstrate the anti-modern features encapsulated in the arrested, retrospective, and backward imagery of the city. In his analysis, films such as Merry-Go-Round (and others, which will be discussed in the following chapters) by no means open up what Miriam Hansen has elaborated as ‘reflexive modernism’ in Kracauer’s sense. As Hansen argues in a detailed analysis of Kracauer’s writing, Kracauer otherwise attributes to the cinema and to mass culture in general the potential to negotiate on behalf of a heterogeneous audience the gulfs, tensions and contradictions that make up the horizon of experience in an increasingly modernized, capitalist society. Hansen states, the cinema offers a major rehearsal ground for new forms of social identity because of its mechanisms of perceptual identification in which the boundaries between self and heteronomous images are weakened […] and which permit the viewer to let himself or herself ‘be polymorphously projected’ (Hansen 1995: 383).

As Hansen explains, in his more positive outlook on cinema, Kracauer perceived the cinema ‘as an alternative public sphere […] an imaginative horizon in which, however compromised by its capitalist foundations, something like an actual democratization of culture seemed to be taking shape […]’ (Hansen 1999: 70). In his essay ‘Cult of Distraction’, for example, Kracauer suggested the liberating possibility of cinema for an emergent mass audience that found itself subjected to the contradictory processes of

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mechanization and the changing fabric of every day life, due to the experience of modernization: Here [in cinema], in pure externality, the audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions. Were this reality to remain hidden from the viewers, they could neither attack nor change it; its disclosure in distraction is therefore of moral significance (Kracauer 1995: 326).

In a ‘reflexive modernism’, as elaborated by Hansen—and Kracauer attributes this sensory reflexivity particularly to his favorite genre, American slapstick comedies—the fractures of the modern world are made visible, dealt with, and examined for their liberating potential. By the end of the 1920s, however, Kracauer’s viewpoint had become more pessimistic. Hansen sums up: As Kracauer increasingly observes—and objects to—[…] the return […] of lieutenants, fraternities, and royalty, he recognizes them as a specific version of technological modernity, an attempt to nationalize and domesticate whatever liberatory, egalitarian effects this modernity might have had (Hansen 1995: 388–389).

Contrary to the aforementioned possibilities of a ‘reflexive modernism’, Kracauer discerns that in ‘technological modernism’, modernity’s contradictions are naturalized, domesticated, or even mystified—for example, in the increasing penchant of German cinema between the wars for invoking anti-modern symbols such as the Alps, Prussia or, in this case, ‘Old Vienna’. It is precisely such liberating effects that he fails to discern in a film like Merry-Go-Round. Instead, he sees only the indulgence in a sentimental timelessness beyond history, in which world wars are nothing more than a melancholic anecdote playing out to the dismay of a resigned monarch, and class conflicts dissolve in a maudlin love story. From this standpoint, Merry-Go-Round must itself fall victim to meaninglessness. If we apply Miriam Hansen’s thesis, however, according to which classic Hollywood cinema can be understood as a ‘vernacular form of modernism,’ offering its global mass audience—in the US and beyond—a horizon of meaning and reflection to help them come to terms with the complex experiences of modernity and modernization, the film appears in a different light. To put it differently, Kracauer’s and Hansen’s theses produce divergent opinions on Merry-Go-Round. As Hansen points out, Hollywood’s success in forging a mass market ‘out of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous

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1. The Ferris wheel in the Prater: Merry-Go-Round (1923)

society,’ had to do with ‘the diasporic, relatively cosmopolitan profile of the Hollywood community’ (Hansen 1995: 68). Hence, classic Hollywood cinema provides what Hansen dubs ‘the first global vernacular,’ which celebrates its overwhelming transnational resonance in great part ‘because it played a key role in mediating competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernization, because it articulated, multiplied, and globalized a particular historical experience’ (Ibid.). Merry-Go-Round, for example, resonates with the sensibility of a crisis generated by Viennese modernity, a crisis characterized by the asynchronicity of a monarchy that is dying out and a rapidly forming mass society. This experience can be visualized particularly well by taking recourse to an ‘Old Vienna’ in which power and gender relations are located topographically, following the intact city model of center versus periphery—an opposition I will elaborate on in detail in my analysis of Stroheim’s The Wedding March. In Merry-Go-Round, it is specifically the topos of the Vienna Prater, where the experience of crisis is condensed at close quarters: the fairground is imagined as a contact zone between high and low, as the mass-cultural, quasi-extraterritorial meeting place where the two sexes from various class backgrounds cross paths and the hidebound system of the ancien régime is (at least temporarily) suspended.

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In an interview in 1930, Stroheim, who had left Vienna in 1909, looked back from that vantage point on the turn-of-the-century Prater as a ‘split world’ with demarcated sections for aristocrats and commoners: It [life in Vienna] was a romance built on the complicated class-structure that divided the Prater, the great Prater along the Danube, into the Volks Prater—the People’s Park, full of Punch-and-Judy shows and Ferris wheels—and the Nobel Prater, the park for the upper classes. Whether you approve of such a social structure or not, you will admit it makes for color in life, for picturesqueness and romance (Stroheim quoted in Calhoun 1930: 30).

That romance between the classes was a fantasy is already inherent in this description. Even though the Prater consisted of segregated spaces assigned to different classes, since the 1780s the whole area had been opened to the public and established as a leisure area for the masses. This was a unique feature of the Viennese Prater: the small inns, pubs, coffee houses, carousels, park benches, and resting places offered potential spaces where members of different classes could meet and mingle.

2. ‘Meet and mingle in the Prater’: The Aristocrat flirting with the Sweet Girl in Merry-Go-Round (1923)

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According to the historians Siegfried Mattl and Werner Michael Schwarz, for the Prater to be able to unite the upper and lower classes it takes the ‘whole Prater,’ including its entire organic ensemble of spectacle, technology, display and nature, without which the fluid transitions between modernity and local tradition, between the presence of the aristocracy, the middle classes and the ‘people’, between persuasion and erotic adventure would not have been able to have been embroidered into a myth (Mattl, Schwarz 2004: 131).

Between 1890 and 1911, say the authors, the People’s Prater underwent a period of rapid technological development, thus becoming the ‘site of a highly advanced industry of mass culture,’ (Ibid.: 135) which found itself under pressure to adapt to the standards of higher technology. Stroheim mobilizes precisely this mix of modernity and local tradition in his Prater topos, and it is quite revealing to note how the Austrian reviews at the time perceived specifically the portrayal of the Prater from divergent standpoints. The Filmwelt saw in the screening of Prater (the Austrian distribution title) an occasion for a melancholic, nostalgic journey into the past: We see the venerable old monarch, whom all of Vienna revered with unwavering loyalty and who, despite the intervening upheavals, is still remembered fondly by all Viennese, the aged Kaiser Franz Joseph; we see the old uniforms of an army that no longer exists and is but a memory today, exactly as they were back then; the old ‘Fiaker’ carriages with the coachmen in their ‘Stösser’ caps, and the inevitable Virginia, the laundry maid, and all the other telling folk types Vienna had to offer back in those days (Die Filmwelt, Vienna, No. 27, 1924, my translation).

Conspicuous in this review is the nostalgic recourse to ‘telling folk types’. These particular folk types, since the end of the nineteenth century, were closely connected in the middle-class Viennese feuilleton with the fantasy of ‘Old Vienna’, and functioned as ‘guarantee of the traditional order of things’ (Rapp 2004: 144). This notion of ‘telling folk types’ recalls Benjamin’s observation of the ‘physiologies’ and ‘physiognomies,’ which emerged in the early nineteenth century in the French bourgeois feuilleton, in reaction to the challenges of the life in a big city and in order to negotiate disorderly masses: ‘The long series of eccentric or simple, attractive or severe figures which the physiologies presented to the public in character sketches had one thing in common: they were harmless and of perfect bonhomie’ (Benjamin 1983: 37).

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The ‘literature of reassurance,’ as Tom Gunning calls it (Gunning 1997: 28), served to domesticate the crowd and to level out the unevenness of reality. Similarly, the ‘Prater typology’ came to play a reassuring role in a discourse at the turn-of-the-century in Vienna, where a public debate had surrounded the looming loss of ‘Old Vienna’ in the onslaught of mod­ ernity. The ‘telling folk types’, then, comprise precisely the repertoire of the anti-modern image of Vienna that, according to Kracauer, represented, in cinema, a means for exporting sentimentality. This function was also discerned by the reviewer in Filmbote, who appraised Prater from the point-of-view of the potential tourist and came to the conclusion that the film was suitable for showing abroad: ‘This film is therefore of very special interest to us, because it is more suitable than anything that has gone before as propaganda for Vienna’ (Der Filmbote, Vienna, No. 5, 2 February 1924, my translation). Caustic by contrast was the commentary of Fritz Rosenfeld in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the newspaper of the social democrats; he found the romance too saccharine and the Prater too modern looking: ‘The Prater was never lit up so brightly with electric lights and never as clean as shown here; it is much quieter and more old-fashioned, utterly lacking in the flair of the cosmopolitan nightclub’ (Arbeiter-Zeitung, Vienna, 27 September 1924, my translation). A completely different perspective on the film was offered by the critic of the Neue Freie Presse. After the author made express mention of the value of the film as democratic propaganda ‘against the war and for the Republic of Austria,’ he admits jocosely: ‘I like American sentimentality because it almost always harbors a grain of real feeling, denying which has become fashionable these days’ (Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, 19 September 1924, my translation). The last comment is particularly telling because it astutely echoes and supports Hansen’s statement that the reception of Hollywood f ilms is primarily anchored in ‘sensory experience and sensational affect’ (Hansen 1999: 71). To back up her argument, Hansen quotes Benjamin’s praise for a ‘sentimentality’ in ‘American style’ when he claims that, in cinema, ‘people whom nothing moves or touches any longer learn to cry again’ (Ibid.).

Melodrama, Mass Culture, and Social Masquerade As soon as Merry-Go-Round opens, the f irst lingering shots and the corresponding intertitles establish the urban phenomenon that is

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Vienna, while at the same time segmenting and stratifying it. The word ‘Vienna’ on the screen is followed by a long shot of the famous Graben, a shopping street in the city center, and the words ‘–old–gray–historical–’ accompany a view of Stephansplatz. This dark city center is then contrasted with a shot of the periphery, the Prater ‘–The town of joy–of gladness–and of mirth–’, with the giant Ferris wheel turning in the background. The next scene is especially worth noting. The intertitles segue from ‘town of joy’ to ‘of sordid sorrow–and of grief’. We cut to a long shot of a woman with a child on a bridge. There is a short scuffle and then the woman releases herself from the child’s embrace, climbs onto the bridge rails and jumps off. The people rushing to save her are unable to prevent the calamity. An especially blatant contrast comes with the next intertitle: ‘The Town of Dukes–of Princes–and of Counts’, accompanied by a scene of the emperor’s carriage and the monarch himself. With these initial establishing shots, ‘Vienna’ is def ined as a city of class hierarchies, of high versus low culture, and of melodrama made tangible. Scenes of the city center and its inhabitants begin and end the sequence of shots, framing the views of the Prater and the melodramatic act on the bridge: ‘Prater’ and ‘melodrama’ are closely associated. The spatialization of social conflicts is a strong focus in the melodramatic tradition (Haenni 1998: 86), and in the course of events, the People’s Prater, or ‘Wurstelprater’, is introduced in the diegesis as melodramatic space. As Peter Brooks has famously stated, the melodramatic mode and modern sensibility are inseparably entwined (Brooks 1976: 21). Melodrama unites sensationalism with everyday life, addresses the ordinary and the private and exaggerates them to create drama. In order to augment the ethical conflicts and achieve the greatest possible degree of polarization, characters are enlisted not as psychologically motivated individuals, but rather as types. Schani Huber for example, owner of the famous electricpowered Kalafatti Merry-Go-Round, is a classic bad guy lifted directly from the melodrama repertoire, evil through-and-through and without any discernible motivation or character development; Agnes Urban, the pure and innocent girl, is his melodramatic counterpart. As Patrice Petro has noted, society’s outsiders—i.e. women and the working class—are preferred subjects for melodramatic treatment (Petro 1989: 95). In fact, the two parallel plot lines in Merry-Go-Round differ in visual style depending on the class-specific focus: melodramatic and expressionist when the narrative spotlights the Prater and its lower-class personnel;

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and dramatic-ironic when the story revolves around Count Hohenegg.11 The Urban family, with their undeserved afflictions, are always grouped as melodramatic tableaux: for example, old mother Urban on her deathbed, surrounded by her loved ones, or father Urban (Cesare Gravina) as an injured clown lying on the ground in a Pietà-like scene. The mise-enscène takes on a more expressionist air, however, when Huber appears. Especially those scenes in which he tries to rape Agnes or when he himself is slain by the escaped orangutan Boniface are immersed in a strongly contrasting light-and-dark effect. A comparable scene taking place in a patrician townhouse, where the count likewise launches into an attempted rape, looks much less ominous in an evenly lit mise-en-scène than in the oppressive rooms at the Prater. As a place of mass culture, the Wurstelprater connotes a melodramatic, lower-class venue from which the heroine Agnes ultimately wishes to escape. Her upwardly mobile character becomes apparent in a scene where she goes shopping in the city center with the hunchback Bartholomew. In front of a fashionable clothing store, they admiringly gaze into the elegant window when they accidentally run into the count. Hohenegg pretends to work in the store as a necktie salesman and invites Agnes to the house of a friend who might help her unjustly imprisoned father to get free. She immediately leaves Bartholomew alone in the street and ascends into a carriage with the count. But the shady city house of Mrs. Elvira in the center, in which the count has his tryst with Agnes, can offer no moral alternative to the Wurstelprater. On the contrary, the following scene beautifully epitomizes the relationship between the city—represented by the (male) aristocrat or bourgeois citizen—and the suburbs, represented by the woman. The count’s ‘friend’, Mrs. Elvira, leads the couple into a noble salon: the mise-en-scène is crammed with Greek statues, lavish curtains, a grand piano, a violin, and other expensive décor, but the signs of European high culture do not guarantee safety for the menaced, lower-class woman. Agnes, who has never played an instrument except her mechanical grind organ, tearfully listens to the waltz tunes played by the skillful f ingertips of the count. The waltz, as I will elaborate in more detail in Chapter four, carries the motif of desire, expressed by the count. The camera cuts back and forth between them in medium close-ups; the count observes her crying and then states, in an intertitle: ‘The whole world is just make-believe—and we are children, dreaming.’ He leaves the room and returns with elegant clothes, which he offers to Agnes to put on for fun.

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3. ‘Social masquerade’: Seduction scene in Merry-Go-Round (1923)

No sooner has Agnes playfully donned a fancy coat and hat, thus cloaking herself in the opposite social masquerade that the count has already cultivated at the Prater, when he pretended to be a commoner, than the man turns into a potential rapist. The sight of a woman from the lower classes in the raiment of a ‘fine lady’ prompts for the aristocrat associations with prostitutes, thereby revealing a flash of the erotic fascination and contempt in which the liberal bourgeoisie or the aristocracy held those deemed beneath their status (Janz, Laermann 1977: 15). It is only when Agnes once again slips into the simple clothing of the lower class and, with hands raised, in a medium close-up, pleads for mercy, in the classic melodramatic gesture for threatened innocence, that the count comes to his senses. But in a cut-away, we see that the string of the violin has snapped, symbolizing the loss of the values once supposedly guaranteed by elite culture in an era when the upper class is in the process of disintegrating. The new order instead decrees that, ‘the future belongs to the suburbs,’ (Ibid.: 40) anticipating the breakdown of the monarchy and the resulting democratization.

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Deception and Reflection: The Entertainment Machinery In the Prater topos, the entertainment culture is exposed in all its exemplary ambivalences—in its democratizing or at least homogenizing potential as well as in its function as a dream machine, creating the illusion for momentarily dazzling the masses, allowing them a brief escape, only to send them directly back to the factory or—in the case of Merry-Go-Round—back to the street organ. The tough competition in the amusement industry, personified by the unremitting malevolence of Schani Huber, lays bear capitalist exploitation structures to which innocent, disenfranchised victims like Agnes and her family fall prey. And, though it is true that their unceasing suffering produces melodramatic despair that spotlights how the masses are blinded to the ugly truth by mass culture, mass entertainment also gives rise to moments of reflection. Three scenes dramatize the self-reflexive relationship of the entertainment machinery to its audience, thereby employing typical elements from the melodrama genre. The first is when Huber steps on Agnes’ foot, forcing her to go on playing despite her pain and to keep smiling all the while. The camera closes in on her face, examining it for her reaction to this chicanery. The close-up of her smiling while trying to hide her tears displays for us, the audience, how poor this staged entertainment really is. While cheerful music rings out and the woman making the music seems to be having a good time, we, the spectators, get to see something the Prater visitor within the diegetic world does not: the psychological strain and physical pain behind the production of mass entertainment. Another scene is open to a similarly pessimistic interpretation. Old Mr. Urban, who does the puppet show, finds out that his wife is on her deathbed and wants to rush to her side. But then the crowd waiting to see the show begins to clamor for the curtain to go up. Huber forces Urban back into the puppet theater and he has to go on with the show. In a medium close-up, we see Urban behind the stage working the puppets, tears running down his face. Outside, the amused crowd howls with laughter. Once again we, the film audience, are the only ones privy to the mechanisms of exploitation; the masses outside remain blind to the true state of affairs. A third scene finally puts an end to the illusion. Urban, who has changed his métier from puppeteer to clown, is playing for a laughing crowd of children when Huber, forever trying to outdo the competition, throws a flowering plant at his head, inflicting a serious wound. The clown falls to his knees in agony. But he still tries to keep up appearances and go on acting for the children. This time, however, the audience does not let itself be fooled by the culture of spectacle, even though it consists almost

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4. ‘Melodramatic terrain of the lower class’: The wounded clown in Merry-­Go-Round (1923)

exclusively of children. The young viewers begin to sob inconsolably at the helplessness of the clown, who mirrors their own helplessness. The ‘shock of the modern,’ (Maderthaner, Musner 2000: 119) which mass culture is meant to compensate for, condenses emphatically into a melodramatic tableau around the figure of the wounded clown. This is where conflict is foregrounded, the suffering of an oppressed class is articulated, and a group of people who can find no solace in the conditions in which they are forced to live, express their isolation and social exclusion.

Sex, Romance, and Spectacle: Leaving the Prater Behind In her study of mass culture in New York at the turn of the last century, Kathy Peiss argues that modern amusement parks ‘emerged as laboratories of the new mass culture, where middle-class attitudes toward leisure, sexuality and the social relations of women and men were forged’ (Peiss 1986: 116).12 This is exactly what the narrative in Merry-Go-Round is trying to do: produce a couple that is fit for the middle class, with the Prater serving as a laboratory for their coming together. This is useful, especially for the aristocrat, who can practice his prospective role of middle-class husband

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and potential necktie salesman at the amusement park. Even before his fateful encounter with Agnes, he casually enters a shooting gallery with his companions, takes up a rifle and hits five heart-shaped targets right in the center. The scene recalls a passage from Viennese author Felix Salten’s13 collection of literary vignettes, Wurstelprater, a key text of Viennese modernity from 1911, where he writes under the title ‘Schiessen angenehm’ (‘Pleasant Shooting’): When the aristocrats are up for some fun, they pretend they’re just plain folk, go to the Prater, ride the merry-go-round, [...] go to the shooting galleries and try out a rifle. But this is not befitting their station. They have the privilege of hunting outdoors in the forests, of going stalking on their own ground [...]. This is where people come who only know hunting from pictures [...] who can only dream of ‘big game’ and of ‘prey’ [...] (Salten 2004: 69–70, my translation).

Salten would like to reserve the shooting gallery, a surrogate for the masses that are excluded from patrician privileges, for the lower classes. Touched, he observes how a young working-class man in hunter’s dress tries, day after day, to shoot a tin eagle—strangely, without ever managing to hit it. ‘The stands belong to these people,’ is the conclusion, one that prompts him to overlook the homogenizing effects of mass culture. In fact, the count in Merry-Go-Round demonstrates that, despite his slightly jaded attitude at the shooting stand, he is nevertheless in possession of all the essential qualities necessary for a commercialized culture of spectacle: the qualities of a good consumer. To underline this fact, Hohenegg wins a female and a male doll as a kind of guarantee for what the modern amusement park promises its middle-class clientele: the well-tempered enjoyment of ‘sex and romance’ (Peiss 1986: 137). In Erich von Stroheim’s hands, Merry-Go-Round—depending on which of the two screenplays was used—would have come to a tragic ending. Either the lovers would never have managed to come together, or they would have done so only after losing so much that one could hardly speak of a happy ending. Under Julian’s direction, the count returns from the war and is finally united in a romantic embrace with Agnes on the bourgeois side of the Prater meadow. Bartholomew, the hunchbacked friend of Agnes’ youth, has abjured his love for her and looks on sobbing, clutching the hairy hand of his orangutan. Bartholomew remains rooted to the melodramatic, lower-class terrain of the People’s Prater, his close relationship with the ape rendering him unfit

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to be a romantic bourgeois lover. The ape stands for a cruel spectacle that might have reminded Merry-Go-Round viewers of Edgar Allan Poe’s first detective story The Murders in the Rue Morgue of 1841. As the critic Robert E. Sherwood aptly noted in his writing on Merry-Go-Round in 1923: ‘Mr. Julian, as a director, atoned for his own deficiencies as a writer. He devised one episode, in particular, which was as vitally terrifying as any passage in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’ (Sherwood 1982: 189).14 In Poe’s story, an escaped orangutan gruesomely murders two innocent Parisian women, and it needs the work of a detective to solve this horrible crime and to uncover the mystery of the big city. As Tom Gunning contends, the detective genre was shaped by the dark image of urban space, which already circulated in the pulp literature and sensational novels of the nineteenth century and which articulated fear, particularly of the urban underclasses (Gunning 2000: 38–39). In Merry-Go-Round, the orangutan is likewise associated with the lower classes; at the same time, he is an

5. ‘Unfit to be a bourgeois lover’: Being friends with the Orang Utan in Merry-Go-Round (1923)

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attraction at the Prater and, as such, the ‘incarnation’ of the ambivalent mass culture spectacle. Ultimately, he is not to be trusted, and neither are the persons associated with him. For our heroine Agnes, it takes an honorable man to elevate her to a higher class—and not the owner of a killer ape (who eventually murders Huber). The orangutan is part of Bartholomew, who must be left behind as melodramatic victim, and with him the People’s Prater. The recurring image of the revolving carousel in the f ilm with the mischievously smiling male torso in the center signified a vortex dragging everything down with it under Stroheim’s pessimistic worldview—taking on the role of a great, leveling injustice. In Rupert Julian’s optimistic and audience-pleasing interpretation, however, the carousel symbolically homogenizes all the characters to generate a middle class, a desirable goal that culminates in the coming together of high and low to create the romantic bourgeois couple.15 In order to achieve this result—and this is perhaps the greatest difference in the narrative strategies of Julian and Stroheim—the Wurstelprater must, in the end, be overcome. In the final image, we see Agnes and her lover, who has lost his aristocratic status after the war, embracing in the more patrician meadows of the Prater. Agnes cannot entirely deny her origin in the lower class, signified by the Wurstelprater. The meadows stand between the Wurstelprater and the elite of the inner city, signifying a hybrid social space, which assimilates popular roots to a cultured middle class, that is, the ‘great American middle class’ audience that Merry-Go-Round, in Rupert Julian’s version, clearly strives for.

Excess and Analysis: Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928) Erich von Stroheim’s second attempt to project his native city onto the American screen without having to compromise his artistic vision took on concrete forms with The Wedding March. On 2 January 1927, the New York Times published an article in its entertainment section, headlined ‘Old Pre-War Vienna reproduced in Film’. The article began: Thirty-six separate sets have been built for Erich von Stroheim‘s latest picture, ‘The Wedding March’. This production has already cost more than $1,000,000. These exteriors and interiors are Viennese and Tyrolean. Richard Day, the art director, together with von Stroheim, having spent several months in research connected with them. It is said to be well known among picture technicians that von Stroheim secures many of his

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most sensational effects through the atmosphere provided by his foreign settings. Vienna before the war in all its glory is presented, featured by its great landmark, the Cathedral of St. Stephen’s (New York Times, 3 January 1927).

The article then goes on to explain in great detail the efforts made to bring an ‘authentic’ Vienna to the big screen, including duplicating the splendid interiors in the palace of ‘the late Emperor Franz Josef,’ drawing rooms and boudoirs of the aristocracy, streetcars, vineyards on the banks of the Danube and rural inns. The article ends with an authoritative, personal validation of the authenticity of this cinematic Vienna from the film’s director, Erich von Stroheim: ‘It is Vienna’, exclaimed von Stroheim as he walked about through the various sets and scenes, and those with him observed a sad note in his voice–‘Vienna, before the great war of 1914–Vienna the melodious, the romantic, the dramatic–my Vienna!’ (Ibid.).

Even though the Times claimed that the film would be out soon, it was more than a year until The Wedding March saw the light of the American screen in October 1928. The reasons for this delay were manifold. Production had started in June 1926 and quickly become out of control—as usual for a film directed by Stroheim. Although the film had been granted a generous budget, its costs exploded, not least due to Stroheim’s own indecisiveness, according to Richard Koszarski, who reports that some of the scenes were shot thirty or forty times without any noticeable change of direction on Stroheim’s part (Koszarski 2001: 221). Stroheim overworked his crew late into the night and early morning, and his obsession with mastering every detail in the mise-en-scène was particularly demanding for his collaborators. Shooting dragged on into fall 1926 and was significantly behind schedule. By the end of January, both the producer, Pat Powers, and Paramount ran out of patience and money, and the production was stopped. But the editing process also turned out to be extremely complicated. Stroheim had proposed presenting the film in two parts to the public, consisting of The Wedding March and The Honeymoon. In August of 1927, the editing of the film was taken away from Stroheim and handed over to Josef von Sternberg, whose final version was declined by the studio. At last, The Wedding March opened in October 1928, two and a half years after the shooting had started. The Honeymoon was never screened in the United States, only in Europe. The original copy was destroyed in a fire at the

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Cinémathèque Française in 1959—and this can be regarded as one of the great losses in film history. In 1953, however, with the support of Henri Langlois, Stroheim accomplished a restored version of The Wedding March for the Cinémathèque, which, as it turned out, differed only in minor details from the copy of The Wedding March screened in the US (Koszarski 2001: 226). Upon its release in 1928, however, the film only drew lukewarm critical responses and failed miserably to become the expected box-office hit. The beginning of the sound era may also have played a role in the failure of this late silent film, which ran only for a short time in American movie theatres. Paramount originally marketed the film with the promise of its authentic reconstruction and representation of Old Vienna, authorized by Stroheim himself. The Paramount press sheet suggested taglines to theatre distributors such as ‘Franz Josef of Austria Alive again in The Wedding March’, ‘Vienna with a code of morals all its own’, and ‘Glory of Old Vienna is Immortalized’. In addition, the studio promoted Erich von Stroheim as an original and true auteur, thus, capitalizing on selling his star persona, which he had carefully constructed, fashioned, and circulated in media texts. Stroheim cultivated the image of himself as an Austrian aristocrat who had come to America straight from the imperial court in Vienna. As is well known today, Stroheim was indeed born in Vienna, on 22 September 1885, but Erich Oswald Stroheim’s parents were by no means royalty, rather Benno Stroheim of Gleiwitz, Prussian Silesia and Johanna Bondy of Prague. Both of Stroheim’s parents were Jewish (which is of great importance given that Stroheim denied this throughout his life). The family was not rich but well off (at least until the pater familias started to waste the family capital with his extravagant lifestyle). In particular, Stroheim’s obsession with the Austrian military significantly shaped his persona as a star director and auteur in Hollywood. Since his early youth, it seems, Stroheim was driven by the singular desire to join the Austrian military. In 1906, he took the conscription examination and failed because he was considered too weak. He reapplied later that year and was accepted into the Royal and Imperial Training Regiment 1, stationed in Vienna, ‘at his own expense’. Only five months later, on 29 May 1907, he was discharged from the Imperial-Royal Army, again as an ‘invalid’. Stroheim’s military career lasted only five months instead of seven years, as he claimed, which was even reported in his obituary in the New York Times in 1957.16 Stroheim reapplied to the military again in 1908, failed again and left the Jewish faith in the same year. His biographer Arthur Lennig hints that there are autobiographical undertones to a passage in a play Stroheim wrote later, based on the scenario of Merry-Go-Round, in which a ‘little

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lieutenant’ is sneeringly looked upon by a count as ‘Mosesdragooner [sic]’. An attached footnote refers to the fact that ‘Mosesdragooner’ was a ‘slurring way of referring to men of the train and transport service, because so many Jews served under this branch unable to be admitted to the cavalry’ (Lennig 2000: 13). As Lennig concludes, ‘This passage has an autobiographical ring and surely is as close to the humiliating truth as Stroheim ever came.’ (Ibid.). Overall, Stroheim completely reworked his autobiography in America. His self-fashioning as a Catholic aristocrat once he set foot in the United States recalls Freud’s topos of the ‘family romance’, where a child fantasizes that it belongs to a family superior to its own. His autobiographical accounts appear to be a fiction of an aristocratic identity continued in his films, a narrative of passing that perfected a project of assimilation and class transgression by capitalizing on the New World’s enthusiasm for European lifestyle and class pretense. The German literature on Stroheim has repeatedly referred to Stroheim’s work as a ‘cinema of ostentation and of exhibition,’17 (Grafe 1993: 238) a cinema, which does not tell but first and foremost shows. For Grafe, Stroheim’s nostalgic, though grim look at prewar Vienna bears the traces of a ‘baroque modernity’ that fuses an excess of decorum with an analytic view of class structure. This claim rests on the fact that both Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg were grounded in a culture of ‘exhibitionism’ that flourished in prewar Vienna. Apart from the Prater, typical mass spectacles and entertainment in fin-de-siècle Vienna were frequent parades where the empire and the military most effectively demonstrated, and held onto, the law and order of the ançien régime that was falling apart. Shortly before Stroheim left Austria for America on 12 June 1909, for example, the Habsburg dynasty and with it the Austro-Hungarian empire celebrated its final extravaganza. A huge parade was staged to celebrate the emperor’s sixty-eighth year of rule. The creator of this extravaganza, Joseph Urban, was a distinguished designer and artist whose name was closely associated with, and strongly influenced by, Art Nouveau and Jugendstil. Urban later emigrated to the United States, where he designed sets for Broadway shows (including ‘Ziegfeld Follies’), for Metropolitan Opera productions, and for motion pictures. As a result, Urban became an American art director straight out of the heritage of the imperial courts. His bombastic scenario for the ‘Franz-Joseph-Festzug’, however, was probably the historical climax of an on-going spectacle of decoration that Stroheim—then still in Vienna—probably witnessed in the old world. It must be borne in mind, however, that this parade was the most famous of many that shaped the perception of the Viennese population at the turn of the century. Not surprisingly, a significant number of early silent films made

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in Austria include scenes of parades and festivities, since they were frequently held in the imperial city. When, in January 1910, the first independent Austrian production company was founded, it set out to document ‘actual events and natural beauty of our fatherland’ (Nepf 1999: 15). The first documentary produced by the newly founded Kolm Company was titled The Carnival Parade in Ober St. Veit (1910) (Der Faschingszug In Ober St. Veit); it was followed by The Funeral Procession of His Excellency the Mayor Dr. Karl Lueger (Der Trauerzug Sr. Exzellenz des Bürgermeisters Dr. Karl Lueger) and Emperor Franz Joseph I .‘s Visit to the Wr. Neuststädter Airport (Der Besuch Kaiser Franz Josef I. am Wr. Neustädter Flugfelde), both of which were produced in the same year. Even more striking is a documentary from 1916–17 that shows different actualities from the last years of Kaiser Franz Joseph (Aus den letzten Lebensjahren weiland Sr. Majestät des Kaiser Franz Josef I.). Among a variety of official rituals and visits involving the Kaiser, there is a short piece of a Corpus Christi procession in front of St. Stephan’s cathedral. The similarity of the actual celebration to Stroheim’s restaged scene in The Wedding March is astounding. Not only do the military uniforms look exactly like those of Stroheim’s cast, also the manner in which the procession moves through the street, surrounded by the crowd of onlookers, resembles the scenes in Stroheim’s film. Twenty years later, in an interview Stroheim gave the writer Dorothy Calhoun for the magazine Motion Picture Classic in April 1930, he would fondly remember this Viennese culture of spectacle around the turn of the century: I remember, when I was a young officer I was stationed one May Day with a company of cavalry and a machine-gun in a side street off the Ring to keep a watch on the famous May Day demonstration of the Socialists. Down the street came the working men, thousands upon thousands with their red banners waving defiance, ‘Down with the Monarchy!’ ‘Let the People Rule!’ singing their revolutionary songs. Suddenly, several mounted police appeared, good humouredly waving the marchers to one side of the road. And in the cleared space rolled the Emperor’s carriage, with its familiar plumed horses and the small, old figure huddled on the cushions, feebly touching his plumed hat right and left. And all in an instant these Socialists, who had been shouting their hatred of the upper classes so lustily a moment before, tore their greasy caps from their heads and waved them and shouted just as lustily, ‘Hoch der Emperor!’ with sentimental tears streaming down their faces (Stroheim quoted in Calhoun 1930: 30, 78).

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However accurate Stroheim’s account of the contradictory responses of the demonstrating socialists vis-à-vis the face of the old Kaiser might have been, when he claimed that now, ‘in this dull[!] democracy’ of 1930, the workers were homesick for Franz Joseph, he was yet again trotting out the all-pervasive Habsburg myth and the image of the unifying and classdifference-leveling image of the fatherly emperor, as he would do on so many occasions for the rest of his life. Significant, however, are the similarities between the autobiographical memories of Sternberg, Stroheim, and Fritz Lang—who referred in his memoirs to the Kaiser tenderly as ‘der alte Herr’ (‘the old man’)—when it comes to conjuring up the golden days of Imperial Austria. A nostalgia for the monarchy and loyalty to Franz Joseph was particularly current among Jews and Jewish intellectuals (for example, Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel), who had felt protected by the supranational character and cosmopolitan tradition of the Habsburg monarchy (Botstein 1991: 194). The Austrian writer and essayist Hilde Spiel, in her cultural history of fin-de-siècle Vienna, even refers to Franz Joseph as ‘a real father to his Jews’ (Spiel 1995: 235). How much her account is also part of the Habsburg myth is open for debate. Nonetheless, the fondness for Franz Joseph, who guaranteed stability and safety to his (Jewish) citizens, reverberates in the aforementioned memories of Sternberg, Lang, and Stroheim. But especially Stroheim conjured up the Habsburg myth in cinema as much as he debunked it.

Concentric City: Center, Circle, and Suburbs The plot of The Wedding March is simple. Stroheim plays Prince Nicki von Wildeliebe-Rauffenburg (Nikki Count of Redhotlove-Fisticuffs), an impoverished aristocrat, who has lost his fortune on account of an excessive lifestyle spent in brothels and gambling. His parents advise him to marry a nouveau riche daughter (ZaSu Pitts), who—even though she has a crippled foot—is very desirable in terms of her fortune. Nicki agrees, but at the same time, during a Corpus Christi parade at which the Emperor is personally present, he meets Mitzi (Fay Wray), a lower-class girl from Nussdorf, a suburb in the outskirts of the city. He falls in love with her and promises her happiness, only to ultimately abandon her in favor of his rich fiancée. In his discussion of Metropolis, released in Germany in 1927 (that is, one year before The Wedding March), Tom Gunning observes that the representation of the city of Metropolis is a vertical one. The society in

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Metropolis is class-based and spatially ordered along a vertical axis: the ruler lives on top, the oppressed masses far below (Gunning 2000: 62). Stroheim’s Vienna, by contrast, is presented as a concentric city model, where space and the distribution of power is organized horizontally. While cities such as London or Paris had multiple-centered inner cities, Vienna remained mono-centered. Due to an 1892 planning ordinance (Bauordnung), the cathedral of St. Stephan’s was established as the highest building in the city, which was not to be topped. This law undermined the emergence of new inner city centers; furthermore, the inner city around St. Stephan’s signified the Catholic center of power and high culture, while amusement parks and other sites of mass culture were located at the periphery, keeping intact a model of center versus periphery in terms of high versus low culture. Consequently, even though since 1890 the urban infrastructure had developed rapidly, the representation of urban spaces and the way they were used conflicted with modern urban techniques such as mass transportation (Horak et al. 2000: 10, 11). Hence, whereas the preferred mode of transportation in Metropolis is the elevator, in The Wedding March—and in almost every other film set in turn-of-the century Vienna—it is still the carriage and the horse. The carriage was the privileged mode of transportation for members of the upper classes and guaranteed them privacy within the realm of public space. And even though the electric tramway was part of the urban mise-en-scène in the stock footage of Vienna, which Stroheim used in his film, it did not come to play a role in the diegesis. In Stroheim’s The Wedding March, then, the opening stock shots, which were, unlike the rest, shot on location, give a clear mapping of how the power relations of the city are inscribed in its spatial organization. In Stroheim’s ‘Vienna’, the inner city is bracketed off from its surrounding suburbs by the Ringstraße, the big street that enclosed the center like a circle. The city is established through shots of signif icant urban hallmarks. As Carl Schorske has argued, great representational buildings like city hall and the houses of parliament—prominently featured in Stroheim’s opening shots—signify the constituents of a liberal bourgeoisie in alliance with the bureaucratic empire. These great representational buildings function as a sociological isolation belt against the outskirts, that is, the proletarian quarters and its immigrant masses (Schorske 1981: 24ff.); f ixed class positions are grimly reinforced and inscribed in the urban space. Rather than featuring representational buildings solely as sites of consumption for the tourist gaze, Stroheim establishes them in a series of unrelated longs shots (through which he singles out each site as a site of power) and then immediately cuts to the private spaces

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of a morally degenerated aristocracy and its decadent and disgusting family rituals, thereby linking the sites of off icial culture to depraved aristocrats. In this initial topographical mapping of the power relations in Vienna, Stroheim sets up the symbolic tension, which determines the course of his narrative. In fact, a peculiar kind of opposition is found in the city center itself. The antagonistic poles, which supposedly demarcate the fate of the city, are symbolized by the Virgin Mary and her opposite, the Iron Man (Rathausmann). The Virgin Mary—‘guiding, comforting, and consoling’, as the intertitle reads—resides in St. Stephan’s. The Iron Man, positioned on top of city hall—thus, suggesting a challenge to the symbolic power of the highest building, St. Stephan’s—is ‘a remnant of the Middle Ages’, as the intertitles tell us, ‘heartless, soulless, threatening’. Both figures are located in the center, competing entities of conflicting powers. The Iron Man, Stroheim later explained in an essay for Motion Picture Classic, stands for ‘intolerance and prejudice and cruelty and hate’ (Stroheim quoted in Calhoun 1930: 85). The Holy Virgin, on the other hand, symbolizes love and purity. By the same token, though, St. Stephen’s is not only home to the Holy Virgin, but also signifies the power of the Catholic Church in alliance with the imperial court. During the Corpus Christi procession, when the aristocrat first meets the lower-class girl, the Royal Police keeps the people at bay and prevents them from transgressing the church’s threshold, which is reserved for aristocracy and high-ranking military only. Thus, the space of St. Stephan’s is marked off as a space where the masses are not permitted, because it first and foremost ‘belongs’ to the social elite. The positioning of the Holy Mary in St. Stephan’s, then, undermines her symbolic opposition to the Iron Man, because she—like the Iron Man—is associated with the ruling classes and, thus, is part of an oppressive regime. Sure enough, in the course of the narrative, power relations are redistributed according to the aforementioned concentric model of the city. The center, enclosed by the ‘Ring’, and its representatives, antagonize the masses at the periphery. This antagonism is symbolized, as I will argue, through a visit that the Iron Man, from the center, pays to the vineyard, at the periphery.

Baroque Modernity: The Aesthetics of the Rotten Stroheim has frequently pointed out that his own stance toward the political class struggles in turn-of-the-century Vienna was critical of the

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decadence and hypocrisy of the aristocracy and their shallow lifestyle, but even more critical of the revolutionary masses. He was clearly in great favor of the dominant Austrian culture, which, as Michael Steinberg has observed with respect to Karl Kraus and Gustav Mahler, instigated ‘identification through contradiction’. What Steinberg diagnosed in Kraus, namely that he was very much part of the ‘theatricality he attacked, the theatricality that marked the dominant culture of the Austrian secular baroque’ (Steinberg 2000, Vol. 2: 105), would seem to hold true for Stroheim as well. As Steinberg continues, ‘[A]mong these and other Jewish modernists, Catholic conversion is most reliably a deep sign of attraction to the dominant culture’ (Ibid.: 107). To understand the notion of ‘secular baroque’, Steven Beller’s definition of the driving forces dominating the official Austrian culture and politics at the turn of the century is helpful: Vienna, the ‘capital of a staunchly Catholic monarchy’ was the center of an empire ‘still dominated by the alliance which had effected this situation: the Church, the Habsburgs and the high aristocracy—the cultural expression of which, baroque, dominated Vienna’s inner city’ (Beller 1989: 172). The dominant Austrian culture at the time was deeply marked by (Catholic) theatricality and (social) masquerade,18 two characteristics that influenced Stroheim’s aesthetics. His fondness for the staging of Habsburg spectacles—even with the acknowledgment that the very protagonists of these spectacles are degenerate, aristocratic creatures—is just one case in point of Stroheim’s obsession with detail and material excess. The Corpus Christi parade, a key sequence in The Wedding March, and the only sequence of the film shot in Technicolor, recalls, as stated before, the legacy of Joseph Urban and the excessive display of imperial power that was so common during Stroheim’s experiences in Austria. Not surprisingly, Urban’s excessive style prompted sharp critiques amongst his Viennese contemporaries, primarily from the architect Adolf Loos. Loos fought over the traditional opposition between the ornamental and functionalist structure in the applied arts. For Loos, the ornament was merely a ‘symptom of backwardness and degeneracy,’ which provided the means to exercise power over the people. In his polemic against ‘unmodern’, ornamental art, he launched a specific attack on Urban’s staging of the Emperor’s festival procession. His argument is twofold: the ornament functions to gloss over the old spirits in a new form and, as a result, it deludes people about the reactionary characteristics that still form its core. By the same token, the ornament represents wasted material and, hence, wasted labor and wasted capital.19

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But it is precisely this ‘too-much-ness’, this ornamental ‘waste’ that functions as an important feature of a concept of ‘critical decadence’ and it is this particular kind of excess that becomes salient in Stroheim’s work. The intrinsic connection between modernity and decadence is prominently discussed in Matei Calinescu’s book Five Faces of Modernity, in which he presents a concept of decadence that stands in a complex dialectical relationship to modernity: ‘The ideas of modernity and progress on the one hand, and the idea of decadence on the other, are mutually exclusive only at the crudest level of understanding’ (Calinescu 1987: 155). Instead, Calinescu claims that progress and decadence ‘imply each other’ intimately and cannot be considered apart from each other; even though the idea of decadence negates concepts like progress, modernism, and utopia, this refusal encapsulates a progressive moment in that it signifies a crisis, an urgency of time; hence, as the flip side of modernity, decadence engulfs a critical dimension: ‘Consciousness of decadence brings about restlessness and a need for self examination, for agonizing commitments and momentous renunciation’ (Ibid.: 154). Stroheim stages the lengthy parade of a Corpus Christi procession as a military extravaganza, clearly echoing the excessive display of imperial power that was so common at the turn of the century. Moreover, to emphasize the outstanding significance of the scene within the black-and-white feature, Stroheim filmed it in Technicolor. Peter Wollen has noted, with reference to the philosophy of George Bataille, that it was extravagance, waste, and feudal excess that counter-pointed a ‘restricted economy of production’ based on ‘production, utility and exchange’ (Wollen 1987: 27); waste, then, produces an excess that propels a transgressive negativity. It is exactly this overload that Stroheim puts on display to lay bare the frozen class structures of an anachronistic feudal society (and, on a more practical level, to provoke the economic reasoning of the studio system). By exaggerating the decorational excess of the Habsburg empire, as, for example, epitomized in the Corpus Christi procession, Stroheim creates a ‘too-muchness’, which becomes self-destructive by exemplifying its decadent moment of decay and exhaustion. A particularly interesting example is given in a scene where the aristocrat, Prince Nicki, meets his new love interest from the lower classes: the lovers get together in an idyllic garden in the vineyards, where apple blossoms start falling on their heads. It is known from the production history of the film that all the (artificial) apple blossoms were handmade to make them look more ‘real’. But even without this knowledge, the effect would be the same: we have an excess of material creating a surplus of artificiality, signifying waste and decay within the mise-en-scène.

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6. ‘Material excess’: Handmade apple blossoms surrounding Erich von Stroheim and Fay Wray in The Wedding March (1928)

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But also the characters themselves are associated with the markers of a dying class. Stroheim applies a rhetoric of sickness in depicting certain characters: the aristocratic woman Prince Nicki is about to marry for her money has a limp; her body is somatized and thus stigmatized as part of a dying class. Again, Peter Wollen: ‘Utility, function, fitness and the machine superseded ornament, luxury and display. Yet there was a third term. As well as the cooked and the raw, there was the rotten’ (Ibid.: 27). By exaggerating the display of luxury and ornamental decor, Stroheim creates what Wollen has called ‘the rotten’: in the case of The Wedding March, it seems to me, the ‘rotten’ is the human body, most notably, the grimace. Right at the beginning of the narrative, we see the repulsive faces of a married couple—Nicki’s parents—lying in bed next to each other, looking mean and degenerated. The wife’s (Maude George) first words to the husband (George Fawcett), instead of ‘Good morning!’ are, as the intertitle states, ‘You—ugly old fool!’ And ugly he looks, indeed. But so does she. Later, when Nicki’s father and the millionaire father (George Nichols) of Nicki’s future wife meet during an orgy in order to arrange the ‘money marriage’ between their children, Stroheim again resorts to a sequence of medium close-ups and close-ups to stress their ugliness in detail. The camera closes in on their drunken visages and examines their swollen noses, so that their mean and pathetic expressions are emphasized even more. But not only the members of the aristocracy show their ugly faces (which become even more disgusting within the spectacle of the splendid decor); the proletariat is equally endowed with mean physiognomies, as a couple of close-ups of Schani (Matthew Betz) the butcher’s face makes clear right at the beginning. Moreover, the proletariat is also associated with the notion of waste, but not, as in the case of the aristocrats, with the waste of the ornamental; rather, more literally, with the waste of society: with pig stalls. When Prince Nicki visits his new love interest for the first time in the suburbs, he passes by a pig stall, owned by Schani, Mitzi’s brute boyfriend. The royal puts a handkerchief to his nose in order to avoid the smell of the lower classes. In that sense, Stroheim’s authorial stance can be linked to the concept of decadence in that he refuses to take on a certain stance in terms of privileging one political position over the other: instead, he shows both class positions to be equally ‘rotten’. Bazin found a beautiful metaphor to describe Stroheim’s aesthetics: ‘In [Stroheim’s] films, reality lays itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police [...] Take a close look at the world, keep doing so and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty

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and ugliness’ (Bazin 1967: 27). The way Stroheim ‘presses’ his material to ‘confession’, so to speak, is achieved through an ‘excess of reality’, which in its ‘too much-ness’ reveals moments of decay and exhaustion.

Repressed and Restricted Looks: A Geography of the Gaze Typically, the outstanding intellectual endeavors of Viennese modernity are credited with the philosophical examination of a crisis of language and its impact on the formation of individual subjectivity and social identity. Both literature (for example, Schnitzler,20 Kraus, Hofmannsthal and Musil) and philosophy (Wittgenstein, Mauthner, Mach, et al.)21 were deeply informed by a modernist critique of (and deep mistrust in) language. As Andreas Huyssen has argued, the intellectual accomplishments of Viennese modernity were not only bound up with a crisis of language, but even more so with a crisis of perception, due to the psychological repercussions of the particular spatial and social arrangement of the city. What Huyssen calls a ‘disturbance of vision’ (Huyssen 1998: 35)—a symptom that deeply informed class, race, and sexuality issues—rested not only upon the experiences of urban life in the context of a rapidly modernizing culture. It was also rooted in the topographical specificities of Vienna where, as already outlined, the inner city was the center of political and religious power of an aristocratic elite, who turned their backs to, and strictly segregated themselves from, the proletarian masses inhabiting the outskirts. Huyssen adds another dimension to the already mapped out urban geography of power in that he combines the spatial organization of the metropolis with the notion of visual mastery: The Viennese bourgeoisie, the political carrier of Austrian liberalism, was literally located in the ocular crossfire of an aristocracy that it tried to imitate but that mostly despised it, and a working class that it experienced as a threat. Inside the circular and constricted space of the Ring, seeing and being seen exhibited an inevitable social pathology. […] the bourgeoisie sought the eye of the aristocracy, but repressed or foreclosed the look of the popular classes […] (Huyssen 1998: 40).

Huyssen’s spatial model suggests not only the horizontal distribution of power as generated by the topography of the city, but also discerns an economy of vision, which is closely connected to the organization of urban space. To put it differently: the topography of the city not only distributes

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power spatially, but the spatial arrangement also determines the means of visual mastery granted to a character. The power of the look, then, is dependent upon the spatial position of a protagonist; in return, the spatial organization fixes class and gender positions, in as much as it directs the character’s ability to look. A good starting point to elaborate this notion of a ‘geography of the gaze’ is the Corpus Christi parade, where Prince Nicki and the commoner Mitzi meet for the first time and start flirting. The scene opens with an intertitle, introducing the procession as ‘the greatest religious and military celebration of the year’. In the opening shots—all staged by Stroheim, without the use of stock footage—we see the ringing bells on the top of St. Stephan’s. Next, in a couple of extreme long shots, Stroheim establishes the open space in front of the cathedral entrance where military on horses and police officers parade, while members of the high aristocracy walk into the church. We then cut to a long shot of a crowd of people who have all come to see the Kaiser and the procession, and who are positioned at a safe distance, opposite the church entrance. In medium close-ups, the camera singles out the protagonists from the lower classes: we meet the vulgar looking and spitting Schani and his father (Hughie Mack); Mrs. Schrammel (Dale Fuller), an equally vulgar looking woman, and her daughter Mitzi. Mitzi sticks out in this sequence of close-ups: the way her face is brightly illuminated gives her the appearance of an angelic-looking, sweet, and innocent girl. Clearly, she is different from the other low-class characters; she is elevated by her youth and her beauty. Mitzi, like Agnes from Merry-Go-Round, is the prototypical Viennese girl, also referred to as the ‘sweet young thing’, a direct translation of Schnitzler’s famous notion of the ‘süße Mädel’. The Viennese girl is always associated with the suburbs and the lower classes, and, thus, tightly linked to sites of mass culture. In the next couple of long shots, the carriage with the emperor arrives and Kaiser Franz Josef (Anton Wawerka) is led to the church entrance where a long shot shows him kneeling before the Catholic priest. This procedure is inter-cut with shots of the cheering crowds who begin to push forward to get a better sight of the royal spectacle, while police hold them back. A group of high-ranking military men on horses—among them, Prince Nicki—start forming a line in order to protect and shield the ruling class from the masses. They place their animals right in front of the pushing crowd, their backs turned to the popular classes, literally repressing their look. Schani is not amused. All he and his peers get is a glimpse of the backs of the horses: ‘Ain’t we got no right to see nothin’ a-tall?’ Ironically, his female companion, Mitzi, very much enjoys the view, because Nicki,

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high on his horse, has caught her eye. In a spectacular sequence of medium close-ups and close-ups, the camera cuts back and forth between Nicki, Mitzi, and Schani, who all look at each other. In a point-of-view shot of Mitzi, the camera pans up the elegant figure of the man on the horse, starting with his boots. With loving caress, the camera pans up the shiny boots and the snow white pants of the aristocrat, finally, from a low angle, resting on his self-satisfied smiling face: the man in uniform is introduced as an erotic and desirable spectacle, parading in front of the lower-class woman who unabashedly admires him and cannot help falling in love. In his right eye, Prince Nicki holds a monocle through which he gets a better sight of the woman in the crowd. Mitzi’s medium close-ups are shown from his point-of-view from a high angle. Mitzi shyly looks up to the royal, but then, unable to sustain his look, always has to lower her face and hide behind the brim of her hat. This scene introduces the upper-class male and the power of his gaze, epitomized by his monocle, as a source of authority, which determines the course of the narrative. Similiarly, in Ophüls’ Liebelei, the motif of looking is picked up in the figure of the male aristocrat and his deadly stare through his monocle. Schani, the lower-class man, also looks up to the high officer, whom he immediately registers as a competitor for the attention of Mitzi. In a truly pathetic gesture, he starts combing his hair in order to match Nicki’s good looks. This futile attempt, of course, makes him appear ridiculous. The camera, finally, closes in, alternately, on the faces of Nicki and Mitzi, who intensify their eye contact. The asymmetry of their power relation, however, is reinforced by the vertical axis of exchanged looks between the aristocrat and the commoners: while the latter are forced to look up to the aristocrat from a low angle, the former always looks down on them from his high angle point-of-view. In the course of the procession, guns are fired and Nicki’s horse rears and hurts Mitzi badly. Police and an ambulance arrive. Schani starts cursing at Nicki, who still sits on his horse, witnessing the drama from his privileged high angle point-of-view. Schani, finally, is arrested by the police for his unruly behavior, while Mitzi is carried away by the ambulance. These ensuing actions are presented in high angle point-of-view shots of Nicki, suggesting that it is his superior gaze that directs the unfolding events down below. Before Schani is dragged away, he looks up to Nicki, threatening him with his fist and challenging his superiority; in the following succession of shot/reverse-shots, however, the aristocrat just has to look down through his monocle to the commoner, who immediately is taken away by the police—as if the authorities needed to evacuate Nicki’s field of vision from representatives of the lower classes. Similarly, in the final shot of Mitzi

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in this scene, again from Nicki’s high angle point-of-view, we see her lying on the stretcher—eyes closed. Clearly, the social encounter in the inner city has ended with the expulsion of the commoners. The center of imperial power has been cleared of unruly subjects who transgress their assigned roles of being simple, cheering bystanders. Schani’s demand for his own view has been denied by the aristocrat; hence, he has been denied space in the inner city and taken away. Mitzi, as well, has attempted to instigate an exchange of looks with a man not only above her own class (it is clearly she who first looks admiringly at Nicki), but also in a place where she does not belong. Consequently, she is also been punished for her conduct and taken away. She, like Schani, was not able to bear Nicki’s gaze. At the end of their fateful encounter, it is only Nicki’s point-of-view and his gaze from above that commands the visual field. After Mitzi and Schani are gone, the actual spectacle of the Corpus Christi parade shifts into full effect: the mise-en-scène, only in this particular sequence, takes on the splendid and lush colors of Technicolor— as if to underline the fact that the lower classes had only been granted point-of-views in black and white.

Meet Me at the ‘Heuriger’: Tales of the Iron Man After Mitzi’s recovery in the hospital, the blossoming relationship between the Prince and the Viennese girl climaxes during two encounters in ‘Dreamy Nussdorf’, a suburb at the Northwestern periphery. Nussdorf is famous for its vineyards, the so-called Heuriger, where Mitzi works as a harpist. The Heuriger, not unlike the Prater, counts as a popular site of mass culture where people from different classes mingle. By the same token, the Heuriger is also a place which Roman Horak (following Adrian Rifkin) has dubbed the ‘Viennese timeless popular’ (Horak 2000, Vol. 1: 170–171). Recalling the ideological function of the ‘folk types’, the ‘timeless popular’ similarly serves to uphold a notion of an ‘Old Vienna’ that guarantees order and tradition in a changing urban environment. Typical forms of the ‘timeless popular’ are places like ‘the Heuriger’ or ‘the coffeehouse’, but also cultural practices such as ‘the operetta’, ‘the waltz’, or ‘good food’ were relentlessly promoted by a tourist discourse, by sociologists, historians, and literary authors, and define Vienna as the city of music, of wine, of coffeehouses, etc. Timeless popular places are sites of consumption, establishing Vienna as a place of leisure, easy amusement and the famous ‘Gemütlichkeit’ (coziness). They are markers of a ‘prototypical Viennese-ness’

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(Urwienerisches) and guarantee a ‘timeless state of being’, a stasis that defies historical processes of transformation: ‘These tropes […] control and code the representation of change/transformation into a succession of merely/ pure appearances and nostalgia.’ (Ibid.: 171). Stroheim’s reconstruction of ‘Dreamy Nussdorf’—as the intertitle reads—matches precisely the description of the timeless popular where the aristocrat meets the commoner: the orchard of apple trees at the Heuriger, where the lovers get together, has an old carriage—Mitzi’s ‘fairy tale carriage’. In there, the couple sits down and Nicki makes his first move toward the shy girl, trying to kiss her. They are framed in a two-shot, surrounded by Stroheim’s handmade apple blossoms. Mitzi looks off screen to her right; the camera cuts to a long shot of the Danube22 riverbank and then back to the lovers. Mitzi starts recounting an old folk tale from the lower classes, according to which sometimes ‘Danube Maids’ come to the shore of the river. These Danube Maids appear to be a ‘water version’ of the Viennese girl. Those who are lucky enough to see the nymphs are promised luck, happiness, and love. Mitzi admits that she has never caught a glimpse of the Danube maid herself, but, as the intertitle reads, ‘[…] I’m satisfied just so I don’t ever see the “Iron Man”!’ The second part of her tale is less reassuring: Once in a while, the ‘Iron Man’ leaves the inner city, travels to the banks of the Danube and carries away a Danube Maid. To those who see the Iron Man killing a Danube Maid comes ‘sorrow, grief, and death’. Nicki, of course, has never heard of such a story and calls it ‘people’s foolish fancies’. As the Austrian historian Gernot Heiss has pointed out, there is actually an old legend involving the Danube Maids and the Iron Man. In a book about ‘the Viennese Woman’ from 1909, Heiss found the positive version of the recounted tale: According to this tale, the Danube Maid fosters ‘in her golden heart’ a deep and jubilant love and admiration for the Iron Man who resides above Vienna (Heiss 1986: 262). Why Stroheim should change that love story into a murder mystery seems peculiar; one might wonder if he just did it for melodramatic effect. Interestingly, Stroheim brings up the Iron Man in the quoted interview from 1930 in which he recalls his youth in Vienna. He explicitly names the Iron Man as the symbol for the dark side of Vienna, ‘a sullen figure in heavy battle armor, symbol of intolerance and prejudice and cruelty and hate’ (Stroheim in Calhoun 1930: 85). Why should the Iron Man signify intolerance, cruelty, and hate? It seems that Stroheim’s Iron Man symbolizes not simply the dark eternal force of mythical evil; rather, he stands for an experience Stroheim had in Vienna

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before he left for America. What he calls intolerance, cruelty, and hate, is, in fact, a more general circumvention for the experience of anti-Semitism. Stroheim, who in America successfully passed as a Catholic aristocrat, remained ‘in character’ during his life and his films; nevertheless, The Wedding March highlights the experience of anti-Semitism and social exclusion experienced by a marginalized, Jewish, petit bourgeois male in turn-of-the-century Vienna—and the Iron Man comes to play a crucial role in that experience. Historically, the Iron Man, a medieval knight in armor,23 was placed on top of city hall in 1882, symbolizing the self-confidence of a newly empowered bourgeoisie. When the Iron Man was inaugurated, the constructor of the figure, a certain Friedrich Schmidt, addressed the sculpture with the following words: ‘Keep your eyes open and watch over the city. Keep away all evil and those forces that don’t wish her well. […] You ought to be a symbol for the citizens of Vienna who, like you, are always harnessed to fight attacks’ (Neue Freie Presse, 22 October 1882, reprinted in Schlauer 1985: 27–28). By the turn of the century, city hall was the domicile of Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna between 1897 and 1910. The charismatic politician from the Christian Socialist Partly signif icantly shaped the city’s image by combining a technological modernism with a paternalistic, regressive, and authoritarian view on society. The American historian John Boyer characterized him as a ‘reactionary modernist’ (Pfoser 2000: 228). Lueger municipalized the supply of gas, electricity, water, and transportation.24 Under his term of office, he created a new urban infrastructure, which was able to handle a metropolis with two million inhabitants. By the same token, his politics were anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic: Lueger propelled an anti-Semitic discourse that he used not only to address, in particular, the lower classes, but that he also used to offer the masses a ‘narrative of identification’ (Maderthaner, Musner 2000: 144–145). With regard to the multi-ethnic population of the monarchy—especially the Czech minority—Lueger fought for a pure ‘German character’ of Vienna, coining the then-famous slogan ‘Vienna is German and has to remain German.’25 As the Austrian historian Brigitte Hamann points out, for Adolf Hitler, living in Vienna at that time and admiring the city’s mayor, Lueger became the great ‘Germanizer’ of the city (Hamann 2002: 396). Further, Lueger’s rhetoric of German nationalism and anti-Semitism legitimized an anti-Semitic public discourse with devastating effects: it opened the doors for the racism and anti-Jewish propaganda that would accelerate after World War I. (Pfoser 2000: 228).26

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Lueger’s city hall—and with it the Iron Man placed on top of the building—stood ideologically apart from progressive municipal politics and for German nationalism and fierce anti-Semitism. A caricature from around 1900, printed in the satirical, anti-Semitic magazine Kikeriki, supports this thesis. Under the heading ‘Auch ein Turmkraxler’ (‘Another tower climber’), we see the caricature of a traditional Eastern Jew who is on top of city hall and throws down the Iron Man. This image functions as a warning from the Christian Social Party to the population to beware of the supposedly threatening supremacy of Jews in Vienna (Hamann 2002: 492).

7. ‘Another tower climber’: Title image of the anti-Semitic satirical magazine Kikeriki (July 16th, 1911)

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8. ‘Thrown out of city hall’: Anti-Semitic postcard from around 1896

Similarly, a postcard from around 1896, again printed by Kikeriki, shows a caricature of three Jewish men who are thrown out of city hall. The title ‘Kommunal-Kreditlose’ (no communal credits) suggests that city hall would provide no more money for ‘Jewish high finance’.27 It would be wrong, however, to attribute to the Iron Man an open and straightforward symbolism of anti-Semitism. But it is safe to say that the sculpture signified the ‘German’ part of multi-ethnic Vienna and stood high up in a hegemonic position against everyone considered ‘non-German’, and particularly, against Jews. At the beginning of the The Wedding March, two symbolic figures determine the power relations of the city’s topography—the good Virgin Mary and the evil Iron Man. According to the intertitles, the balance between these two forces holds the fate and fortune of Viennese citizens in check. In the course of the narrative, however, these antagonisms gradually relinquish and no longer govern the character’s trajectories. On their second encounter in the orchard garden of the Heuriger, Mitzi and the aristocrat rest in an old carriage. The carriage, an interior space within the realm of the public, and, as noted earlier, the typical mode of transportation for the privileged upper classes, symbolically elevates the lower-class woman to the position of her lover. At the same time, it also points to the ‘temporary-ness’ of the unification between the lower-class woman and the upper-class man. The camera cuts to a long shot of both

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Nicki and Mitzi in the carriage; Mitzi looks off-screen to her left, from where a huge, ghostly figure enters the frame. It is the giant Iron Man towering over the lovers; from her low angle point-of-view, we see the Man in a medium close-up, holding a dead Danube Maid in his arms, laughing. In a long shot, we see him walking through the orchard from right to left; his ghostly figure is superimposed on Nicki and Mitzi and, thus, walks ‘over’ them. Then, the camera cuts to a two-shot of Nicki and Mitzi; they struggle, and Nicki tries to calm down the horrified girl. Not only has the upper-class protagonist never heard of the myth of the Iron Man killing a Maid, he is unable to see it. The power of vision is only given to the female character. She is the one who has to anticipate her own sorrowful fate of being abandoned for another woman of superior class. Mitzi faints and is picked up by Nicki, who carries her off to the left side of the frame, not unlike the way the Iron Man has carried away his victim. The mise-en-scène at this point seems almost delirious, especially through its expressive lighting technique and the way in which it heightens a certain phantasmagoric quality. As this scene suggests, the Iron Man does not so much antagonize the Virgin Mary in the city center, but rather the Danube Maids (in other words: Mitzi). It is the antagonism between the inner city and the outskirts, the imperial powers and the lower classes that propels the dynamics of the narrative. The aristocratic protagonist, despite his monocle, is ‘blind’ and

9. Iron Man carrying off a Danube maid in The Wedding March (1928)

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unable to see his own active part in this destructive dialectic. As the superimposition and doubling of the images of both the Iron Man and the male protagonist suggest, he and the Iron Man are very much alike. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times picked up on this parallel when he speculated, that ‘[P]erhaps Prince Nicki is in a way this Iron Man’ (New York Times, 15 October 1928). The female character, on the other hand, through her vision of the ghostly Iron Man, is given the allegorical power to look, even if only to witness her own victimization. After her seduction, her aristocratic lover abandons her and eventually marries the rich heiress. The visit of the Iron Man channels the timeless popular back to the historical dialectics of class struggle and anti-Semitism. Stroheim maps out a field of power relations that spatializes and genders the narrative in a specific manner: on the one hand, the official turn-of-the-century culture of representation in the center of the city embodied by the royal protagonist; on the other hand, prominent sites of mass culture, such as a Heuriger and the Prater located in the outskirts, are equated with the lower-class girl. By triggering the aristocrat’s journey from his ‘assigned’ space of power toward popular meeting places in the suburbs, Mitzi functions as a kind of seismograph in registering the pressures of historical changes, and it is her allegorical vision that dynamizes the timeless popular space of nostalgia and arrested utopia.

3.

Critical, Controversial, Conventional Viennese Girls in Films by Ophüls, Feyder, Hochbaum, and Forst

Introduction Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March failed to be a success. The film drew lukewarm critical response and disappointed at the box office. The reasons for this letdown were multifaceted. The heavy cutting of the original material, for example, as Variety pointed out, ‘has not added pace. Root of the evil is the time given the Corpus Christi event from which the succeeding action never recovers, being none too swift in itself’ (Variety, 17  October 1928). Another clue as to what might have hurt Stroheim’s Viennese film was given by Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times. Hall specifically complained about the character of Mitzi, the Viennese girl who not only gets slapped and humiliated by her mother, but also falls for ‘the playboy of Vienna’. Her submissive behavior was not met with compassion by the critic, but rather with indignation: ‘Fay Wray really gives the most sincere performance of the cast, but, as Mitzi, she loses sympathy by permitting her mother to beat her and for being beguiled by Prince Nicki’ (New York Times, 15 October 1928). As this comment suggests, contemporary audiences could not entirely relate to this particular type of submissive femininity portrayed by Fay Wray. Also, her traditional appearance certainly did not match the standards of modern womanhood in the United States. Her long and curly hair, with a straw hat on top of her head, and her big eyes, ready to burst into tears at any moment, recalled the image of a romantic heroine from the Victorian ages. Mitzi, in other words, embodied the total opposite of what was considered modern femininity in post-World War I American consumer culture, epitomized by the flapper. Contrary to the Viennese girl, the young woman typified by the flapper stood for the pursuit of modern life. The plots of flapper films—a sub-genre of the silent romantic comedy that peaked in the mid-1920s—revolved around the heroine’s striving for independence from parental control, while at the same time promoting modern styles of dresses, cosmetics, and fashionable appearances (Landay 2002: 22). When selling The Wedding March, Paramount was obviously aware of Fay Wray’s outdated look. As the Paramount press sheets reveal, the

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marketing department attempted to cast her old-fashioned appearance as the special feature through which she obtained the role in an auteur film by Erich von Stroheim: ‘Fay Wray is glad she resisted the temptation to have her hair cut. In fact, her long, silky brown, naturally curly hair assisted her in securing one of the most coveted roles of the year—that of ‘Mitzi’, the little Viennese sweetheart of Erich von Stroheim in his latest Paramount Picture […]’ (Paramount Press Sheets, 1August 1928–31 July 1929, 3).1 Original quotes from Fay Wray on how she was reproached by friends for her conservative hair-do, supported the account: ‘“For goodness sake, have that mop off; it’s as out of style as puffed sleeves.”—These are only a few of the inducements offered me to bob my hair—but I had an idea somehow that if I kept it, the part I wanted most in the world might come to me. It did. […]’ (Ibid.). Perhaps in part due to her curly hair, which supported Stroheim’s lighting effects to give her face a dreamy expression, Fay Wray came to typify a quintessential ‘Viennese girl’ in American cinema. Taking her interpretation of femininity as an example, Lotte Eisner reminds us that Stroheim not only came from Vienna and might have been influenced by the work of Schnitz­ ler, but that he also worked as an assistant for D.W. Griffith before shooting his own films. In discussing the impact of Griffith on the work of Stroheim, Eisner points to the latter’s portrayal of young girls, the ‘süße Mädel’ (the ‘sweet young thing’), and detects a similarity to Griffith’s Victorian ‘little darling’. Both types of women, Eisner argues, were typical for the cinema of the 1920s: big, teary eyes, a small and lovely mouth, and a little nose. But Eisner discerns a decisive difference between Griffith’s ‘little darling’ and Stroheim’s ‘sweet young thing’ with respect to sexuality: ‘Griffith’s little girls carry their innocence like a protection wall, even when they give themselves [to a man, A. S.] or when they are married. Stroheim’s little girls are more passionate and give themselves more completely’ (Eisner 1976: 70). Similarly, in trying to define the Viennese girl, the author of an Austrian film magazine called Mein Film (My Film) from 1927, is fascinated by a particular type of femininity he considers typical for the city of Vienna. ‘This is the “sweet girl…!”,’ he states euphorically: The ‘Sweet girl’ is a gentle and dreamy character created by Arthur Schnitzler around the turn of the century [...]; she is different from similar girl characters in other countries in the same manner the term ‘flirt’ is different from the term ‘Liebelei’; today, this legendary, truly Viennese type of girl belongs to literature only. And literature is where film found her. […] In reality, Sweet girls and Anatols don’t exist in Vienna any more

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than Mimi Pinsons in Paris. […] Today, our whole life, love and young people who fall in love are completely Americanized, and terms like ‘flapper’ and ‘flirt’ have changed national characteristics fundamentally (Mein Film, 1927).

According to this critic, who calls himself ‘Hugo’, femininity à la Vienne is not an easy character trait for young actresses to accomplish. They had to be blond, blue-eyed, and they had to exude atmospheric qualities, such as the rhythm of the waltzes in every movement of the body. By scrutinizing portrayals of Viennese girls in recently released films, Hugo observes that most of these typical Viennese characters were played by women who had no connection with Vienna, but originated from countries like Poland, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and even America. Especially international directors like Ernst Lubitsch, E.A. Dupont, or Erich von Stroheim had to choose ‘pseudo-Viennese’ girls like Mary Philbin (in Merry-Go-Round and Dupont’s Love Me And The World Is Mine from 1927), Xenia Desni (in Ludwig Berger’s The Waltz Dream) or Fay Wray (in The Wedding March), and, as it turned out, these actresses proved to be excellent choices. For Hugo, there is only one conclusion to be made: ‘The secret of the Viennese woman is probably this: She is a woman who has a lot of heart. And this, however, is truly international’ (Ibid.). As the German scholar Rainer Rother has noted, in German cinema between the wars, the type of the ‘sweet young thing’ was more accepted than her modern counterpart, the flapper. The ‘sweet young thing’ proved to be a popular character and was prominently embodied by the star actress Lilian Harvey, who—born in England and raised in Germany—came to signify the sweet Viennese girl in German Cinema (Rother 1997: 137). Her typical character traits such as charm, sweetness, a certain amount of frivolity, and musicality were most efficiently played out in her portrayal of a Viennese shop girl in the musical comedy Der Kongress tanzt (The Congress Dances, by Eric Charell from 1931), an internationally successful early German sound film that also did very well in America (Elsaesser 2000: 374). Actually, the Viennese girl as an internationally recognizable stock character of femininity did in fact seem to have circulated within the US industry. Essays published around Stroheim’s making of The Wedding March indicate this. In a May 1928 issue of Photoplay there were two articles that were closely connected both to the protagonists of the Austrian empire and to the persona of Erich von Stroheim. One story was written by ‘His Imperial Highness, Archduke Leopold of Austria’ and titled ‘A Habsburg

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Sees Hollywood’ (Photoplay, May 1928, 30, 92). In it, the Archduke Leopold, grandnephew of Franz Joseph, tells how he views the film industry through his royal eyes and gives a report on the hardships of extras. To underline his argument about the pressures the film industry exercises upon its employees, Leopold recounts an incident involving his Austrian secretary. He tells us that his male secretary, who suffered from homesickness, saw in the distance an extra girl. She was a typical Viennese girl. The next day I learned that my secretary had talked to the girl, complimented her on her ability and told her she was the Viennese type. And that little incident gave her high hopes of appearing in a Viennese film. Poor girl! When such trivial incidents raise such high hopes, you may understand what the poor actors have to go through during desperately hard times (Ibid.: 92).

The secretary’s rather blunt pass on the extra girl aside, this little story confirms that there certainly did exist a common knowledge of what could be assumed as a ‘Viennese type’ or a ‘Viennese film’. The making of The Wedding March probably even heightened this awareness, especially since the same issue of Photoplay printed an additional piece on Stroheim, foregrounding his position as an auteur in Hollywood.2 Stroheim himself relentlessly promoted a nostalgic image of Old Vienna before the Great War, and recalled the splendid nightlife of the aristocracy from those days as follows: ‘Before I left Vienna, the cabarets and night clubs were just becoming fashionable resorts for the nobility. There was one called “The Sweet Girl”, I remember, and another named “The Night Lamp”, but our favorite places of amusement were still the open air gardens […]’ (Stroheim 1930: 78). Stroheim’s equation of the ‘sweet young thing’ with designated places of commercial pleasures demonstrates how this character—a demi-mondaine—was closely connected to low culture, easily accessible for upperclass men, or, to put it more drastically: her proximity to prostitution. In fact, the aforementioned nightclub ‘Das süße Mädel’ did exist in Vienna and attempted to lure paying customers onto the premises with its suggestive name. This was in 1912, when the term ‘sweet young thing’ had become common in everyday language in Austria. By that point, of course, only the cliché of the ‘sweet young thing’—’undemanding, willing, and Viennese’—had survived, not her critical potential. And that was also the point when Arthur Schnitzler, her ‘creator’, refrained from using the Viennese girl as literary figure in his subsequent work (Seemann, Lunzer 1994: 7).

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Arthur Schnitzler’s Sweet Young Thing: Male Fantasy and Female Misery As is well known, before the Viennese girl entered the realm of international cinema, she famously emerged in the literature of Schnitzler.3 The characteristics of the ‘sweet young thing’ or ‘Sweet Viennese girl’4—to adopt Schnitzler’s terminology—were notoriously described in his first major play, the cycle of Anatol from 1893. The sweet girl serves as the epitome of seductive naïveté and sexual availability and, due to her undemanding nature, embodies the ideal lover for the bourgeois male. For him, she guarantees moments, however fleeting, of authenticity and truth in a splintered modern world.5 Anatol,6 a bourgeois turn-of-the-century bon vivant, who idles his time away by seducing women, explains to an upper-class woman that the sweet young girl from the lower classes he is having an affair with, is ‘not fascinatingly beautiful—she isn’t especially elegant—and she’s by no means brilliant…’; rather, ‘she has the soft grace of an evening in spring…and the charm of an enchanted princess…and the spirit of a girl who knows how to love!’ (Schnitzler 2007: 25). The description of the girl as a particular type came to fix her image as a serialized and interchangeable stock character usually named ‘Mizzi’, ‘Anni’, or ‘Franzi’. The diminutive ‘i’ at the end of her name suggests the manner in which her male counterpart attempts to infantilize her. Her association with the lower middle class, the bohemian world of theater, or the proletariat and the suburbs (‘Vorstadt’) marks her standing for the upper-class man as a lover, but hardly as a prospective wife. Anatol makes this point quite blatantly, when he states in Episode, a playlet from the cycle of Anatol, ‘They [the ‘sweet young things’] find love in the city [that is, from the upper-class men from the inner city, A.S.] and marriage in the common world [that is, in the suburbs within their own class, A.S.] […]’ (Schnitzler 2007: 33). In the words of Martin Swales, the ‘sweet young thing’ tends to play a passive role. […] she is sexually accessible, grateful for any taste of romance and glamour, however brief, that is brought into her limited practical existence by the young ‘Lebemann’. Furthermore, she is socially undemanding. She has to accept the few hours allotted to her, to accept that she is accorded only a peripheral role in the life of her lover (Swales 1971: 182).

Schnitzler’s social geography reveals as much as it conceals the misery of the suburbs from which the lower-class girls wished to escape through a liaison

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with an upper-class bachelor or married man. His ‘süße Mädeln’, as W.G. Sebald points out, are charted with a melancholic ambience that obscures their precarious status between a lover and a prostitute. In the late nineteenth century, due to the processes of industrialization and urbanization, prostitution was a widespread phenomenon in big cities such as London or Berlin, and, of course, Vienna. But whereas in Berlin, for instance, socialist politicians like August Bebel and the philanthropic liberal bourgeoisie drew attention to the miserable situation of the female lower classes, it was ‘reserved for Vienna, during the time of the “gay apocalypse” […] to openly cultivate the type of the “occasional girl”’ (Sebald 1983: 110). Reportedly, 7,000 officially registered and 30,000 ‘unofficial’ prostitutes worked in Vienna at the turn of the century, including women who supplemented their low incomes in jobs such as waitresses, actresses, factory workers, and domestic servants. In 1912, a survey among medical students revealed that only four per cent of the young bourgeois men had had their first sexual encounter with a woman they considered a potential marriage partner. Seventeen per cent claimed a domestic servant or a waitress as their first sex partner, whereas an overwhelming 75 per cent had initiated sex with prostitutes (Hamann 2001: 20). A visit to the brothel was not only considered a moral decline, it also posed the dangers of the widespread, incurable and deadly venereal disease syphilis7 (Keiser 2000: 65–66). Hence, the upper-class man had good reasons to prefer the ‘clean’ girl from the suburb to professional prostitutes. In his autobiography, Youth in Vienna, for example, Schnitzler recalls his own affairs with ‘süße Mädel’, such as the embroideress Jeanette Heger, and he even duly noted that she fell ill during their relationship due to miserable sub-standard working and living conditions. But even though Schnitzler registered the pressing poverty of his lover, his disarming tone when recounting it is striking.8 In the words of Sebald, Schnitzler’s analysis of the conditions suffered by girls from the lower classes was remarkably accurate, but he could never entirely shed his ‘bourgois coldness’ (Sebald 1983: 13). In that sense, Schnitzler’s trope of the ‘sweet young thing’ was a male fantasy of convenience, which concealed the actual gender and class relationships of Viennese society. Arguably, for Jeanette Heger and other women from the suburbs, the connection with a bourgeois man also held an ambivalent moment of emancipation, in that it transcended their predestined roles as mothers or housewives and, offered, however briefly, an escape from pressing poverty.9 Unlike prostitutes, they did not expect money for a sexual rendezvous, but favors such as visits to theaters, concerts, and dinner outings. In Max Ophüls’ La Ronde from 1950, for example, based on Schnitzler’s play

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Roundelay (Reigen, 1897), in which Viennese society across the whole class spectrum is connected through a chain of sexual encounters, there is an episode where a character called ‘the husband’ has sex with ‘the Sweet girl’. Typically, they meet in the private room of a small restaurant, where the bourgeois man orders dinner for his lower-class companion. She happily indulges in expensive food and champagne, before she grants him sexual favors in exchange. The scene quite obviously suggests that the real pleasure for the girl springs more from the consumption of gourmet food than from having intercourse with a rather dull married man. In any case, the ‘sweet young things’ were at all times forced to obey the moral and social codes of the bourgeoisie and play according to their strict rules (such as, for example, to never meet the family of their upper-class lover). It was clear from the outset, that the circles of high society were closed to them, as much as the family life of their bourgeois lover (Janz, Laermann 1977: 45). For the upper-class man, women of his own class were unavailable, except for marriage (after the man had reached a certain age and established himself economically), or an illicit affair with a married woman. Those who conducted a relationship with a married woman of their own class, however, risked detection by the husband and the (deadly) consequences of a duel. In that instance, the married woman turned into a femme fatale for her lover, but not due to her own seductive, ‘womanly’ forces, but rather to the association with her husband. As a general rule, any form of free, extramarital sex was prohibited by the moral code of gentility and correctness, and strictly observed by the upper middle class—at least, by their women. In practice, this code primarily governed and discriminated the sexual behavior of young bourgeois girls and forced them to live a chaste live until they were married off—not for love, but usually to older, wealthy men who were able to financially secure their well-being.10 Men, by contrast, were allowed to bypass the code, at least as long as they did not openly violate it and maintained a façade of discretion (Thompson 1990: 58–59). Due to this hypocritical constellation, in turn-ofthe-century Vienna, premarital relationships for men and lower-class women were commonplace and adultery treated as ‘social folklore’ (Pfoser 2000: 222).

The Viennese Girl vs. the Femme Fatale With his trope of the Sweet Girl, Schnitzler added a new type of femininity to the already existing fin-de-siècle rostrum. Until then, the pervasive

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stereotypes of the femme fatale and the femme fragile had circulated within the artistic endeavors of the belle époque (Severit 1998: 15) and expressed and articulated male fears and fantasies about female sexuality.11 Hypersensitive, feminized and ‘decadent’ male writers and poets such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Peter Altenberg adored and idealized the femme fragile (famously embodied by actress Eleonora Duse) in their literature.12 The femme fragile signifies the child-like, asexual, delicate, and ethereal type of woman who redeems the male subject from his carnal desires, sexual torments, and fears of impotency. Man holds a dominant position vis-à-vis this child-woman in that he shields her from the brutalities of life—that is, from sexuality—and transforms her into an immortal and unreachable lover. The femme fatale, on the other hand, incarnates the demonic, nymphomaniac, depraved, and destructive woman who pervades the imagination of modern writers like Karl Kraus, Frank Wedekind, August Strindberg, Otto Weininger, and Hermann Bahr. Particularly influential in the Austro-Hungarian cultural realm were the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, especially his popular novel Venus in Furs (1869), in which he linked the pleasures of sexuality with pain and humiliation. Another example of a famous femme fatale can be found in Wedekind’s Lulu, from Erdgeist (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904), who combines the deadly qualities of undomesticated sexuality and ruthlessness (Wagner 1987: 138 ff.).13 In his literature, Schnitzler explicitly introduced the Sweet Girl to neutralize the figure of the femme fatale and her threatening forces. In the play Interlude from 1896, on which Max Ophüls based his film Liebelei, a young, bourgeois man named Fritz Lobheimer entertains a forbidden relationship with a married woman. His best friend, Theodor Kaiser, worries about the outcome of the illicit affair, especially if the husband of the married woman finds out. He recommends Fritz give up the ‘enchantress’—that is, the married woman—and to seek solace with a sweet girl from the lower classes. Fritz wholeheartedly agrees with him: ‘You have no idea how I’ve longed for affection like that, without all the problems…for someone sweet, quiet, and agreeable…with whom I can recover from all of life’s irritations and torments’ (Schnitzler 2007: 150–151). Theodor enthusiastically confirms Fritz’s yearnings for an easy relationship, playing out the comforting simplicity of the Sweet Girl against the dangerous complexities of the femme fatale: Recovery! That’s the most important thing. Women are there to help us recover… That’s why I’m so against those so-called interesting women. Women aren’t there to be ‘interesting,’ just pleasant. You should look for

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your happiness where I’ve always looked for, and found, mine. Where there are no big scenes, no dangers, no tragic complications; where there are no particular problems at the beginning and no anguish at the end—where you receive your first kiss with a smile and you part ever so gently and tenderly (Schnitzler 2007, 151).

In this account, Schnitzler exposed the yearnings of his male protagonists for a lower-class woman and her ‘easy virtues’ as a self-centered, patriarchal fantasy and chauvinist attitude in order to maximize their privilege of pre- and extramarital sex and to minimize the (potentially deadly) risks associated with such endeavors. The bourgeois male subject ‘exteritorializes’ his desires, morally, by conducting his sexual activities outside (his) marital bonds and below his own class, and spatially, by leaving the inner city and venturing to the outskirts. He is the main profiteer from the (moral) relegation of the bourgeois woman and of the inferior social status (and the misery) of lower-class females. In his analytic view of class structure and the moral codes of Viennese society, it is Schnitzler’s great merit to have revealed male privileges within the strict conventions of a social system that repressed and governed desire by keeping up a moral façade. And most of the time, it was the woman who fell prey to male dominance and arrogance due to her inferior status within a society that operated on the grounds of moral double standards based on hypocrisy and gender inequality.14 In the words of Sidney Bolkosky, ‘Vienna’s crime in its treatment of women’ rested in the duplicity of ‘forcing sexual ignorance in daughters while directing sons to prostitutes and süße Mädel’. In his verdict, ‘Misogyny in Vienna was not simply hatred of women. It disallowed female individuation, forcing women to be naïve children, lustful prostitutes, or morbidly depressed nonentities’ (Bolkosky 1986: 13). In his play Interlude, Schnitzler meticulously registers this impasse for a young woman who rejects her prescribed place within the society of fin-de-siècle Vienna. The ‘sweet young thing’ Christine refuses to accept her assigned role as temporary relief for her upper-class lover. When she learns that he has been involved with a married woman of his own class and has been shot and killed in a duel by his mistress’ husband, her violent reaction transgresses the boundaries of her social positioning. It is Christine’s friend, Mitzi, a shop girl, who embodies all the ‘typical’ qualities associated with the easy virtues of the ‘sweet young thing’. As her name Mitzi already indicates in its typicality, she treats her romance with Theo Kaiser as a comfortable, but temporary and non-lasting relationship (‘Who thinks of August in May?’). Christine, on the other hand, discards her status as a part-time

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love object and, in killing herself, behaves like a bourgeois heroine from a ‘play of lament’ (‘Trauerspiel’). She commits suicide not only because she realizes that Fritz never really loved her, but also because she becomes aware of the fact that, in his circles of society, she simply does not exist.15 Her strong reaction was considered inappropriate for a woman of her status in society—and this was the real scandal of Schnitzler’s play: elevating a lower-class woman to the realms of high tragedy, and thus, to the realms of feeling, thereby exposing the consequences of (male) behavior. When Interlude premiered in Vienna in 1895 in the Burgtheater, the ignorant and confused reaction of the contemporary audiences reflected the conceited attitude of the upper classes toward the socially inferior woman. The critic Alfred von Berger, who attended the première of Interlude at the Burgtheater, acknowledged how Christine’s suicide irritated the spectators, but hardly evoked empathy: ‘The audience mostly felt alienated, even insulted, sometimes interested, amused, touched […] Overall, the audience did not know how they should react’ (quoted in Calaitzis 1976: 428). The ‘sweet young thing’ as main protagonist on stage, endowed with the moral integrity of a bourgeois heroine, induced major discomfort on the part of the fin-de-siècle theatergoers from the upper classes. As noted earlier, however, the notion of the ‘sweet young thing’ quickly left the realm of literature and turned into a commonly used cliché for the permissive Viennese woman.16 As a consequence, Schnitzler abandoned this particular character in his literary production, which nevertheless came to play a vital role in international cinema.

The Viennese Girl in International Cinema In cinema, the Viennese girl is staged as a central topos of her own. Often, she is connected to atmospheric qualities associated with the vineyards and wine, gaiety, music, and waltzes—especially when the film draws from the grammar of the operetta genre (Büttner, Dewald 1997: 291). Lilian Harvey as the pretty Viennese glove-seller, Christl, in the aforementioned musical comedy Der Kongress tanzt is a case in point. She instigates in her male lover—who happens to be the Russian Czar—the desire to forget the world, to waltz, and, most importantly, to fall in love. Oscar Straus, in a famous song from his stage operetta, Ein Walzertraum, from 1907, pays tribute to the blissful drinking experience at the vineyards, at the periphery of Vienna, where the Viennese girls are to be found. Notably, his operetta, which features a typical, violin-playing Viennese girl, proved to be

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extremely fruitful in the realm of cinema and inspired film adaptations by both Ludwig Berger and Ernst Lubitsch. However, even within the sugary and supposedly conservative operetta framework, she may carry subversive potential. The Viennese girl functions as a polysemic marker, pointing to a variety of meanings, which sometimes contradict each other. Traditional aspects of femininity, like sexual innocence and dependence on male authority, are as much part of her character traits as are sexual mobility, the pursuit of a professional life and modern appearance. In cinema, the Viennese girl is neither a modern flapper, nor is she a sentimental heroine, nor a prostitute, nor a femme fatale. Rather, her character oscillates between various concepts of femininity, displaying the contradictions of womanhood between the conventions of tradition and the demands of the modern world. Conceptualized in literature as the counterpart to a bourgeois male who seeks moments of authenticity and truth in his romance with a lower-class woman, the character of the Viennese girl reflects upon the category ‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’ as markers of identity vis-à-vis concepts of theatricality, role-play and masquerade. In addition, she also throws into question the ‘naturalness’ of masculinity and male behavior. Due to her precarious (and unacknowledged) status, between lover and prostitute, the Viennese girl in cinema develops techniques of self-defense, such as the strategy of wearing her ‘Viennese-ness’ like a mask that can be easily put on and taken off. In that manner, she engages with questions of identity through performing gender as spectacle and interrogates conventionalized concepts of the feminine and the masculine. Further, the Viennese girl Christine, in Liebelei, for that matter, takes on a very different stance from, say, the Viennese girl in Berger’s The Waltz Dream, in that she rejects role-playing and performance as a defensive strategy. Rather, by insisting on a notion of identity based on truth and authenticity, and by refusing to accept her spatial relegation to marginalized spaces, she exposes the procedures of inclusion and exclusion firmly bound up with the theatricality of Vienna’s celebrated fin-de-siècle culture. In this chapter, my main focus rests on Max Ophüls’ film Liebelei and his adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s stage drama for cinema. Within the framework of my discussion of Ophüls, I also refer to other films made in the first half of the 1930s, in order to flesh out my argument about the significance of the Viennese girl in international filmmaking of that era. I particularly draw attention to the appeal of the Habsburg myth for American cinema by discussing Sidney Franklin’s Reunion in Vienna (1933) and the American version of Schnitzler’s play, Daybreak, from 1931.

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Franklin’s romantic comedy was especially successful with American critics because he managed to exploit the Habsburg kitsch in terms of the extravagant display of production values, while at the same time debunking the Habsburg myth as a thing of the past. Similarly, the Belgian director Jacques Feyder introduced a happy ending to Schnitzler’s play and presented the (petit) bourgeois family as a democratic alternative to the Habsburg myth. The Austrian film Vorstadtvarieté (Suburban Cabaret, 1935) by the German director Werner Hochbaum, is an interesting example for exposing the association of the Viennese girl with a man of higher social status as a relationship that is precariously close to prostitution. Rather than depicting such a connection as an honorable, but impossible attempt to transgress class barriers by means of romantic love (as, for example, suggested in The Wedding March), Hochbaum uncovers these erotic encounters as economic exchanges, within which the integrity of the woman is offered for sale. Further, this film makes the pressures of politics—Austro-fascism—tangible. The encounter of the Viennese girl with the rigidity of the military system mobilized Austrian censorship: certain scenes were cut in order to prevent a critical outlook on militarism.

Max Ophüls, Vienna, and Liebelei (1933) When Max Ophüls shot La Ronde in France in 1950, he allegedly remarked to a French journalist that the Austrians owed him a monument, somewhere along the Ringstraße, because he had made some of the most beautiful films set in Vienna. Not surprisingly, a lot of contemporaries considered him the Viennese director par excellence. ‘Many people thought that Max Ophuls was Viennese,’ Peter Ustinov wrote in his homage after Ophüls’ death in 1957, but as Ustinov noted, ‘He was not’ (Chamblee 1981: 31).17 Nevertheless, Ophüls ‘became a specialist in Viennese charm’ (Elsaesser 1999: 112) and the frequent settings of his films in fin-de-siècle-Vienna gave rise to speculations about his affinity to the city. Robert Chamblee has pointed out, with respect to the ‘Viennese trilogy’ of Liebelei (Flirtation, 1933), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and La Ronde (1950), that ‘no fading banners of the Austro-Hungarian empire are seen in these films, no portentous rips in the tapestry of the Habsburg monarchy are signified in any way, yet the awareness of some sort of impending doom pervades each of these films’ (Chamblee 1981: 1). Indeed, Ophüls’ ‘real life’ experience with Vienna was not of a pleasant kind. In 1925, when he was only 23 years old and an aspiring German theater director, the Viennese Burgtheater hired him to work. It sounded like an attractive engagement for a man of his young age, but the theater

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director of the Burgtheater immediately lost interest in Ophüls as soon as he arrived in Vienna and failed to give his new employee the necessary support. Moreover, Ophüls had to direct mediocre plays, which were already part of a chosen repertoire and thus his work was doomed to failure right from the beginning; the theater critics reacted accordingly and hardly ever delivered a word of praise. Also, the year 1925 registered politically as a high point in anti-Semitic upheavals in Vienna and culminated in the murder of the Jewish writer Hugo Bettauer, author of the famous novels City without Jews (1922) and The Joyless Street (1924).18 It is reported that Ophüls totally immersed himself in his work for the stage and hardly noticed the political atmosphere of open anti-Semitism and hostility; however, he met his future wife at the Burgtheater, the German actress Hilde Wall (Asper 1998: 102 ff.). Not surprisingly, Ophüls ended his engagement with the Burgtheater after six months and left in 1926, to go back to Germany. In his memoir, he looked back on his time in Vienna in an ambivalent manner: ‘I never really felt at home in Vienna. Fate had put me into a wonderfully golden Rococo-carriage but I much rather wanted to ride a motorcycle’ (Ophüls 1959: 97–98). Evidently, in his comparison of the carriage and the motorcycle, Ophüls missed the urban texture he was used to from his background in the industrial German province. Rather, arriving in a city like Vienna for him seemed like arriving in ‘a chapter of Schnitzler or a play act of Raimund. Everything felt unreal’ (Ibid.: 90). This account reverberates with Gertrud Koch’s claim that Ophüls’ relationship to Vienna was shaped by an imago of the city, more defined by literature such as the works of Schnitzler than by actual life experience (Koch 1989: 65). His film Liebelei, however, was not, as originally intended, shot on location in Vienna, due to financial reasons; instead, the settings were recreated in Johannisthal near Berlin. The cinematographer of the film was Franz Planer.19 What endowed Liebelei with a much more specific ‘Viennese flair’ than Ophüls’ later films set in the city, was, of course, the use of language. By engaging Austrian and German-speaking actors and actresses (for example, Paul Hörbiger, Luise Ullrich, and Willy Eichberger, who later renamed himself Carl Esmond in Hollywood), Ophüls added a sense of recognizable ‘Viennese-ness’ through a distinctive ‘aural idiom, not least because of the pleasingly lilting and attractively sensuous Viennese accent, cultivated by armies of highly trained stage actors from the Burgtheater and the Theater in the Josefstadt’ (Elsaesser 1995: 23). Ophüls was most interested in voices and their sounds—and in the aural realm in general. His frequent work for radio is only one case in point. According to the German scholar Lars Henrik Gass, his casting for an early sound film like Liebelei from 1932–33 was ‘guided by sound-impressions’ (Gass 1993: 59).

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Vienna figures in the film less as a phantasmagoric ‘dream city’ than as an evocation of a historically more specific location in which ‘[t]hose characteristics less generally associated with fin-de-siècle Vienna (attitudinizing, political stagnation, social rigidity) are openly inscribed’ (Chamblee 1981: 40). Even though the story of Liebelei takes place at the turn of the century, Ophüls avoids familiar Viennese landmarks such as famous buildings or sites (like St. Stephan’s or the Ferris wheel). Rather, he presents the cinematic city through a distinctive turn-of-the-century iconography, including military men, horse-drawn carriages, aristocratic interiors, and spectacular royal ceremonies associated with the Kaiser; and through typical cultural activities—like visits to the opera and to the coffeehouses and playing music and dancing waltzes. Ophüls scholars20 have pointed to this mobilization of a more ‘realistic’ discourse on Vienna with regard to the contemporary Weimar film audience,21 which was able to read Liebelei as an actual critique of the political developments of that time; that is, the growth of fascism and Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. This assertion is specifically bolstered in connection with the significant alterations Ophüls made to Schnitzler‘s play in adapting it from the stage to the screen. Most notably, he, together with his scriptwriters Hans Wilhelm and the already mentioned Austrian writer Felix Salten, changed the occupation of the main characters, Fritz and Theo—originally conceived of as citizens of the upper class—into members of the military. Theo’s courageous anti-militaristic plea (invented by Ophüls) at the end of the film, when he tries to prevent the fatal duel between his friend and the cuckolded Baron von Eggersdorf—‘Every shot fired which does not serve pure self-defense, is murder!’—was read by critics as a social comment by the director and as a political statement pointed against the fascist mobilization of the machinery of war. Also, whereas in Schnitzler’s play Fritz treats his liaison with Christine rather lightly, in Ophüls’ adaptation it becomes clear that Fritz truly does love Christine. Gertrud Koch has called this shift from literature to film, where flirtation is transformed into serious love, the ‘romantic positivization of feelings’ (Koch 1989: 68). When Liebelei was released in Germany in the critical year of 1933—the year Hitler came to power—the film was shown in two movie theaters in Berlin, but only on condition that the names of all Jewish contributors were cut from the credits, including those of Arthur Schnitzler and Ophüls himself. One month after the film’s premiere on 16 March, Ophüls left Germany with his family and moved to Paris. As it turned out, Liebelei became a key work in his career and one which, not least because of its

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professional use of sound technology, opened the doors to the French film industry for him (Williams 1986: 84).

Variations of Reality in Liebelei: The Military and the Theater Liebelei starts with a stunning opening scene in the opera, where the audience is awaiting a performance of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio. Surprisingly, it is not the action on stage that draws the interest of the camera, but the audience and its stratification within the spatial arrangement of the theater. In a detailed series of long shots and medium close-ups, alternating from high-angle and low-angle perspectives, the camera registers a complex regime of looks exchanged between the main protagonists who await the appearance of the emperor. At the same time, a hierarchy among the characters is established along a vertical axis. As Susan

10. ‘High rank, low position’: Magda Schneider (left) as Christine and Luise Ullrich as Mitzi in Liebelei (1933)

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White has noted: ‘The first scene’s arrangement of the main figurants at the opera presents visually the class consciousness supposedly absent from the film: the characters are rigidly hierarchized in order of class by their seats in the opera house’ (White 1995: 47). The female protagonists, Christine (Magda Schneider) and her friend Mitzi (Luise Ullrich), are seated up in the high ranks of the balcony—hence, in the lowest position in terms of their social status—and look through an opera glass to get a better view of the Kaiser. Ophüls introduces the Viennese girls in a medium shot from a slightly low angle: we see people standing in the first row of the balcony, looking down at the Kaiser, when, all of a sudden, a young woman pushes forward into the first row, followed by another girl. The order of their appearance already indicates their different temperaments: Mitzi, with an excited smile on her face, gestures toward her friend while glancing at the royal spectacle, whereas Christine, more subdued than Mitzi in her entire behavior, looks through an opera glass. Both young women are nicely dressed and wear gloves; but they do not wear jewelry, and compared to the elegant aristocratic audience members, occupying the seats in the orchestra, their light, girlish dresses clearly look less expensive, revealing their social background from the lower middle class. When Christine, in her excitement, and pushed by Mitzi, drops the opera glass, this fall (which also anticipates her later jump from the window) triggers the beginning of the narrative. The glass hits Theo (Willy Eichberger), an officer from the Austrian army, on the shoulder. Theo and his friend Fritz (Wolfgang Liebeneiner) will befriend and eventually seduce the two girls. Already in this opening scene, the importance of both spectatorship and of staging an act is introduced as a guiding principle of the unfolding narrative: when the girls look through their opera glass to their left, they see a spectacle performed by the Kaiser; when they look to their right, they see the opera performed on stage.22 Ophüls, in other words, suspends the idea of ‘reality’ by introducing it as a version of theatricality—and one should not forget, in this respect, that Ophüls originally worked for the theater stage before moving into film production. Right from the beginning of Liebelei, notions of performance and masquerade clearly determine the discourse of the film. When Ophüls introduces the theater stage and the visit of the Kaiser as competing manifestations of reality, he implicates the military as part of the spectacle. Performance and theatricality find their ultimate expression in the military and the military men. As Robin Wood has stated, in Ophüls’ use of soldiers and the military, ‘the stress is always on ceremony and performance, on the army as an extension of the “theatre”’ (Wood 1986: 224).

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In a stunning scene, Ophüls beautifully epitomizes the theatricality of both the upper classes and the military and their close affinity to the deadly and stiffening qualities of an oppressive masculinity that lies at the core of a strictly hierarchized class system. Right after the opening scene at the opera, Fritz leaves the auditorium in order to meet his mistress, the Baroness von Eggersdorf (Olga Tschechowa), at her palace. The suspicious Baron von Eggersdorf (Gustav Gründgens) returns from the opera as well, earlier than expected, hoping to find his rival with his wife. In a long shot from a high angle, we see the baron, dressed in a black cape and with a top hat, descending from his black carriage in front of his house. He walks away from the camera, toward the half-open gates of his house, which evoke the ghostly image of a haunted castle. When he enters the hall, his appearance first casts an expressionistic shadow on the wall, before his figure fully comes into frame. Clearly, the mise-en-scène depicts the aristocrat as the vampire-like representative of a dying class, allied with the military and bound up with insignias of death and destruction. Fritz is still in the house and tries to escape unrecognized. The following encounter between the baron and Fritz is shot in Ophüls’ and Planer’s significant ‘mobile long-take style’ (White 1995: 133):23 in a long shot, the camera pans with Fritz, running down the stairs of the hallway, when, all of a sudden, the baron enters. Within the same shot, we see Fritz hiding behind a column, while in the background the baron casts his shadow on the wall. The baron enters the frame and starts walking up the stairs, thereby passing the column behind which Fritz hides. This is the crucial moment when both men are together in the frame, moving around the column in a circle, invisible to each other. Their circular movement indicates their change of place in the erotic triangle with the baroness. For a moment, the baron hesitates, before he proceeds to walk up the stairs. The camera now pans with the baron, moving upstairs with him and keeping him in frame until he disappears behind a closed door. Then, we cut back to Fritz, still hiding behind the column. The silent encounter bears a moment of high theatricality in which one character pretends not to be there, while the other pretends not see him. However, in this particular scene, Eggersdorf actually does not see his rival; but by recalling the uncanny atmosphere of an expressionistic silent film, Ophüls heightens the feel of play-acting and of putting on a show. In this instance, Fritz is able to successfully perform his invisibility, but the crucial moment of becoming visible and, thus, becoming public, is imminent. The precarious consequences of failed performance are already suggested in this scene; the still ‘playful’ encounter between the cuckolded husband and the lover anticipates their final act—the duel—after which,

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as Wood puts it, one of the actors will not be able take a bow after the performance. On another occasion, Ophüls again brings the stiffening qualities of the official ceremonies and protocols of the upper classes to the fore. He cuts from a waltz scene in a tiny, cozy café, where Fritz and Christine dance to the waltz music coming out of a jukebox, to a waltz scene in the palace of the baron. Instead of the jukebox, a real orchestra picks up the same waltz tune in a sound bridge, and instead of Fritz and Christine, it is Fritz and the baroness who dance their waltz now. The suggested continuity between the two spaces, linked by the music and the movement of the waltz, underlines both their similarity and their difference (White 1995: 45). In the tiny café, the waltzing scene is blocked in such a manner that the small space, decorated with tables and mirrors, appears cozy and secure. At the same time, the particular dance in the café is often cited as a quintessential Ophüls scene, because of the beautifully fluid movements of the camera, which seem to transgress the confinement of space (Grafe 2003: 93). To put it differently: the space in the café provides intimacy, because of its smallness. But the narrowness of the space can also be transgressed through the movement of the waltz, suggested by the fluid movements of the camera. Thus, the café is small and intimate, but not suffocating, as the freedom of the camera indicates.

11. ‘Quintessential Ophüls scene’: Waltzing in a tiny café in Liebelei (1933)

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The aristocratic palace, by contrast, is physically far more spacious, but psychologically distressing: while the baroness and Fritz waltz through the room, they are exposed to the scrutinizing gaze of the baroness’ husband and other guests. The huge space of the palace, in other words, provides no place to hide. By contrasting the small, lively Viennese coffeehouse to the pompous, stiff, aristocratic palace, Ophüls filters the aristocratic fin-de-siècle Vienna through petit-bourgeois glasses, clearly in favor of the latter. As it turns out, it is Christine’s petit-bourgeois home in the suburbs, and not the aristocratic palace of the baroness, where Fritz seeks peace and comfort. Right before he leaves for his duel, Fritz pays a final visit to the home of Christine. Her father lets Fritz in and shows him the small and homely apartment, a petit-bourgeois idyll Fritz yearns for. The space of the lower-class woman suggests solace and freedom to her upper-class lover, who is entrapped in the rigid and claustrophobic system of the ancien régime. She represents the new (bourgeois) order that challenges the suffocating protocol of the ruling classes.

The Gaze of Oppressive Masculinity and the Need for Disguise Within the aforementioned pervasive discourse of theatricality and performance in Liebelei, the Viennese girl Christine comes to signify the site of authenticity and truth. Her exceptional positioning vis-à-vis the other characters becomes evident in her refusal to participate in any form of role play and pretense. Rather, she remains oblivious to the fact that categories of surveillance—i.e. looking—and detection—i.e. saying—govern the trajectories of all protagonists (including her own) and thus fails to realize the strategic need for disguise and the necessity of play-acting. This claim, of course, needs further elaboration. First, it must be noted that a major shift from Schnitzler’s play to Ophüls’ film lies in the transformation of space. While in Schnitzler’s drama the entire narrative takes place within private rooms, Ophüls partly transfers it to the realm of the public. The opera, coffeehouses, shops,24 and streets are sites of major importance for chance encounters, romantic rendezvous, and fateful meetings. Most importantly, Ophüls introduces public space as a realm of the visible, and, hence, of the detectable. To put it more generally: he mobilizes the cinematic apparatus as a technology of visibility that generates evidence. Early in the f ilm, after the opera performance has ended, the girls leave the building through the back door, together with those who work

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backstage, like Christine’s father, Herr Weyring (Paul Hörbiger). Members of the upper classes, such as Baron von Eggersdorf and Fritz leave through the main entrance and immediately enter a private horse-drawn carriage. The lower classes, on the other hand, walk home on foot, because privacy in public space is a privilege that belongs solely to the aristocracy. Later, after the first meeting in a coffeehouse, arranged by Theo, Fritz walks Christine home on foot, ‘in long silent peregrinations […] through a Vienna on the threshold of modernism, the Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud’ (Sierek 2004: 220). In a remarkable succession of five long takes, the camera first establishes the empty space of gloomy backstreets, before Christine and Fritz enter the frame and, alternately, walk toward the camera or away from it. The very sight of vacated space25 in the backstreets of Vienna, held in a static frame for a significantly long duration, recalls Walter Benjamin’s remark about the photographs of Eugène Atget, who, in the late 1890s, photographed the empty streets of Paris in order to produce a catalogue of urban space for archival purposes. For Benjamin, Atget’s images of deserted territory suggested scenes of a crime, for which the photos tried to produce proof. His metaphor—the scene of crime—for the modern city evokes the notion of detection, of evidence, and of surveillance (Donald 1999: 41–42). Taking Benjamin’s observation as a cue, the perspective of the long takes showing Fritz and Christine on their way home, similarly evokes the point-of-view of an invisible observer who implicitly monitors the urban scene. Finally, at the very end of the scene, the uncanny gaze of surveillance executed by the ubiquitous eye of the camera is anchored in the gaze of a male authority, who appears to be an observer: after biding Christine farewell, Fritz is promptly reproached by a military officer of higher rank who has observed the couple and now scorns Fritz for openly walking the public streets, rather than seeking the privacy of a carriage. The more general lesson to be learned from this incident, however, is the necessity for disguise and the need for putting on a show in the realm of the visible. Almost every scene in Liebelei implies the position of an (implicit) observer for whom a performance needs to be staged. For example, Theo secretly lets Mitzi into his apartment, while distracting the night porter with a fake story about political rumors of crisis. The camera pans with Theo, who engages the older man in a conversation and walks him away from the entrance. Only when the camera cuts back to the waiting Mitzi, we, the film viewers, realize that the entire scene was staged for this secretly observing woman who waits for the right moment to sneak up the stairs.

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Another example occurs when Fritz meets Theo during military maneuvers on the meadows of the Prater. The men are on horses, and the encounter between Fritz and Theo is first viewed in a long shot from the point-of-view of the company, before we cut to a medium close-up of the two friends. Theo (who is of a higher rank than Fritz) acts in front of his company as if he was giving important orders, while he is really informing Fritz about a private lunch meeting with the girls. As the German film scholar Reinhold Rauh has shown, the two scenes are salient examples of how Ophüls innovatively used the new technologies of sound cinema. The usual practice of early sound films of the so-called German theater film era of the early 1930s was to match image and sound synchronously: typically, two characters are shown in a two-shot and have a conversation. Without sound, the image remains meaningless, whereas the addition of the spoken dialogue adds a great amount of information. In the two scenes cited above, on the other hand, the discrepancy between the verbal and the visual opens up an entirely new meaning. During the conversation between Theo and Fritz in front of the company, both men put on serious faces and pretend to discuss official matters, while they are really exchanging intimate details about their love life (Rauh 1987: 101 ff.).26 Similarly, in the scene in which Theo distracts the night porter, the conversation he conducts with the older man stands in complete opposition to the gestures he makes toward the waiting Mitzi. Combined with the optical, the acoustical takes on a new meaning. The innovative use of sound technology by Max Ophüls, then, functions as an additional strategy to highlight and support the style of theatricality and play-acting. Successful performance is linked to the clever use of verbal language as an instrument of deception. The examples cited above, however, are playful performances in which public places, such as a building entrance and the meadows of the Prater, are used as a private stage for putting on a show for personal benefit. These performances are all harmless and without consequence, because they are staged for onlookers of lower social status (such as Theo’s company and the night porter). There is nothing at stake because the gaze of their ‘audiences’ is powerless and has no agency. But as the aforementioned metaphor by Benjamin suggests, the implicit observer monitoring urban space is by no means powerless; rather, it is the gaze of surveillance, embodied by a policeman or a detective, in short, by a source of male authority. To put it differently: a hierarchy of gazes dominates the structure of the narrative of Liebelei, with the gaze of a male authority as the most powerful one. Various characters in Liebelei embody this source of patriarchal masculinity: the military officer who rebukes Fritz; Major von Eggersdorf

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(Paul Otto), the brother-in-law of the baroness; and, most importantly, the Baron von Eggersdorf himself. In front of these onlookers, masquerade and performance fall prey to detection and turn into matters of life and death. Also, language and sound, once in the service of male authority, turn into dangerous instruments that severely hurt the main protagonists. On one occasion, Fritz and the baroness waltz together through an elegant ballroom—the scene following the already mentioned waltz scene in the cozy café. In a medium-shot, the camera pans with the dancing couple; then, we cut to a slightly low-angle, medium shot of the baron, who stands on the stairs and, staring through his monocle, observes his wife and her dancing partner. The camera cuts back and forth between the dancing couple, and other guests, who also stare at them, thereby establishing a crossfire of looks directed at Fritz and the baroness. Finally, one of the onlookers makes a condescending remark, which is overheard by the brother-in-law of the baroness. It motivates him to speak to his brother and to tell him about the rumors circulating about Fritz and the baroness. This is the moment when the private affair comes to light; that is, becomes public. Fritz and the baroness are no longer able to keep up their performance as ‘just’ good friends. The playful discrepancy between the verbal and the visual of the earlier scenes is closed off: image and sound work in tandem to confirm male supremacy. The rumors circulated by high military officers and members of the upper classes accumulate and produce verbal evidence. The spelling out of the illicit relationship by the major fixes the image of Fritz and the baroness as the adulterous couple. Fritz and the baroness finally look guilty, their masquerade has failed. As a final consequence of these scenes, the duel is arranged and Fritz is eventually killed.

The Kaiser and The Viennese Girl: Doing Away with the Habsburg Myth in Liebelei and De Mayerling à Sarajevo (1938) The narrative agency of the male gaze and its inherent violence executes tremendous power over the fate of the characters. The staring gaze of the infuriated baron, for example, literally forces his wife out of the city. After the detection of her secret affair, Eggersdorf orders the baroness out of his house, out of Vienna, and back to the distant estate of her mother. Her departure from the train station—another quintessential Ophüls scene27—culminates in a humiliating farewell scene, in which Major von Eggersdorf refuses to shake the hand of his sister-in-law, now a fallen woman. As these scenes suggest, the immediate victims of the aristocratic male gaze, it seems, are

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the baroness and Fritz, whereas the Viennese girl Christine only indirectly falls prey to the rules of the upper classes. Or does she? In her analysis of the opening scene of Liebelei, Susan White discusses the exchange of looks within the audience. Specifically, she is interested in the relationship between the Kaiser, the supreme commander of the military, and the two young women on the balcony. The first couple of shots exploring the audience clearly bring into focus members of the upper classes: they are seated close to the stage, displaying their wealth and power in jewelry and elegant robes. Granted, the girls on the balcony are part of the audience as well; in the auditorium, members of different classes and sexes are equalized by the camera in their role as spectators of the same performances (the Kaiser and the opera). But due to the spatial arrangement, their social positioning is kept in place and their gaze has no agency. Whereas Fritz and the Baron von Eggersdorf cast meaningful glances in each other’s directions, establishing them for us as major protagonists of the unfolding narrative, the girls’ position of looking equals that of those who look from backstage: they remain unseen and their look is not returned. This, of course, immediately changes once Christine drops her opera glass. The object hits Theo on the shoulder and, in the same moment, the entire audience turns around to look at the Kaiser (who remains off-camera.) Since the girls are positioned above the box of the Kaiser, it appears as if the audience is now looking at them.28 It seems that, after the glass hits Theo, lower-class women attract the gaze of the upper classes, but are unable to bear it and crouch in discomfort—a scenario that recalls Stroheim’s scene in The Wedding March, where Mitzi is unable to sustain the power of the aristocrat’s gaze and faints. As White argues, by dropping the glass, the girls break the hierarchy of locked gazes: Since the film audience does not see the Emperor, Mizzi [sic] and Christine in some sense replace him, or at least prove (almost) capable of sustaining the gaze he must support and return. But of course, this is not necessarily a position of power: they have turned quickly from privileged spectators—even shop girls may look at a king—to embarrassed performers (White 1995: 48–49).

What is particularly interesting about this scene is that, due to the editing, an immediate connection between two total opposites, the Kaiser and the girls, is insinuated. Linked together through an exchange of looks between the upper-class audience and the lower-class women, a confrontation between these two positions, radically different in gender, social status, and military occupation is suggested.

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The Kaiser versus a lower-class woman is a recurrent topic in films dealing with fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Habsburg myth.29 In Ophüls’ film De Mayerling à Sarajevo, for example, made during his French exile in 1938, Kaiser Franz Joseph wants to prevent the marriage between the heir to his throne, Franz Ferdinand, and the Czech Countess Sophie Chotek, a woman of inferior status. During the first intimate encounter between Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in a park, a large statue of Franz Joseph looms threateningly in the background, constantly reminding the lovers of his patriarchal authority and his insistence on social protocol. When Sophie first arrives in the park, we see her in a high-angle point-of-view-shot from the statue, which ‘looks’ down on her. Sophie returns the look and, in a couple of shot/reverse shots, the Kaiser and the countess ‘exchange’ opposing glances. Finally, Franz Ferdinand arrives, but the emperor statue remains in the frame in the background during their entire conversation. Also, similar to the petit-bourgeois setting of the house of Christine’s father in Liebelei, the living space of Sophie’s father bears the signs of bourgeois coziness (White 1995: 117). Sophie Chotek, of course, is of much higher social rank than Christine, but she also fails to fit into the official etiquette. She and Franz Ferdinand are finally united in a morganatic marriage, which excludes the woman completely from the official protocol of the court. To demonstrate her constant marginalization, Ophüls resorts to the theatrical notion of the ‘main stage’ versus the less visible backstage. When the couple attends a royal ball in Vienna, Sophie is excluded from the official spectacle and relegated to the ‘backstage’, in that she is forced to use the ‘Minor Stairs’, as the English sub-title reads. Overall, in De Mayerling à Sarajevo, the Kaiser is openly portrayed as an embittered and hopelessly old-fashioned man, whose reactionary attitudes destroy lives, and, eventually, instigate the breakdown of the monarchy and the beginning of World War I. The persona of Kaiser Franz Joseph, in the retrospective yearnings of the Habsburg myth as found in the films of the 1920s and 1930s, is usually projected as a venerable father protector, who guaranteed the security and safety of the supranational, cosmopolitan monarchy; however, the persona of the Kaiser also played the role of an oppressive, patriarchal, and reactionary autocrat, ruthlessly governing the personal lives of his subjects and being personally responsible for the outbreak of the World War. The negative portrayal of Franz Joseph as a perpetrator of a strict and stiffening protocol until the bitter end was historically quite accurate—the mysterious suicide of his only estranged son, Prince Rudolf, in Mayerling being just one case in point.30 Archdukes and other members of the Habsburg family who pursued unsuitable love relationships with partners below their

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own social ranks, were, as Mattl and Schwarz report, disciplined by being ‘slapped in the face and transferred for disciplinary reasons,’ measures taken with the personal sanctioning of Kaiser Franz Joseph (Mattl, Schwarz: 2006: 32). Around 1900, a couple of scandals shook the imperial court, one involving crown princess Luise, married to crown prince Friedrich August von Sachsen. Luise fell in love with the teacher of her five children and divorced her husband in 1902, upon which Kaiser Franz Joseph suspended Luise from all her royal rights (Hamann 1988: 270). Allegedly, Luise was spied upon by royal agents and threatened with psychiatric treatment. The writer and journalist Felix Salten—Ophüls’ consultant on the script of Liebelei—was a friend of Archduke Leopold, and had intimate knowledge of all royal scandals. He duly reported them to a wide readership, who followed the events with great sympathy for the transgressors (Mattl, Schwarz: 2006: 32). Consequently, in international cinema, the figure of the Kaiser came to play an ambivalent role. In the United States, for instance, the image of the emperor was exploited as a cinematic spectacle that could be sold to audiences. But even though the splendor associated with royal court life was milked in terms of production values, the audience was reminded that the Kaiser stood for anti-democratic principles. In Stroheim’s MerryGo-Round, he personally orders Count Grafenegg to leave his lover, the Viennese girl from the Prater, and to marry someone of his own social class. Similarly, in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, the Kaiser, in a less threatening manner, confirms the relationship between an aristocratic officer and a German princess, even though the former is in love with a lower-class woman. When the aristocrat meets the Viennese girl for the first time, a painting of the Kaiser is hanging on the wall of the living room as a constant reminder that, in the social system embodied by the Kaiser, the aristocrat and the commoner will eventually have to terminate their relationship. Especially in the American context, the Habsburg myth and its fairy-tale lifestyle is usually done away with at the end of the narrative in favor of the value system of the democratic middle classes.

Happy Endings in Hollywood: Sidney Franklin’s Reunion in Vienna (1933) and Jacques Feyder’s Daybreak (1931) Two examples of Vienna-themed films made in Hollywood illustrate the appeal of the myth of Old Vienna, the Habsburgs, and the Viennese girls, for American cinema.

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Sidney Franklin’s romantic comedy for MGM, Reunion in Vienna, a lavish production from 1933, starring John Barrymore, fully capitalized on the Habsburg myth in terms of presenting the grandeur of the royal lifestyle as visual spectacle, while at the same time exposing the myth as an outmoded paradigm within the context of modern urban life. The film was based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood,31 which had been successfully performed on stage by the famous acting couple Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. Thanks to the twofold narrative involving both modern Vienna after World War I and the nostalgic reminiscence of Habsburg Vienna, art director Cedric Gibbons could use his famously crafted cornerless European architecture set design and also indulge in Habsburg kitsch. The plot of Reunion in Vienna revolves around Elena Krug (Diana Wynyard), a young bourgeois Viennese woman married to a psychoanalyst

12. ‘Room without a past’: John Barrymore as Archduke Rudolf in Reunion in Vienna (1933)

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(Frank Morgan), who cannot forget her time as a lady at court during the Habsburg monarchy and her love-relationship with Archduke Rudolf (John Barrymore). The story operates on the premise that only the reliving of the past—that is, attending a monarchist ball and meeting her ex-lover Rudolf again—can free the woman from her symptoms of nostalgia and longing. Gibbons’ spectacular set design for Dr. Krug’s apartment, a modernist ‘room without a past,’ connotes modernism’s break with old tradition, whereas the lavish ball scenes taking place in the Hotel Sacher celebrate the elegance of royal lifestyles and the multicultural aspect of the Habsburg monarchy (featuring Hungarian musicians). At the end, John Barrymore, in a hysterical outfit of Austrian folklore, gives up his former lover to her husband; but the end leaves open the possibility that the two spend a last night together, in order to rework and resolve ‘the symptom’ of their love and yearning for the Habsburg myth. On a rather curious note: when Reunion in Vienna was shown in Rio de Janeiro in 1933, it caused a political hiccup. Several American newspapers reported that the Austrian ambassador to Brazil felt so ridiculed by the film that he initiated an embargo of MGM films in Austria, claiming that Reunion in Vienna ‘represented [Austrians] as frivolous drunkards, giving a wrong impression of the character of the country’ (New York Tribune, 20 December 1933). This opinion was not shared by the American Minister to Austria, George H. Earle 3rd, who, as the New York Tribune gleefully reported, ‘said he liked [Reunion in Vienna] so much that he wished to get to Austria as quickly as possible’ (Ibid.). To settle the case, MGM agreed to make changes to the film, in accordance with the Austrian ambassador’s wishes, and eventually the embargo was lifted.32 Notwithstanding this controversy, the critical responses in American newspapers to Reunion in Vienna were generally enthusiastic. The film provided an excellent opportunity for the studio to visually exploit the Habsburg myth and to display high production values on a grand scale. As the reviewer of the New York World Telegram accurately noted, ‘[s]eldom has there been a film more stunning to look upon’ (New York World Telegram, 29 April 1933). Another significant American film, this time dealing with more ‘serious’ material by Schnitzler and debunking the Habsburgs in favor of bourgeois mores, is Daybreak (1931), a sound film by the Belgian director Jacques Feyder. Feyder directed this MGM prestige picture, on which Frederic Gibbons—again—worked as art director, in 1931, the same year that Lubitsch made The Smiling Lieutenant. The heavily altered film version of Arthur Schnitzler’s famous novel Daybreak, from 1926, served as a talkie vehicle

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for the Latin star Ramon Novarro. In addition, the appeal of Feyder’s film for the US rested on the promotion of middle-class values, hinged upon the figure of the Viennese girl, who initiates the transformation of the male protagonist from a monarchist, philandering military man into a democratic, solid, middle-class family man. In Daybreak, Feyder consistently contrasts the iconography of the military and its associated lifestyle (such as lavish parties and night clubs) with more democratic settings such as the Heuriger and the interior of a petit-bourgeois family home. Already in the opening shot, the cinematic city is introduced with a long shot through the fence of a military barrack. We cut to the barrack yard, where the Imperial Guards present their arms to a high-ranking officer. The officer singles out a soldier and lectures him about the importance of the debt of honor, before he tells his nephew Willy (Navarro), a dashing young military officer, to marry for money. Similarly to Stroheim’s Merry-Go-Round and The Wedding March, Feyder introduces the theme of upper-class men ‘marrying for money’ in order to pay back their debts of honor. He suggests, right from the beginning, that the Habsburg myth and romantic love are not compatible. Willy, of course, is engaged to a rich woman he is not interested in, other than for her wealth. But the other soldier, who was lectured by Willy’s uncle, has no rich fiancée to back him up and shoots himself in the head. Alarmed by the shot, his friends—among them, Willy—rush to his room, only to find his dead body. We cut directly from their upset faces to a long shot from a high angle, which establishes a common room, with a huge portrait of the Kaiser hanging on the back of the wall. The monarch, in other words, is directly linked to the soldier who killed himself in order to fulfill a code of honor, represented by the Kaiser. Thus, from the outset, Feyder introduces the deadly qualities of the Habsburg myth, and the downside of a splendid military lifestyle. However, Willy distracts himself in an elegant nightclub, where waltz tunes are played and elegantly dressed women suggest their willingness to entertain high military officers. When Willy enters the club, he is wearing a monocle—like Stroheim in The Wedding March—and, in a medium close-up, looks at a woman, standing next to the entrance. She is wearing a modest, buttoned-up dress, a coat and a hat, seemingly not part of the elegant party crowd. When another party guest offends her, Willy intervenes on her behalf and accompanies her out of the club. As it turns out, the Viennese girl, Laura (Helen Chandler), is again of lower-class origin and gives piano lessons to the son of a petit-bourgeois family. She aspires to transcend her social status by teaching art, but her association with the outskirts, and low culture are spatially indicated—at

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least at the beginning of the narrative. When Willy—after ‘rescuing’ her in the club—sets out to seduce her, he invites her to the vineyards, where classes mingle and the usual waltzes are played. The next morning, after spending the night with Laura, he offends her by leaving her some money. Unlike Mitzi in Stroheim’s The Wedding March, who is solely depen­ dent upon the ‘true love’ of her suitor, or Christine’s bleak desperation in Liebelei, Laura is able to change her position within the patriarchal order by buying herself out of romantic love and by achieving a certain kind of independence.33 This precarious independence, though, is attained by selling her body to the wealthiest suitor and by becoming the paid mistress of Herr Schnabel (Jean Hersholt), a rich gambler and entrepreneur. By embracing her role as demi-mondaine, Laura transforms herself from a plain girl into a stunning and elegant woman. Unfortunately, her sophisticated appearance coalesces with her moral downfall. The image of the Kaiser, as already indicated, signifies a system of deadly moral codes, which threaten to undercut the formation of the heterosexual couple. The Imperial Guards, devoted to their overbearing father figure, are depicted as a homo-social military circle where encounters with women are as much a part of casually conducted leisure activities as gambling in the casino. The dark undercurrents of the seemingly lighthearted lives of the officers and those who are associated with them become apparent again when Willy’s life is at stake after losing money by gambling. After a last-minute rescue by his uncle, Willy gives up his military career in favor of a life in a civil society with the petit-bourgeois family at its core. He resigns his lieutenancy, renounces his identity as a military man and proposes to the Viennese girl. By contrast, in Schnitzler’s play, the lieutenant cannot imagine a life as a civilian and kills himself instead at the end of the narrative. Unlike Stroheim’s grim The Wedding March or Ophüls’ radical Liebelei, Feyder’s Daybreak maintains the light tone of a romance throughout. Hence, even though the seduction scene of the girl is staged in the vineyard at the periphery of the city, she is not spatially confined to the outskirts (as were the characters of Fay Wray and of Magda Schneider). Rather, having been relegated to the spaces of commercial culture she finds her ‘real’ destination as a teacher in a petit-bourgeois family. And this, the narrative suggests, is the right place and where she truly belongs. The dull scenario of the nuclear family provides the civilian alternative to the end of Willy’s military career; and the Viennese girl, on the verge of becoming a housewife and mother, guarantees a happy ending to a narrative that clearly favors the conduct of a decent civilian life over the splendid rituals of the royal army.

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Similarly to the warm reception of Merry-Go-Round, which also closed on the positive outlook of forming a middle-class couple, American reviewers at the time—overwhelmingly positive in their evaluation of the film—appreciated this closure. Only one critic preferred the glamorous lifestyle of the male protagonist and noted sarcastically: ‘Although the ending is supposedly tremendously happy, we could not help sighing as Mr. Novarro gave up position, career, money, fiancée all for a sentimental blonde [sic!]’ (Review from Az. Union, 1 June 1931). Apart from the last quotation, in which a certain degree of nostalgia for the Habsburg myth shimmers through somewhat ironically, the journalistic discourse surrounding Daybreak refrains from seeking ‘authenticity’ with respect to the Schnitzler novel or to an ‘authentic’ portrayal of Vienna. On the contrary, as many reviews point out, the original play was altered to meet Hollywood standards of a happy ending. However, as the trajectory of the narrative makes clear, the Habsburg myth leaves no position for a morally ‘respectable’ woman to occupy. To achieve the status of a ‘good girl’, the female character has to abandon her participation in the lifestyle of the military and their social circle. Only after giving up her career as an elegant mistress of a wealthy suitor and after returning to her subdued position as the ‘mousy little teacher’ (as one reviewer called her), can she elevate her lover to the status of a ‘human being’, i.e. a man without uniform. When Willy proposes to Laura, he renounces his military occupation and claims that his only desire is to become ‘a human being’. It is the secure haven of the (American) middle-class family, then, which offers the true alternative to the myth of the Habsburgs, and it is the Viennese girl who prompts the male character to emancipate himself from the Kaiser and his patriarchal order. Feyder’s Daybreak suggests the petit-bourgeois family as a desirable option. The final romantic embrace between Laura and Willy implies a happy future; but the employees of Laura—an elderly couple and their annoying son—loom in the background as a warning about how easily petit-bourgeois bliss can turn into a philistine existence of boredom and narrow-mindedness. Especially the role of woman, the narrative somewhat ironically suggests, holds little surprise in store other than a subordinate position as wife and mother within the patriarchal family system. In Ophüls’ Liebelei, the lower-class milieu of Christine and her father appears as the forbidden paradise for which the military man longs in vain. The Habsburg myth and its associated personnel—the military and the aristocracy—are presented as an anti-democratic, destructive force emanating from an oppressive masculinity. In opposition to the deadly

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qualities of the ruling classes, the decent petit-bourgeois household of Herr Weyring appears life-enhancing and peaceful—at least for the male protagonist Fritz. For Christine, by contrast, a return to her father’s house remains impossible, since it only offers her the life of an old spinster (as Weyring recounts the fate of his unmarried sister), or marriage to a dull, suburban man.

The Viennese Girl and the Truth of Music in Liebelei Christine in Liebelei takes a radical stance that leaves no position for her to occupy. She is neither willing, nor able to compromise and to comply with the conventions imposed on her by the ruling protocol. Further, she is the only main character who rejects the ubiquitous strategy of make-believe and the show, utilized by the characters around her. Christine never uses ‘sound’, that is, language, to play-act or to pretend, but always to speak (or sing) the truth—even when she actually enters a stage. After an intervention by her father, Christine, who takes private singing lessons, is finally encouraged to sing on stage in front of a theater director. This is her only attempt to participate in the discourse of theatricality, and she almost fails to perform because she is so overwhelmed by her emotions. As the cross cutting between her singing on stage and the events unfolding in the Prater suggest, Christine’s audition takes place at the same time as the duel between Fritz and the baron. At the beginning of her audition, we see Christine on stage in a long shot, from the perspective of the male onlookers, scrutinizing her performance. Asked to present a song from her repertoire, Christine chooses the German folk song ‘Schwesterlein’ (‘Little Sister’), which recounts the story of a young girl who tells her brother not to wait for her because she wants to spend the evening dancing with her lover. If she were to leave now, she reasons, her lover would dance with another woman. The next morning, however, the brother finds his little sister pale and weak, as if kissed by death. In the final verse, she longs for the peace of her grave. It remains unclear in the song why the young woman has to die, but her untimely death is obliquely connected to her encounter with the beloved man. When Christine sings the last verse, the camera closes in on her face—one of only three medium close-ups in Liebelei—and Christine’s voice fails, as if resisting singing the words about the dying girl, sensing that these lyrics anticipate her own sad fate. Mitzi, in The Wedding March, learned the truth about her victimization due to a vision (of

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the Rathausmann), and, for Christine, it is her intimate connection to sound—in this instance, to music and song—that provides her with a brief hint of her sorry future. Whereas all the other characters use language for means of deception, Christine resorts to music and song in order to f ind truth. Her singing exposes her innermost feelings and fears, and the camera work—the close-up—reinforces this notion. The strong association suggested here between the feminine and music is a cliché that has triggered a vast amount of (feminist) theory in film studies discussing this constellation.34 However, Christine’s aff inity for music permits her to f ind a place where she can express her own desires (and fears). Being a singer, for example, empowers her to enter a stage as a main protagonist and perform in front of an audience. Further, when Christine learns about her chance to audition, she immediately fantasizes about becoming a famous opera singer, being able to buy her own horse-drawn carriage (that is, enjoying privacy in public space) and to attend the elegant balls of the upper-class circles. Christine takes her chance on stage and starts singing, when she is suddenly overwhelmed by her repressed fear, bound up with her love for the upper-class man. The fate of ‘Little Sister’ in the traditional folk song triggers, for the first time, Christine’s awareness of her own precarious position within the patriarchal order. As Carol Flinn puts it: ‘Music’s relation to psychic activity […] is a mediated one: its unconscious pleasures actively participate within rigorously organized symbolic systems’ (Flinn 1986: 71). The pleasure of singing, of commanding a stage, of articulating desire, is disrupted by the representational order of the song’s lyrics, which clearly foreshadow Christine’s death. The truth reverberating in the song undermines her ability to control her own performance, and her voice cracks. As Flinn also writes, ‘[…] music offers woman a discursive place in which her desire is provisionally articulated’ (Ibid.: 72). Music and musical performance, then, frequently associated with the trope of the Viennese girl, promises the lower-class woman escape from her own social position. Music opens up a space for self-expression and the articulation of (repressed) desires and fears. As an artistic occupation, music renders the Viennese girl seemingly classless by associating her with a world of artists and bohemians; and as a prospective career as successful performer, it promises independence and the means to penetrate new spaces, occupied by the upper classes and their elite culture—if only in fantasy.

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The Viennese Girl on Stage: Werner Hochbaum’s Vorstadtvarieté (1935) A fantasy of self-empowerment and class-transcendence by means of music was fostered by another Viennese girl in the Austrian film Vorstadtvarieté (Suburban Cabaret, 1935). Shot by German director Werner Hochbaum in Vienna, the film is one of a few rooted in the tradition of social realism from the silent era (Hake 2001: 155). Hochbaum based his work on a play by Felix Salten, co-writer of the script of Liebelei. But Salten was not the only connection between Liebelei and Hochbaum’s work. Luise Ullrich, the Austrian actress who plays Christine’s pragmatic friend Mitzi Schlager in Liebelei, portrays Mizzi Ebeseder, the Viennese girl, in Vorstadtvarieté. Mizzi Ebeseder comes from a family of typical Viennese folk singers, who run a varieté theater at the Prater in the Vienna of 1913. Mizzi is a talented singer and longs to perform before an audience. Like Christine in Liebelei, she dreams of her own horse-drawn carriage, of an adoring audience, but most importantly, of public recognition as a true artist. Her boyfriend Josef Kernthaler (Mathias Wieman) loves Mizzi but hates her artistic inclinations, for which he has only the utmost contempt. In his view, Mizzi’s family is morally detestable, and he forbids his fiancée to work on stage and to expose herself to a (male) public. To put it differently: Josef does not love his girlfriend because she is a Viennese girl, but on the condition that she stops being a Viennese girl. In his view, her typical Viennese charm and her musicality send the wrong signals to men, who would immediately recognize her as a girl of ‘easy virtue’—very much in accordance with the character of Mitzi Schlager that Luise Ullrich portrays in Liebelei. The sharp opposition between Mizzi and Josef rests on gender difference, but is also played out along questions of nationality. Josef was born in the Austrian countryside but raised in Berlin. As his father, played by the Viennese actor Hans Moser, points out, Josef does not understand the Viennese mentality. Josef has no affinity to the Viennese folk tradition and its fondness for vineyards, drinking, and singing. He only has an eye for economic exchange relations underlying the mechanisms of the business of entertainment. In that respect, his jealousy appears narrow-minded, but not entirely unmotivated. Rather, his ‘German correctness’ exposes the ‘Viennese charm’ as a manipulative strategy. Hochbaum portrays Mizzi’s brother Franz, played by the Viennese folk singer Oskar Sima, as a calculating entrepreneur and a pimp who lures paying customers onto his premises by means of his charm. Hochbaum thereby

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exposes atmospheric qualities like charm, joviality, and coziness, associated with cinematic Vienna, as calculated masquerade. Franz is particularly interested in the military as the prime target for selling his show. As he tells a lieutenant: ‘The military is my life!’ When an aristocrat mentions his attraction to Mizzi, Franz takes money from him for the promise to put his sister on stage. The following courting rituals of the baron, trying to seduce the Viennese girl, are particularly interesting because the pretensions of romantic love on part of the aristocrat are debunked as false promises from the beginning, when he puts money for Mizzi on the table. Mizzi herself is fully aware of the situation, and, unlike the character Mitzi in Liebelei, she shows no interest in the upper-class man. Rather, her true love is for a man of her own class, a simple soldier and valet who has to set the table for his aristocratic superior. By the same token, Mizzi insists on her right to perform on stage, to sing, and to support herself with her art. For her, the singing opens up Carol Flinn’s notion of a discursive place, where the woman can articulate her desire, however provisionally. In one particular scene, the girl, Mizzi, appears in a soldier’s uniform on stage, combined with a mini-skirt, and presents a marching song that joyfully parodies the military lifestyle. Right before she enters the stage, her boyfriend appears and tries to prevent her from performing. In a medium close-up, the camera pans down on Mizzi, f irst shows her face and then her uniform, the mini-skirt and her boots. In the next shot, the camera pans up on Josef, starting with his boots, his uniform and ending on his angry face. The similar outf it of the two lovers highlights their aff inity, while at the same time stressing their insurmountable difference (Büttner 2000: 10). Josef leaves, and Mizzi enters the stage. For a short moment, she f inds freedom, independence, and self-expression in the performance of her song and the playful parody of a man in uniform. The camera closes in on her jubilant face, which gradually changes in expression from happiness to melancholy. Unlike Ophüls, who avoided close-ups, Hochbaum scrutinizes Mizzi’s face at close range. Mizzi realizes that the moment of joy is conf ined to her performance on stage, and that her triumphant portray of the carefree soldier, marching to the ‘Burgmusik’, stands in sharp contradiction to the reality of the soldier’s life and to the trials of her relationship with Josef. This particular discrepancy is heightened in the following scene, when Mizzi visits Josef at the barracks in order to reconcile with him. Josef is fetched by a comrade and meets Mizzi in front of his dormitory. In a medium shot, Mizzi is shown on the right side of the frame, whereas, on the left,

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13. ‘Playful parody of a man in uniform’: Luise Ullrich gets on stage in Vorstadtvarieté (1935)

Josef is positioned next to other soldiers, watching the unfolding scene. During the conversation between Mizzi and Josef, the latter buttons up his open uniform. This gesture underlines the narrowness of his mind, which is paralleled by the closing of his military outfit (Ibid.). Clearly, his stern conviction that Mizzi has to choose between a decent life as his wife or her stage career is connected to the military and its authoritarian structures. In this scene, Josef’s uniform does not flaunt masculinity in the spectacular way it did in Stroheim’s portrayal of Prince Nicki in The Wedding March, whose glamorous appearance impressed the Viennese girl. Instead, the drab clothing of the simple soldier flanked by his comrades in the same outfit foregrounds the sameness between the men and heightens the separation between the sexes. Hochbaum amplifies their difference in a shot/reverse-shot pattern, when, in a series of medium close-ups, he frames Mizzi alone, whereas Josef is always flanked by sneering comrades. After his final rejection of Mizzi, Josef leaves her alone with the other soldiers,

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who humiliate and laugh at her on her way out of the barracks. In this particular scene—a variation on what I have called ‘the Kaiser and the Viennese girl’—the opposition of gender and military affiliation is played out, and, again, draws attention to the homo-social character of the military and its misogynist attitude. The succession of these particular scenes—first, Mizzi’s playful stage performance as a marching soldier, followed by the depressing encounter between the two lovers at the barracks—alarmed Austrian censors who did not appreciate the critical outlook on militarism and its authoritarian structures. Thus, Hochbaum was forced to cut out Mizzi’s scene on stage, parodying the military, and her unpleasant encounter with the sneering soldiers in the barracks (Büttner 2000: 6). The repressive political climate of the time explains this move on the part of the censors.35 Hochbaum’s film was released in 1935, one year after Austro-fascism was officially established in May 1934. Inaugurated by chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, this clerico-authoritarian corporate state under the leadership of the conservative, Catholic-oriented Christian Social party, attempted to put a halt to Nazism and the annexation to Germany by introducing their own version of fascism (Dassanowsky 2005: 53). The reactionary state politics also affected the film production and put it under its authoritarian control. Furthermore, the Austrian film industry was particularly interested in Germany as a lucrative export market for Austrian films. In order to avoid restrictions on the part of the German Reich, the Austrians anticipated German censorship by applying censorship themselves. In 1935, the Austrian film industry made an agreement (the so-called Kontingentvereinbarung) to adopt anti-Semitic regulations from Germany and to execute them in Austria as well: this prohibited Jews and emigrants from working within the Austrian film industry (Tillner 1996: 177). In terms of Austrian censorship, another major change to Werner Hochbaum’s Vorstadtvarieté concerned the ending of the film. In the course of the narrative, it turns out that Mizzi’s only moment of freedom is confined to the singing of a song, that is, to a stage act. Beyond the stage, there is no place for the Viennese girl, who refuses to become the lover of an upper-class man and who is abandoned by her boyfriend for being associated with commercial culture and its alleged perils. Like Christine in Liebelei, Mizzi Ebeseder ends her life and jumps off a bridge—at least in Hochbaum’s original version of Vorstadtvarieté. But again, Austrian censors intervened, claiming that such a bad ending was not tolerable for the audience in 1935, and forced Hochbaum to re-shoot it. Given the success of Liebelei two years earlier, which had also ended with the suicide of the Viennese girl, such an argument

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seemed hypocritical. Rather, as Büttner points out, the newly inserted last minute rescue of the girl by the soldier was supposed to elevate his moral positioning vis-à-vis his lover, and to harmonize the opposition between private life and military obligations (Büttner 2000: 4). In any case, Werner Hochbaum’s film highlights the precarious proximity of the Viennese girl to prostitution and points to the asymmetrical relationship between the upper-class man and the lower-class woman, based on the inequality of gender and class. Also, like Christine in Liebelei, the only place of freedom provisionally offered to Mizzi is in music and song. The moment of liberation from her soldier boyfriend and his authoritarian behavior, which echoes the culture of the military, finds its ultimate expression on stage, in the musical parody of the military man.

Willi Forst’s Maskerade (1934): The Viennese Girl and Social Folklore Until this day, Maskerade, a successful Austrian film from 1934 by Austrian director Willi Forst, counts as a masterpiece within its genre (Hake 2001: 155). Maskerade established Forst as an internationally recognized director36 and made the female lead, Paula Wessely, a star. Scripted by the Austrian Jewish writer Walter Reisch,37 filmed by the cinematographer Franz Planer—who also shot Liebelei—the film starred the Viennese actor Adolf Wohlbrück38 as well as Olga Tschechowa. Released during a period when opposing militias clashed in the streets, the escapist and lavish film, set at the turn of the century, proved to be a great success. Maskerade set the tone for the already mentioned ‘Wienfilm’ (Viennese films),39 ‘a genre of erotic melodrama in operetta night-life settings, narrated in a tone of resigned irony, and most supremely embodied in the films of Willi Forst […]’ (Elsaesser 2000: 333). The plot revolves around the aristocratic painter Heideneck (Wohlbrück), who instigates a scandal by painting a society lady (almost) naked. To protect her identity, Heideneck invents the name of a girl—Leopoldine Dur (Paula Wessely)—who supposedly modeled for the incriminating picture. When, all of a sudden, the real-life Leopoldine turns up at a society-ball, she (unknowingly) threatens to expose the false story. Heideneck immediately removes Leopoldine, a lower-class Viennese girl, from the upper-class ball and relocates her at a suburban theater, an establishment quite similar to the one in Hochbaum’s Vorstadtvarieté. In a long pan, starting from the stage, the camera moves along the guests in the auditorium—mostly frivolous men and women, getting drunk and making out—and finally

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frames Heideneck and Leopoldine, thereby connecting the Viennese girl to the lower classes and the marauding aristocrat. But Leopoldine is morally above all doubt and, despite her naivité, she does not suggest sexual mobility: when the camera, at the end of the pan, in a medium shot, finally rests on Leopoldine and Heideneck, we see Leopoldine, her eyes closed, singing along with the song performed on stage. At the line ‘I only want your love,’ Leopoldine turns to Heideneck, but, before uttering the word ‘love’, she startles, interrupts herself and puts her hand over her mouth. We cut back to the singer on stage, and when we return to a medium shot of Heideneck and Leopoldine, the latter looks ashamed and insists on leaving. Even though Leopoldine, by means of the camera pan and the singing along with the song, was linked to the lower-class spectacle, by interrupting herself before the end of the song she also ‘interrupted’ the connection between herself and the lower-class site and its inhabitants.

14. ‘I only want your love’: Paula Wessely and Adolf Wohlbrück in Maskerade (1934)

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In the next shot, we see her entering the hall of her employer, alone. Unlike the Viennese girl Laura in Daybreak, for example, who has breakfast with her suitor the next day, Leopoldine even refuses to flirt. Her typical outfit, a long small skirt and a buttoned-up blouse, underline her morally upright behavior. Heideneck promptly falls in love with her and proposes marriage. The pictures he paints of her resemble ‘images of saints’, as his maid points out, and not adulterous wives. When his ex-mistress Anita, an upper-class lady played by Olga Tschechowa, learns about Heideneck’s new love, she humiliates Leopoldine at an aristocratic party, where the girl has to serve tea for the upper-class women. After the party, Anita waits for Heideneck and shoots him. The Viennese girl intervenes and, secretly, to avoid a public scandal, fetches a doctor. Heideneck is saved and in the final image, we see Leopoldine sitting at the bed of her future husband, taking care of him. It is interesting to note the similarity of Olga Tschechowa’s part in Maskerade to the one she plays in Liebelei. In both films she portrays a jealous woman who fights with a lower-class girl over a beloved man. But whereas in Liebelei the two women never meet, because their conflict is produced by a system of false codes, in Maskerade everything is reduced to the personal drama of two women in love. Anita appears as a femme fatale with a pathological streak and fires a shot at her ex-lover. The Viennese girl, as the only witness of the attempted murder, instead of calling the public ambulance fetches a ‘private’ doctor. Due to her complicity, public scandal can be avoided. The doctor happens to be Anita’s future brother-in-law, a bourgeois man with paternal attitudes who saves Heideneck’s life and returns the pistol to Anita. The doctor knows now that the woman who is going to marry his brother has attempted murder and it is made clear that, from now on, she will play the role of a humble wife and not that of a femme fatale. Significantly, the crucial scene where the doctor returns the pistol to Anita takes place at the opera—the same place where Liebelei started. The doctor shares a box with his wife—the woman who was the naked model of Heideneck—and with Anita, his future sister-in-law. During the scene, Caruso is singing on stage, while the doctor’s brother, and Anita’s fiancé, conducts the orchestra. The camera frames the three people in the box in a medium shot: the doctor, flanked by his future sister-in-law, Anita, and by his wife. We pan to the left and close in on the doctor’s hand as he returns the pistol to Anita. The camera pulls back and pans up to a close-up of Anita’s face, which displays a thankful expression to her brother-in-law for his cover-up. Within the same shot, we pan to the doctor’s face and then

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15. Trapped in a box: Olga Tschechowa (left) in Maskerade (1934)

close in on the doctor’s hand, which he puts on his wife’s hand. The camera travels up to her face; she gives her husband a vague and surprised smile and then continues looking at the stage through her looking glass. Finally, the camera pans back to the doctor’s face in close-up: he looks pleased. Within this one movement, the camera links three people together who are ‘in the know’ about each other, but pretend not to know. What Thomas Elsaesser has dubbed ‘transparent duplicity’ with regard to a culture of irony and self-reflexivity pertinent to a lot of films in the Weimar period (Elsaesser 2000: 339) also makes itself felt in Reisch’s plot: the husband knows about his unfaithful wife but pretends not to, and, instead, attempts a reunion. She, on her part, accepts, but keeps looking through her looking glass, suggesting that she will continue to find distraction elsewhere. Anita, the future bride, has just attempted to kill her ex-lover, with whom she is obviously still in love. During this exchange of meaningful glances and gestures, we hear Caruso singing on stage the famous aria from Verdi’s Rigoletto, ‘La donna e mobile’ (‘Woman is flighty, like a feather in the wind’), thereby ironically

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commenting upon the sexual relationships involving all of the characters. We then cut from the doctor’s face to a long shot of his conducting brother, who turns around and looks back. Now the four of them are linked together, participating in and tacitly agreeing upon a highly theatrical pact of roleplay and pretense regarding sexual matters. In Liebelei, questions of love, marriage, betrayal, and honor escalate into a crisis of life and death; in Maskerade, these very same issues are ironically acknowledged and celebrated as part of Viennese charms and social folklore—not least thanks to the Viennese girl. Due to her intervention, differences of class and gender are sealed off and reconciled, affirming the status quo. Her complicity with the façade of respectability concurred with an understanding of Viennese-ness as opportunism and frivolity. Now, her saintly qualities—as Heideneck’s maid pointed out with regard to the pictures of Leopoldine—anticipate her future role as petit-bourgeois wife and mother. However, whereas the scene in the opera bore the traces of irony and theatricality, the final images of Leopoldine Dur, the Viennese girl, lack any kind of distancing strategies. Granted, the barely recovered Heideneck immediately finds his Viennese charm, as soon as he regains consciousness. But the earnestness of her attitude undercuts his irony: in the final shot, she sits at the sick bed of her future husband, lovingly resting her cheek on his hand. As the Austrian scholar Gottfried Schlemmer has pointed out, in that image, the Viennese girl fixes the image of woman as nurse. As early as 1934, Schlemmer argues, she anticipates the role of the woman who sacrifices herself for family and fatherland (quoted in Büttner, Dewald 1997: 150). The authoritarian ideology of Austro-fascism, and particularly its oppressive ideology of State Catholicism, was leaving its oblique imprint on the depiction of the Viennese girl. In the instance of Leopoldine Dur, progressive aspects of her character, briefly featured in her association with commercial culture at the suburban theater, are in the end renounced in favor of a traditional concept of femininity and the prospect of the nurturing role of a petit-bourgeois housewife.

Living Backstage, Dying in the Backyard: The Drama of Marginalization in Liebelei After these two divergent examples of Viennese girls and their signification in Austrian cinema of the 1930s, a final return to Liebelei draws a comparison from Stroheim’s geography of the gaze to Ophüls’ usage of

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theatricality. As demonstrated, the Viennese girl is spatially associated with the periphery and the suburbs, and with commercial places of mass culture such as the Heuriger and the Prater. In Liebelei, the Viennese girl is again associated with the lower classes, the suburbs, and the coffeehouses. But Ophüls adds to the geography of center vs. periphery, mapped out by Stroheim, by rearticulating her topographical positioning in theatrical terms. Ophüls clearly differentiates—metaphorically speaking—between the stage and backstage and firmly links the figure of the Viennese girl to the backstage. When Christine learns about the death of Fritz, for example, she realizes that she is completely excluded from the official protocol that governs the life of the upper classes. She was not allowed to witness Fritz’ last act as a military man, who performed his deadly duty of honor for his upper-class lover by fighting a duel. This is the moment when she realizes that she is, and always will be, relegated to the backstage, the backstreets, the backyards. Speaking on a more general level, Ophüls’ concern with role-play and pretense blurs the boundaries between appearance and reality. But within these aspects of performance, a clear hierarchy stays intact. There are those protagonists from the ruling classes who are entitled to occupy the ‘main’ stage of official culture—such as the duel scene between Fritz and Eggersdorf in the Prater—and those from the lower classes who are relegated to the backstage—such as Christine’s suicide in the backyard. Once Mitzi and Theo learn that Fritz has been shot dead, 40 they run to the theater and fetch Christine’s father for support. Weyring is in the midst of his orchestra audition, playing Beethoven’s fifth symphony. In a succession of three long takes, the camera observes Theo, Mitzi, and Herrn Weyring running through the backstages of the theater to the entrance—alternately toward and away from the camera. These three long shots curiously extend a scene (i.e. the protagonists leaving the building) that seems, at least on first sight, of minor interest for the progress of the narrative. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the extension of the scene is to heighten the significance of the backstage as a space of marginalization and exclusion. The characters have to squeeze themselves behind wooden girders holding up the main stage and obstructing their exit, enhancing the feeling of confinement and demotion. There is a spatial parallel between the extensive walk of Fritz and Christine through the suburbs at the beginning of the narrative, the long sequence when Weyring and the others leave the theater backstage, the final suicide of Christine, and Weyring’s descent of the back stairs. These scenes all amplify the notion of a relegation to the backstreet, the back stairs, and

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the backyard—in short, the exclusion from an official culture, which clearly differentiates between main protagonists and supporting actors. Ophüls rearticulates the lower-class origin of the Viennese girl within the spatial parameter of the theater. Significantly, Christine’s final performance—her suicide—takes place in the backyard, at the backstage of Vienna; and her last audience consists of neighbors, living, like her, in the suburbs. But Liebelei does not close on Christine’s great leap. In the final images of the film, the camera pans over a snowy landscape, bringing back the memory of an earlier scene, in which Fritz and Christine had taken a sleigh ride through the snow together and confessed their love for each other. Ophüls takes the spoken promise of eternal love seriously insofar as he keeps the young lovers alive on the sound track. At the end of the film, when Fritz and Christine are both dead, their voices reunite in off-screen space. A long pan over a snowy landscapes recalls the earlier scenario of the sleigh ride. The same symphonic music from the sleigh ride accompanies their voices, promising love to each other; even the bells of the sleigh are heard again. The Viennese girl and her lover have escaped the order of the Habsburg myth and evaporated into an acoustic world. Their ‘voice-off’, as Mary Ann Doane argued, suggests that ‘[h]e/she is ‘just over there’, ‘just beyond the frameline’, in a space which ‘exists’ but which the camera does not choose to show’ (Doane 1986: 338). The voice-off emanates from the mise-en-scène and encapsulates a trace of the displaced bodies of Fritz and Christine, who are now ‘just over there’, in the realm of sound, speech and music. They are invisible, but still audible, hence they are ‘dead’ in the realm of the visual, but kept alive through the sonification of their bodies. In the final image of Liebelei, the camera pans over an evacuated white landscape. The theatrical categories of stage and backstage cease to matter; instead, Ophüls conjures up the mechanisms of cinema—the white screen and the technology of sound.

4. Women and the Market of Modernity G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925) Introduction The American film public would have witnessed the demise of the Austrian monarchy and the misery of postwar Vienna on screen as early as 1923—were it not for the fact that Erich von Stroheim had been replaced by Rupert Julian in the course of shooting Merry-Go-Round. In Stroheim’s original film script, the narrative ended after World War I and portrayed the aftermath of the cruel devastation inflicted upon the city and her habitants. Like the male protagonist in Merry-Go-Round, the former Count Hohenegg who comes back to Vienna with a wooden leg, and his valet who returns with an artificial arm, demobilized soldiers did, in fact, return from the trenches with missing limbs. In Stroheim’s original, the class structures of the empire are overthrown and the aristocrats are left bereft of their privileges, and together with the fall of the empire comes a moral decline. Hohenegg’s ex-wife, the Countess Gisela is now making a living as a prostitute. The groom, a former lover of hers, has gained a fortune as a war profiteer and is part of what Stroheim in an interview with Dorothy Calhoun spitefully called the new ‘aristocracy of money’ (Calhoun 1930: 85). Stroheim had always cast a sharp and critical eye on the decadence of the Austrian aristocracy and was scathing about the monarchy’s rigid class structure and its inherent social injustice. But even though he did not hesitate to point out the consequences of the Great War—after all, a result of the disintegrating empire—he nevertheless bemoaned the final fall of the ançien regime: as noted earlier, the newly founded republic of Austria appeared to him as a ‘dull democracy’ in which even the socialists ‘miss the pageant of royalty in Vienna now’ (Ibid.: 78). The feeling of loss over the monarchy and its fragile supranational state is conjured up by Stroheim in nostalgically remembering Kaiser Franz Joseph as a an integrating figure: ‘Vienna was a city of warring races and hereditary hates. One thing alone held their differences together and that was a common love for the Emperor, Franz Joseph, based on a common sympathy for his many sorrows’ (Ibid.). This yearning for the Kaiser as the lost organizing principle of a multicultural, crisis-ridden monarchy, fully subscribes to what the Italian scholar Claudio Magris in the early sixties famously dubbed the ‘Habsburg myth’ (Magris 1966). The widely disseminated notion of the Habsburg myth

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essentially refers to a nostalgic tendency in Austrian literature to glorify the integrating effect of the Habsburg Monarchy and its traditions; Magris traces these idealizing tendencies back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. After the demise of the monarchy in 1918, however, the Habsburg myth gained greater significance for a generation of writers, who yearned for the lost world of their childhood and, as Stefan Zweig called it, ‘the golden age of security’ (Zweig 2005: 15). To support his claim, Magris focuses on the work of well-known, canonized authors of that period, such as Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Joseph Roth. His general thesis advocates that the authors of the postwar years failed to register the pressing realities of the newly found republic and—even if they engaged critically with the monarchy—remained prisoners of the Habsburg myth (Magris 1966: 278 ff.). This somewhat generalizing view post festum has not remained unchallenged. In an essay dealing with the portrayal of the first republic in the mirror of its contemporary writing, the Austrian literary scholar Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler turns away from the aforementioned ‘classic authors’ and draws attention to the then widely circulating middle- and low brow literature. Schmidt-Dengler locates immediate engagements with the urgent political and social issues of the time in the feuilletons of contemporary newspapers and in the so-called Viennese Novels—popular ‘bestsellers’, all set in Vienna (Schmidt-Dengler 1977: 66). But what exactly were the new realities of the first postwar years? After the collapse of the monarchy, the republic of Austria was finally proclaimed in November 1918, with Vienna remaining as the capital with about 1.8 million people. In the initial postwar years, it was largely understood that Austria could not exist as an independent state. The remaining citizens suffered from what the Austrian philosopher Norbert Leser has termed ‘the shock of reduction’ (Spiel 1995: 211). From the former empire of 52 million people with its variety of nationalities, only 6.4 million remained. In Vienna, only two minorities of significant numbers were left: 120,000 to 150,000 Czechs and little over 200,000 Jews (together, approximately 1.8 per cent of the population) (Gruber 1991: 13–15). Little passion for the new democracy was found across the political spectrum. Whereas the Christian Social Party longed for a return of the crown, the Social Democrats wished to integrate Austria into the Weimar Republic. The latter plan for an annexation was forestalled by the powers of the entente, who had no desire to enlarge Germany with Austria. These political uncertainties were aggravated by returning soldiers and a growing number of homeless due to a critical housing shortage, food shortages, and

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the mounting pressure of inflation that was to reach astronomic dimensions. Inflation could be stopped by the end of 1922, but the effects on the economy were disastrous. As were the conditions of social life and public health: ‘Prostitution and concomitant venereal disease had increased markedly during the war and continued at a high level during the first peacetime years. Most threatening because most constant was tuberculosis, called the ‘Viennese disease’, which accounted for one-quarter of all deaths in the city, and nearly half in working-class neighborhoods’ (Gruber 1991: 16). Gruber reports that, in the years 1919 and 1920, angry workers engaged in street actions and strike waves to protest food and housing shortages; for the Viennese middle class, who had not yet adopted to the collapse of the old authorities, these outbursts were an outright threat to civil society and their own class status (Ibid.: 19). All these daily hardships directly informed the popular fiction produced in Austria in the early to the mid 1920s. The literature of those years refrained from contributing to the Habsburg myth; rather, the authors decisively and opinionatedly engaged with the realities of the new republic. Whether an author occupied a conservative stance like Hans Karl Strobl, an openly anti-social and anti-Semitic position like Karl Paumgartten, or whether he or she supported the political goals of the Social Democrats like Hugo Bettauer—all writers responded to the vital crisis of the present and negotiated the political struggles between democratic and anti-democratic forces (Schmidt-Dengler 1977: 67). The literary scholar Friedrich Achberger has labeled this period’s output, from the early twenties until approximately 1926, the ‘literature of inflation’, given its focus on inflation and the resulting social upheaval (Achberger 1981: 29).

Leaving the Habsburg Myth Behind: Postwar Misery, Hugo Bettauer, and the Literature of Inflation One of the most prominent writers of the ‘literature of inflation’ was the journalist and novelist Hugo Bettauer, a best-selling author of over twenty novels, nine of which were turned into films, the most famous being G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925). Bettauer was born in 1872 near Vienna, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; he abandoned the Jewish faith in 1890 and converted to Protestantism. During a short stay in the United States, he successfully started writing serialized novels for newspapers. In 1900, he moved to Berlin and worked for the Berliner Morgenpost, where he specialized in exposing scandals of corruption and bribery in high society circles. He finally returned to Vienna and became

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one of the best known authors of his day. The Joyless Street was a serialized novel first published in the Viennese daily newspaper Der Tag1 between October and December of 1923; its publication caused a minor scandal, because the events described seemed to recall an actual affair that had happened earlier that year. The family referenced tried to prevent the book’s publication but failed: in 1924, a single volume of The Joyless Street came out and immediately sold 30,000 copies (Hall 1978: 34). Bettauer’s popularity, nonetheless, was of complicated nature. First, Bettauer was Jewish and instigated anti-Semitic resentments; and second, he tackled sensitive issues dealing with sexuality. To be sure, almost ten years after the publication of The Joyless Street, a list of readers from working-class libraries shows that in 1933 Bettauer still ranked as one of the most popular authors among best-selling writers such as Stefan Zweig, Jakob Wassermann, Erich Maria Remarque, Emile Zola, and Jack London (Gruber 1991: 95). 2 The earlier publication of his most successful book, Stadt ohne Juden (City without Jews; 1922), however, which was intended as a satirical answer to everyday anti-Semitism, so common in Vienna,3 provoked a controversial discussion in all political camps and initiated a wave of anti-Semitic reactions. Bettauer also gained notoriety by founding a monthly erotic magazine in 1924 called Er und Sie (He and She) which, after it was closed down, relaunched as Bettauers Wochenschrift. Probleme des Lebens. (Bettauer’s Weekly. Problems of Everyday Life). In this journal, Bettauer broke sexual taboos by openly discussing erotic issues and sensitive subjects such as homosexuality or the female right to abortion. He even held consulting hours in his magazine office where he would discuss sexual problems with readers seeking help. Bettauer’s liberal opinions on erotic topics unleashed a tremendous wave of anti-Semitism in the media. He was viciously stigmatized as a demon and monster who had set loose a ‘flood of pornography’ (Hall 1978: 99), seducing and spoiling innocent youth. Outspoken anti-Semites like Alfred Rosenberg, author of the notorious Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the 20th Century) in 1930, and later chief ideologist of the National Socialists, felt the urge to take a public stance against Bettauer. In an article titled ‘The Case of Bettauer’, Rosenberg attacked him as a ‘prime example of Jewish destructiveness’ and denounced City without Jews as ‘Jewish race propaganda’ (Rosenberg quoted in Hall 2000:110–111). Moreover, Rosenberg published his brutal polemic right after Bettauer’s violent death. On 10 March 1925, Bettauer was shot in his office by the 21-year-old National Socialist Otto Rohstock 4 and died sixteen days later in a hospital. At that moment, G.W. Pabst was in the middle of shooting The Joyless Street in Berlin.

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Pabst had turned to Bettauer’s novel precisely because Bettauer’s ‘literature of inflation’ dealt with pressing issues of the postwar years in Vienna. Instead of suffering from the ‘shock of reduction’ and paying emotional tribute to the Habsburg dynasty, Bettauer capitalized on the harsh conditions of the postwar years and turned them into his bestselling novels. The inflation period, unscrupulous entrepreneurs and the bankruptcy of bourgeois families, poverty, and the moral decline that forced many women into prostitution—in short, sex and crime, but also the serious issue of anti-Semitism—were the flesh and bone of Hugo Bettauer’s literature. However sensationalist his writing, he certainly captured ‘a slice of reality’ from this particular time period—attested to by Pabst’s interest in his work.

A Taste for the Real: New Objectivity, Cynicism, and the Cult of Distance in Weimar Modernity Georg Wilhelm Pabst first encountered Bettauer’s novel in the Austrian newspaper Der Tag (Michael Pabst 1997: 139). Pabst, Austrian by birth, had grown up in Vienna and knew Bettauer from the time when he, Pabst, was working at the Neue Wiener Bühne.5 In preparing his film The Joyless Street in Berlin, Pabst worked closely with the distinguished and well-known Berlin-based author Willy Haas, a journalist and scriptwriter born in Prague, but also familiar with Vienna. Haas eventually ended up writing the film script of The Joyless Street. What interested Pabst in Bettauer’s work is reflected in Haas’ memoirs in which he comments upon his collaboration with the director: One day, in 1924, the movie director G.W. Pabst called me and asked me to read a novel by the Viennese author Hugo Bettauer, The Joyless Street. He thought it would make a good film. I read the book. It was a terrible crime story, a sensationalist piece from the Viennese period of inflation. But I immediately knew why Pabst with his brilliant sense for contemporary taste was drawn to that book: it was the crass social image of the inflation, the bankruptcy of the old families of the higher officials and academics, the corruption, and the moral decline we had also lived through in Berlin. We agreed to focus on the social issues and consign the criminal aspects of the novel to the background. Almost nothing but the title should remain from the original, because Pabst thought it was attractive (Haas quoted in Hall 1978: 190).

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Haas’ was quite accurate when he praised Pabst’s ‘brilliant sense for contemporary taste’ and his sensibility for ‘realism’; Pabst himself is repeatedly quoted as having said, ‘What need is there for romantic treatment? Real life is too romantic and too ghastly’ (Rotha 1963: 264, 265). With his second feature The Joyless Street, he gained his reputation as a major director of the ‘new realism’. As Kracauer put it, ‘Real life was his true concern’ (Kracauer 1974: 167). The notion of ‘new realism’ was inextricably bound up with the spirit of the ‘New Objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeit), a critical term referring to an artistic movement in Weimar Germany—mostly comprising painting, literature, and architecture—and characterized by its turn toward realism and its attention to the object world of the modern. For Siegfried Kracauer, New Objectivity manifested itself predominantly in the ‘stabilized era’ or the period when the so-called Dawes Plan in mid-1920s Germany came into effect. Due to American long-term loans, the German mark was stabilized and the reparation payments, which Germany was required to pay after the conclusion of World War I, were arranged. These measurements softened the burden of war reparation and provided a short-time benefit for the German economy: ‘Normal life began to reassert itself, and soon the inflation seemed a remote nightmare’ (Ibid.: 131). In this period of ‘false prosperity’,6 the ‘new realism’ of Pabst’s films came to play a significant part in Kracauer’s own critical evaluation of the Neue Sachlichkeit.7 For Kracauer, paradoxically, the artistic endeavors of this period were dominated by a lack of political engagement despite their attention to social reality: ‘Cynicism, resignation, disillusionment: these tendencies point to a mentality disinclined to commit itself in any direction’ (Ibid.: 165). Not surprisingly, even though Kracauer praised Pabst’s realism in terms of his social topics and his sharp eye for details, he eventually criticized him for his retreat into melodramatic schematics and his infatuation with his actresses (Ibid.: 170). Kracauer’s reference to cynicism as the dominant mood of Weimar modernity, however, has persisted in contemporary discourses that set out to illuminate the sophisticated cultural representations in 1920s Germany. Most prominently, Peter Sloterdijk has described the prevailing mindset of that particular time period with the notion of cynicism, a structure of feeling that emanated from an ‘enlightened false consciousness’ typical for the war weariness of Weimar culture after the shell shocks of World War I. Patrice Petro—following Stephen Brockmann—elaborates on the concept of cynicism as follows: ‘[…] Cynicism entailed a modern sophistication, whereby not to be deceived meant to know that everything is deception’ (Petro 2002: 100).

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In a similar vein, Thomas Elsaesser has dubbed this particular state of ‘enlightened false consciousness’—that is, of being ‘in the know’ or ‘knowing better’ despite (or because of) being deceived—as ‘transparent duplicity’. Elsaesser locates this attraction to the fake, to irony and to the double entendre at the heart of a lot of Weimar films, including those of Pabst (Elsaesser 2000: 12). The play with (false) appearances and disguise, the ‘machinations of make-believe,’ the shifting meanings of ‘seeming’ and ‘being’—in short, the ‘cult of the surface appearance’—are qualities associated with the aesthetics of Pabst’s modernism as much as they count for the preoccupation of the Weimar culture on the whole (Ibid.: 261). Another interesting attempt to grasp the atmosphere of the Weimar years is proposed by Helmut Lethen in his seminal study on the culture of Neue Sachlichkeit, in which he singles out ‘coldness’ or the ‘cold persona’ as key terms for viewing this particular time frame. The idea of the ‘cold persona’ encapsulates a fascination with a negative anthropology dating back to the middle of the seventeenth century that re-emerged in the 1920s and made its imprint on philosophy, literature, and the arts of Weimar culture. Lethen extrapolates terms like the ‘cold persona,’ the ‘subject in armor,’ and the ‘cult of the distance’ in his analysis of various philosophical and literary discourses circulating in Weimar, which overall refer to ‘techniques of mimicry,’ developed in order to shield the self from a violent and unpredictable environment (Lethen 1994: 36). Lethen argues, that the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit view themselves as ‘cold observers’ and promote a ‘cult of separation’ that pervades the entire literature of the time (Ibid.: 133). Lethen’s notion of the ‘cold persona’ resonates with Georg Simmel’s famous concept of the ‘blasé attitude,’ from his often quoted essay from 1903, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. There, Simmel accounts for the elemental changes that the texture of modern experience has imposed on ‘metropolitan man’. Suggesting a neurological concept of modernity based on the experience of intellectual shock provided by the city, Simmel investigates the psychological impact of the metropolis on its citizens.8 In order to protect themselves from the shocks provided by the new sensory environment, they developed strategies to counter these changing dynamics. What Simmel famously termed the ‘blasé attitude’ functioned as a ‘peculiar adjustment’ of self-preservation: ‘An incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that blasé attitude […]’ (Simmel 1950: 414). The blasé attitude—a kind of public persona—creates a distance between the modern citizen and his/ her hyper-stimulated surrounding.

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Apart from the shock of the new urban experience, Simmel names another ‘psychological source’ that accounts for the changing habits of representing the self. He also suggests that the influence of the monetary economy has its impact on the development of a blasé attitude. The money economy threatens to reduce the individuality of modern subjectivity to the level of calculation. Simmel writes, ‘By being the equivalent to all the manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler’ (Ibid.). Again, in reaction to the ‘most frightful leveler,’ the blasé attitude works as a protective mask for the individual, independent from his or her class status (Petro 2002: 65). Both Simmel’s notion of the blasé attitude and Lethen’s ‘cold persona’ put forward the idea of the inauthentic, the lack of affect, and the mask. The trajectories of the female protagonists in Pabst’s film are primarily governed by their ability to develop techniques of self-protection, to create a public persona, or a protective mask. These strategies of the masquerade are of outmost importance because, in The Joyless Street, the transformation of woman into a commodity—or, to put it in filmic terms: into a consumable image—is at central issue. Further, in The Joyless Street, the female ability to look and the capacity to control her own appearance take on different levels of significance with regard to class and the social spaces within which the women operate.

The Weimar Street Film, the Street, and The Joyless Street9 In describing the position of G.W. Pabst as a director who breathed the spirit of Neue Sachlichkeit, the German film scholar Klaus Kreimeier characterizes him as a ‘specialist of separation,’ thereby referring to Pabst’s method of scrutinizing different and disconnected social milieus (Kreimeier 1997: 26). Kreimeier draws attention to the often-commented-upon separate trajectories in The Joyless Street, revolving around the fate of Marie Lechner (Asta Nielsen) and Grete Rumfort (Greta Garbo), who never meet, the use of the contrast montage to emphasize the opposing milieus of the poor and the rich, and to the different uses of mise-en-scène to discriminate between the proletarian and the bourgeois world. Pabst does indeed separate the two narrative strands involving his female protagonists from different social backgrounds by means of his opening tableaux shots: we first see the impoverished Hofrat Rumfort (Jaro Fürth), a former member of the higher bureaucracy, with his daughter Grete, followed—within the same shot—by the proletarian drunkard and disabled

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veteran Mr. Lechner (Max Kohlhase) with his daughter Marie. The two pairs—both representatives of two different social milieus struggling to survive in the postwar misery of inflation-ridden Vienna—slowly walk along a shabby street called Melchiorgasse. As it turns out, the two parties live in the same building and occasionally even share the same space, but they never actually interact; they are kept separate throughout the course of the film. The former working-class family of Marie Lechner, now a miserable part of the even more impoverished ‘lumpen proletariat’, occupies the basement in a shabby building on the imaginary Melchior Lane. Above the Lechners, on the first floor, resides Hofrat Rumfort, a widower, with his two daughters. The title ‘Hofrat’ refers to a former rank in the high bureaucracy of the old regime where Rumfort occupied a position within a cultural elite (Beller 1989: 185). In the Vienna of 1921, at the height of inflation, he is losing his savings in stock exchange speculations and desperately struggles to keep his (already lowered) social status as a member of the middle class. After the exposition, the two daughters, Marie and Grete, meet again in Melchiorgasse, where they line up in front of a butcher’s shop, hoping to receive a piece of meat. They are part of a poorly dressed, hungry, and desperate group of people—mostly older women—who get pushed around by the evil butcher Josef Geiringer (Werner Krauss), his white Great Dane and unsympathetic policemen. For this miserable crowd, the street signifies a dire and humiliating place, filled with anxiety and distress, regulated by authorities and guard dogs. The importance of the street in The Joyless Street groups the film within the framework of the ‘Weimar street film’, as described by Siegfried Kracauer 10 —amongst others—whereby the site of the street comes to connote a variety of meanings.11 Anton Kaes, for example, (who also groups The Joyless Street within the category of the ‘street film’) asserts that the street in this context ‘appears as the existential site of modernity’ (Kaes 1999: 30). Analyzing Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (1923), Kaes explores the manner in which the film articulates conflicting responses to the challenges of the modern metropolis. The street in Die Strasse is coded as an ambivalent playground of exhilaration and attraction as much as one of anxiety and apocalypse. As Kaes contends, Grune makes no overt reference to the political, economic, and social turmoil of the Weimar Republic of the early 1920s, such as Hitler’s failed putsch in Munich of 1923 or violent demonstrations of different political parties frequently taking place in public; rather, the film is ‘about the politics (and the price) of desire’ (Ibid.: 27). Ultimately, the narrative of Die Strasse casts a negative perspective on the metropolitan experience in that it portrays the street as a place of peril and

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16. ‘Playground of exhilaration and anxiety’: Die Strasse (1923)

crime, doubly dangerous because of its treacherous attraction to which the protagonist, a middle-aged man, falls prey. Bored to death with his dull domestic life, his homely wife and his petit-bourgeois apartment, he is lured into the street by bustling traffic and the image of a seductively smiling woman. Eventually, when he is falsely accused of murder and put into prison, the street signifies a threat rather than a promise of an exciting urban adventure. As Kaes puts it, the street becomes the epitome of a ‘phantasmagorical space in which appearances deceive and imagination runs wild’ (Ibid.). The Joyless Street echoes the grammar of the Weimar street film, even though Melchiorgasse, unlike Grune’s Die Strasse, is never depicted as a seductive if perilous site of urban life. Eric Rentschler has pointed out that for the miserable crowd, the street does not connote the ambivalent excitements of urban experience, the seductive allure of the modern metropolis, or the invitation for flanerie and (window) shopping (Rentschler 1990: 6). Rather, it retains the impression of anxiety and apocalypse. This has to do with Pabst’s choice to depict the urban experience in The Joyless Street, mainly through

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the subjectivity of powerless women from the lower classes. Especially for Marie Lechner and her friend Else (Hertha von Walther), the street comes to signify a site of humiliation, dominated by a voyeuristic male gaze that aggressively objectifies women and views them as exchangeable commodities. The misery of Melchiorgasse is contrasted with and separated from the world of the nouveaux riches and upper classes. Marie Lechner’s unfaithful boyfriend, Egon Stirner (Henry Stuart), for example, is part of the high society circles and tries to enhance his career by courting the daughter of his boss, a rich banker. He finally ends up sleeping with a rich woman in exchange for a string of pearls. Hence, when Marie Lechner’s desperate friend Else prostitutes her body to the butcher for a piece of meat, this blatant exchange of flesh echoes the mechanisms that propel the narrative. Both in the basement of the butcher and in the ballrooms of an elegant hotel, everything revolves around sex and power. It appears as if the expressionistic and highly melodramatic world of Melchiorgasse, a fantastic territory of lights and shadows, mirrors and amplifies the social dynamics underlying the (more) realistic world of the bourgeoisie (Kappelhoff 1995: 39). In contrast to the shadowy social spaces of the working class just one floor below, the bourgeois living room of the Rumfort family is brightly lit and, despite the impoverishment of the family, the mise-en-scène visually lacks the intense melodrama of the poor (Petro 1990: 32).12 By rapidly cutting between the misery of Melchiorgasse and the luxurious parties taking place in the Carlton Hotel and, finally the brothel, where both worlds converge, Pabst accentuates the crass differences between the poor and the rich. At the same time, however—and this is important to note—he not only separates these two worlds, but also brings to the forefront a common denominator to be found across the divergent class spectrum. Overall, Pabst dramatizes the ‘overwhelming process of commodification’ engaging an entire society.13 If cinema is aligned with a ‘crisis of perception, (in which the subject experiences becoming an object)’ (Petro 1997: 47), then this very experience of witnessing one’s own objectification is made transparent in The Joyless Street. Pabst uses the historical moment of the inflation—‘Vienna 1921’—as an excessive metaphor for registering the process of reification, its impact on the reconfiguration of public space, and the precarious position of women within the commercialized landscape of modern urban life. The experience of objectification, of being transformed into an image and ‘consumed’ by the male gaze, primarily affects the subjectivity of the female protagonists. It is interesting in this respect to compare The Joyless Street to Thomas Elsaesser’s reading of Pabst’s film The Threepenny Opera (1931), in which

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he discusses the ‘power of the look’ attributed to the main character Mackie Messer in terms of Mackie being able ‘to make things happen by simply being seen’ (Elsaesser 1990: 112). His mode of authority, Elsaesser argues, rests upon ‘his image as a show-value’. Mackie is able to exercise power in a ‘double mode of control’, in that he is ‘an ambivalent narrative agent, halfway between possessor of the look that furthers the plot and the look that acknowledges being-looked-at-ness’ (Ibid.: 109). In Pabst’s The Joyless Street, this ‘double mode of control’ of the narrative is hardly achieved by the female protagonists. The upper-class women Regina Rosenow and Lia Leid are temporarily ‘possessors of the look’; however, their active gaze is confined to a commercialized space like the hotel and limited to their purchasing power. More to the point, to exercise power by being looked at, that is, to control one’s own appearance and to exploit one’s own show value becomes the strategy of survival for the lower-class women. They are exposed to the public street and their experience of urban spectatorship is reduced to being taken for a prostitute and transformed into a commodity. The adaptive mechanism of putting on a mask, of displaying ironic detachment, and of turning into a ‘cold persona’ appears to be the only tactic to expose, and even break the power of the male gaze.

The Semi-Public Hotel: In the Realm of Purchasing Power Simmel’s concept of shielding the self with a blasé attitude from an overstimulating environment reverberates in the scenes of The Joyless Street that introduce us to the world of the nouveaux riches and international war profiteers. Capitalizing on the instability of the inflation economy, various bankers, operators, and other elegant folk meet at the chic Hotel Carlton to dance, to flirt, and to conduct business. It is interesting to note that the hotel, unlike a public street like Melchiorgasse, is neither quite public, nor quite private. Rather, it represents one of the commodified spaces of modernity that Elizabeth Wilson has described, together with boulevards, cafés, department stores, etc., as meeting points ‘in which everything was for sale, and to which anyone was free to come, yet they endeavored to create the atmosphere of the salon or the private house’ (Wilson 2004: 78). In contrast to the expressionistic and static tableaux shots used in the preceding scenes in Melchiorgasse and its associate spaces of the poor, Pabst employs long panning shots for the waltzing scene in the ballroom of the Carlton and enhances the impression of realism by emphasizing the fluid movements of the dancing couples.14 We see the wealthy heiress Regina

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Rosenow (Gräfin Agnes Esterhazy), daughter of the bank director Rosenow (Karl Etlinger), gliding through the ballroom with Egon Stirner, secretary of her father and unfaithful lover of Marie Lechner. Stirner is a social climber who openly courts Regina, not least because he wants to improve his financial situation and acquire enough money to become a serious player on the stock exchange. The hidden dynamics propelling his romantic pursuit are visually highlighted by the fluid movements of the dancing couple, which invoke the invisible circulation of money, Simmel’s ‘frightful leveler’. Not only do the camera movements enhance the feel of circulation, the course of the narrative also suggests the exchangeability of people and things. After elegantly waltzing through the ballroom, Regina Rosenow and Stirner leave the main room and withdraw to a private space, secluded from the rest of the party guests. There, the couple sits down in a cozy atmosphere, right under a genre painting by Watteau depicting a rural idyll where a shepherd and his lover rest in an embrace. The camera takes on the point-of-view of Regina, who registers the ‘ingredients’ necessary for the ‘making of a romantic environment’ and thus becomes the spectator of a romantic setting in which she is supposed to play the main role: first, the shot of her cuts to a nicely set table with flowers and fruits, followed by a shot of the painting. Seeing this fake idyll and taking on an ironic facial expression, Regina mockingly anticipates the confession of ‘true’ love that Egon is going to propose to her. She initiates the unfolding dialogue with an ironic remark. The intertitle reads:15 ‘Let’s cut it short: You are going to tell me in this romantic atmosphere, that you are in love with me…’ Cut to her ironic smile, then back to the intertitle: ‘…because I am rich, of course.’ In the next two-shot, we see Egon trying to keep his posture of honesty, and assert his love, but Regina has already reacted with a blasé attitude. In reaction to his passionate claim ‘I’m crazy about you,’ she just laughs and leaves the room. In the following sequence, the motif of circulation and repetition is furthered when Lia Leid (Tamara Tolstoi), the wife of a wealthy lawyer, asks Stirner to dance with her and then urges him into the same room he had just left with Regina. There, Lia demands that he exactly repeats to her what he had just told Regina, displaying also an ironic expression on her face. They end up kissing and arrange to meet again later in a small hotel in Melchiorgasse. Right before they kiss, Stirner grasps the string of pearls that Lia is wearing around her neck and pulls her toward him. With this gesture, it is tacitly agreed upon that the pearls will be the reward for his sexual favors. In that moment, Stirner’s somewhat puzzled but triumphant facial expression suggests that he believes that he controls his own exchange value in this erotic gamble by successfully courting beautiful and rich women.

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What he does not realize is that the two women—Regina Rosenow and Lia Leid—are the ones who fix his price: it is not them who circulate through his hands, it is he who is exchanged between them. Regina wants a rich lover and Lia just wants any lover. Right before Regina disappears with Stirner into the back room, she exchanges glances with Lia, who has just arrived in the ballroom. A medium close-up shows Lia’s face behind a glass door, looking at Regina and Stirner, who are just about to disappear. Lia has a questioning, slightly frowning look, followed by a medium close-up of Regina and Stirner. Regina looks back at Lia and answers her questioning look with a slight wink, aimed at Stirner, before she turns her head away from the other woman. The exchange of glances between the two women remains ambivalent, and it is not entirely clear if it is motivated by jealousy or complicity. But it almost seems that by nodding in his direction, Regina is ‘allowing’ Lia to consummate Stirner’s erotic expertise.16 In any case, Regina is clearly not holding Stirner back from sleeping with someone else. By lending her lover to a rich woman, Regina increases Stirner’s value at a level where she can permit herself to be in love with him: as she tells him, only when he is as rich as she is (or, vice versa, she as poor as him), can she ‘buy’ into the notion of romantic love. Later, she explicitly ‘allows’ him to take money from Lia after having sex with him in order to better his income. In this particular scene, it is the two women who command the flow of money and people. They are the ‘possessor of the look’, insofar as they transform the male protagonist into an exchangeable object of desire. Regina’s blasé point-of-view deconstructs Stirner’s romantic arrangement in the private room and initiates his quest for money. Lia, for her part, looks at Stirner and immediately acts on her desire to possess him. Overall, the ironic stance and the cynical attitude of both women toward romantic love liberate them from the enslaving bourgeois ideals of well-adjusted female behavior and allows them to—at least potentially—act upon their own desires. The notion of romantic love, in other words, is debunked by an alternative ideology of sex, which is dominated by the laws of the free market. The semi-public space of the hotel ‘where everything is for sale’ guarantees full freedom for those with disposable income, even women. The commodified space of the hotel allows the two women to roam around freely. Their viability as consumers enables them to further the course of the narrative; and because they enjoy the privileged status of the beautiful and the rich, they can act upon their own desires and subject the male to the status of a commodity that gets transferred between them. This activity, however, is limited to the realm of a commodified space such as a department store—or a hotel, for that matter. Moreover, their purchasing

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power is dependent upon the income of a male supporter—Regina has a rich father, Lia a wealthy husband. Their financial independence is strictly limited by the allowance of their male sponsors, and their spatial freedom is confined to commercialized sites. The (dis)empowering effect of the emergent consumerism for upper- and middle-class women in the course of the nineteenth century has been repeatedly discussed in feminist literature,17 especially with regard to Walter Benjamin’s meditation on the flâneur, an allegorical figure that roams the debris of the nineteenth century and investigates modernity itself. The flâneur ‘who goes botanizing on the asphalt’ (Benjamin 1983: 36) is commonly figured as a male pedestrian who occupies the domain of the public. He is a product of modernity and takes in the spectacles of urban life from the position of the male spectator. The flâneur is not, unlike the female shopper, restricted to places of consumption; instead, he is free to walk the streets uninhibited and aimless. Walking the streets, then—as has been pointed out frequently—was (and is) a gendered experience; the notion of the female flâneur is suspiciously absent in the literature on modernity; instead, women walking the streets are typically associated with professionals, that is, with prostitutes. As Susan Buck-Morss contends, in the writing of Walter Benjamin, ‘[…] While the figure of the flâneur embodies the transformation of perception characteristic of modern subjectivity, the figure of the whore is the allegory for the transformation of objects, the world of things. As a dialectical image, she is “seller and commodity in one”’ (Buck-Morss 2004: 130). And since the image of the whore becomes the ‘embodiment of objectivity, the manifestation of the alienation of erotic desire’ (Ibid.), her voice is usually silenced and her subjectivity denied.

The Public Street: Taking a Walk in Melchiorgasse Walking the streets highlights the precarious relationship of women to cities in the course of modernity. In The Joyless Street, the female urban experience is profoundly marked by the interchangeability of the female body (Ankum 1997: 162). In contrast to the semi-public hotel, which offered the upper-class women a (limited) space to rove around freely, for the two women of the lower classes, Marie and her friend Else, the public street immediately threatens their female integrity by making them and others aware of their sexual availability. Walking the street, Else and Marie realize, is equivalent to their transformation into interchangeable commodities, that is, into prostitutes.

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A poignant scene reveals to the lower-class women what a public space like the street has in store for them. After the butcher has announced that there is no meat left for the waiting crowd, the police start dispersing the protesting people. While they are still pushing, two women enter the frame in the front. Judging from the provocative manner in which they move their bodies, it is clear that they are prostitutes. They wait until the police have cleared the scene before they kneel down and knock on the butcher’s basement window, which is located below street level. In a medium shot, we see Geiringer framed by his basement, making conversation with the prostitutes. We cut to his point-of-view: he looks up through the window from a low angle and sees, in a medium close-up, the seductively smiling face of one of the streetwalkers. Granted, it is his point-of-view of the girl, who puts herself up for sale for him. At the same time, though, by fashioning herself as a spectacle, she controls the way of being seen. In other words, she fixes the price of her femininity; she has accepted the fact of her commodification and performs her objectification with ironic detachment. The low angle from which the customer has to look at her suggests her superiority on a visual axis. Presenting him her legs in high heels, the prostitute has fetishized her body for the male gaze, but, at the same time, she is very much in control of what she offers the butcher to see and how she wants him to see it. The ironic detachment executed by the prostitutes is furthered by a notion of theatricality conveyed in Pabst’s mise-en-scène. As Frances Guerin has pointed out with regard to her reading of Grune’s Die Strasse, in 1920s Germany, popular debates revolved around the corroding distinction between private and public spaces, between the interior and the exterior, the home and the street. In the electrified German metropolis, the new dazzling light turned the public street into glittering boulevards with the effect that the street was experienced as an interior space. As such, the street provided a stage for the wealthy bourgeoisie: ‘Their [the wealthy bourgeoisie] […] unashamed public display of private desires was in turn understood as the theater of the street; it was a window display full of commodities and capitalist ways of life turned inside out. The private was on display for public consumption […]’ (Guerin 2005: 173). The encounter between the prostitutes and Geiringer in The Joyless Street does not take place in an electrified German metropolis, but on the impoverished back streets of postwar Vienna. However, in the spatial organization of the mise-en-scène, Pabst retains the concept of theatricality, albeit in an ironic manner: Melchiorgasse is indeed turned into a theater stage on which the two prostitutes put themselves on display when parading

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17. Basement window as theater box in The Joyless Street (1925)

in front of the butcher’s desiring gaze. Apart from the ironic attitude of the prostitutes, the viewing position of Geiringer enhances the feeling of theatricality, because the framing of his basement window recalls the spatial set up of a theater box. In analyzing this particular scene, I take my cues from architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina, who explored the architecture of the Viennese modernist Adolf Loos. Loos’ interest in the theatricality of architectural space also reflects upon the modern redefinition of the private and the public, the interior and the exterior. In his theoretical writings, he primarily pursues the idea of the split of the modern individual into a private and a public self and he ‘followed this logic of interiority through to his architecture’ (Donald 1999: 107). As Loos famously claimed, ‘The house does not have to tell anything to the exterior; instead, all its richness must be manifest in the interior’ (Loos quoted in Colomina 1994: 274). In Loos’s architecture of interiors, everything points to the inner space and thus seems to uphold the proclaimed strict split between the private

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and the public. In his interior spaces, all lines of sight direct the eye inwards: the window, for example, does not function as a frame for a view onto the outside world—as it does, for example, in the architecture of Le Corbusier—but provides a source of light at best. Often, the window is curtained or opaque. But even though Loos propagates the strict division between the inside and the outside, it is precisely the theatricality prevalent in his architecture that undermines this division. His frequent use of the concept of the ‘theater box’ within his interior design is a poignant example: typically, the theater box provides a privileged realm of privacy in a public space in that it redraws the lines between the inside and the outside. In analyzing his interior design for the Moller House in Vienna from 1928, for example, Colomina points to the raised sitting area off the living room. This area, a variation of the theater box, provides the occupants with a vantage point overlooking the interior of the room. In this way, they are both guaranteed intimacy (of a secluded space) and control (over eventual intruders) (Ibid.: 238). But there is more to this particular spatial set-up. The theater box certainly provides protection for the occupant, but it also draws attention to itself. For someone who enters the room, his/her gaze strikes the theater box. And then what happens? ‘The “voyeur” in the “theater box” has become the object of another’s gaze; she is caught in the act of seeing, entrapped in the very moment of control. In framing a view, the theater box also frames the viewer. […] Object and subject exchange places’ (Ibid.: 250). In other words, due to the insertion of a theater box into the space of a private home, the boundaries between the private and the public are blurred: ‘The inhabitants of Loos’s house are both actors in and spectators of the family scene—involved, yet detached from their own space: The classical division between private and public, inside and outside, subject and object, becomes convoluted’ (Ibid.: 244). Similarly, Geiringer’s basement window functions as a sort of private theater box looking on to the public street. His theater box is not raised, like in Loos’ spaces, but lowered—suggesting Geiringer’s inferior moral position. By looking out from his privileged position, Geiringer is transforming the street into a private stage, a ‘theater of the street’, on which the prostitutes put their bodies. The straight, medium shot, from a low angle, of Geiringer’s face gazing up to the girl’s legs, presents us with both the spectacle of the legs and his smirking face; hence, we, the audience, see Geiringer seeing. The gaze of the camera fixes him in his theater box, and now it is the viewing subject—Geiringer—caught in the act of viewing and thereby, transformed into an object. The spectator has turned into a spectacle. The voyeur, as is well known, enjoys his voyeurism most when he can watch not only from a distance, but also in the dark. The

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voyeur being watched, on the other hand, is a pathetic figure. In the manner in which the structure of looking is organized in this particular scene, the view of the smirking Geiringer has a comical edge to it and undermines his menacing power. The visual motif of Geiringer framed by his basement window is taken up again later in the narrative, when Geiringer is killed by the enraged Else. In a final image of the butcher, we see him framed in the window of his private theater box, fixed as a bleeding spectacle. The prostitutes as sellers and buyers are successful and the deal with Geiringer is sealed: he lets them into his pantry, willing to give them meat in exchange for their bodies. Marie and Else, who stand separated from the rest of the crowd, observe the scene. They are ‘allowed’ to watch, because they have the potential to turn themselves into a commodity as well. Those who have not retained an exchange value (i.e. a body that sells like the ones of the old ladies in the crowd), who are not able or willing to engage in the process of objectification and refuse to put themselves up for sale, are removed from the action.

18. ‘Commodification, display, and death’: Window shopping in The Joyless Street (1925)

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For the lower-class women Marie and Else, urban spectatorship is limited to the role of the prostitute. Pabst makes this point very clear and deliberately links femininity to commodification by positioning them next to an elegantly dressed female mannequin on display in a window right next to them. The image of the female doll foretells the process of reification the two women are going to suffer in the course of the narrative. The dummy foreshadows the tragic ending for both of them, which results in ‘silencing their voices’, in other words: the death of them both. Anke Kleber, in her search for a female flâneur in Weimar cinema, has alluded to the intimate connection between commodification, display, and death. In analyzing Walter Ruttmann’s contested documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, a film made in 1927, two years after The Joyless Street, Kleber points out female strollers who walk the streets of Berlin on their own without being prostitutes. She proposes a reading of this metropolitan text, where one ‘might indeed discover a literal female streetwalker, a new figure of subjectivity free of professional purposes other than her own processes of walking, seeing, and potentially recording these actions: a femme flâneur’ (Kleber 1999: 181). Thus, she challenges not least Siegfried Kracauer, who, in his review of Symphony, did not hesitate to identify the female strollers as professional whores.18 However, in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, there is a highly disturbing and obviously staged scene, which uncannily disrupts the flow of the otherwise documentary material of the film: all of a sudden, a desperate woman jumps from the bridge into the water.19 Kleber closely analyzes the succession of shots preceding the suicide and observes that the first shot of a ‘human’ figure in the film consists of a group of barely dressed female models behind a shop window: ‘It is rather apparent from this scene,’ she concludes what the intended object on display is: the item of apparel attracts the gaze less to this showcase than to the overall assemblage of female figures. The next shot hints at a partial consequence of this display—the image-status of female existence—as it cuts to the stark picture of water running under a bridge, a bridgepost erected as the marker of future death, a proleptic image of the dawning suicide that comes as a woman’s self-destructive act at the dramatic center of the film (Ibid.).

Kleber reads the images of the window dolls and the way they are linked to the shots of the water as indicators of the suicide scene, that is, of death. The image of the dummy next to Marie and Else signifies a similar implication for the endangered position of female subjectivity: both women anticipate

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their future transformation into a commodity to be consumed by the next customer. Turning into a consumable entity for women in The Joyless Street means to be put on display and to be objectified by the gaze of (male) others. Only those female characters who manage to develop strategies to control their image, who are able to protect themselves by ‘putting on a mask’, and by drawing a line between their private life and their social being, maintain narrative agency or, at least, a certain mode of authority over their trajectory. To exercise power by being looked at, that is, to control one’s own appearance like the two prostitutes vis-à-vis Geiringer, is precisely what the female protagonists who are exposed to the public street in The Joyless Street are struggling for. A poignant example of a female protagonist who fails to control her own image is Marie’s friend Else. After the prostitutes leave, Else and Marie decide to do what they did: they knock at the butcher’s window and demand entry. Else is the one who suggests to the butcher that she desperately needs to get meat from him. But unlike the prostitute, Else is not able to affect the terms on which she is seen. Again, similar to the scene with the prostitutes, we have Geiringer’s point-of-view shot of a woman who puts herself up for sale. But this time, Geiringer does not look up from below, suggesting his inferior moral position as a voyeur and customer; rather, he is standing up, and, being taller than Else, the camera, taking his point-of-view, investigates from a high angle the appearance of Else by tilting up from her legs, ending in a close-up of her trembling face. Else is unable to develop a self-armoring mask (as suggested by Simmel and others) and to create a public persona in order to protect her private self. The shot of her homely shoes emphasizes her helplessness, especially because they are put in direct comparison with the professional and phallic outfit of the footwear of the prostitutes from the previous scene. When, finally, the camera, aligned with the point-of-view of Geiringer, scrutinizes her desperate face at close range, the arrangement of the female as image presented to be consumed by the sadist male gaze is virtually perfected. Pabst negotiates sexual difference in the realm of the look and brings to the fore the precarious status of woman vis-à-vis her own image. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, in his essay on Pandora’s Box (1929), ‘Lulu and the Meter Man: Louise Brooks, G.W. Pabst and Pandora’s Box’ (Elsaesser 2000: 259–292), emphasizes the indeterminacy and androgyny of the Lulu character; her status of woman as ‘forever image’ eventually renders the male gaze powerless because the excesses of looks that construct her image are unable to seize her. In that, she comes to embody the image of the cinema—an image that can never be possessed—and thus, represents the modernist promise of cinema: ‘If [the cinema] cannot bring about the

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revolution, its undecidability, hesitancy, indeterminacy does at least keep things in suspended animation, corroding with its cynicism, its skepticism, its irony all the impostures of spectator power’ (Ibid.: 289).20 Indeterminacy, as represented by Lulu, rests upon her status as a star and a spectacle without a gaze of her own. Rather than returning a look, she constitutes herself as image via the looks of others, resulting in her empowerment through a ‘masquerade of excessive visibility’ (Ibid.: 283). The case in The Joyless Street is somewhat similar. Pandora’s Box investigates the (possibly liberating) implications of the status of woman as non-fixable image, while The Joyless Street explores the status of woman as image with regard to possibilities and limitations of female masquerade. After all, the masquerade ‘concerns itself not only with a woman’s ability to look, after all, but also with her ability to affect the terms on which she is seen’ (Rowe 1995: 11). As was the case with Else, her gruesome powerlessness vis-à-vis the scrutinizing gaze of the butcher rested not least on her incapacity to control her appearance and to shield herself by means of a ‘blasé attitude’, a ‘cold persona’; that is to say, techniques of mimicry that enable the (lower-class) female subjects to determine their own conditions on which they are put on display, or, to put it more drastically, to exploit the market value of their femininity.

Upstairs, Downstairs: Social Climbing Along a Vertical Axis As feminist literature has repeatedly pointed out, industrialization transformed the traditional definitions of public and private sphere and redefined public space by and for women (Ankum 1997). Such debates about the changing parameters of private and social life were also pertinent in 1920s Austria and Germany. ‘In the 1920s, the strict borderlines between housework and the morally questionable public sphere became blurred,’ contends Annelie Lütgens (Lütgens 1997: 93) with regard to the city of Berlin, a claim that holds true for Vienna and other major cities as well.21 The growing visibility of women in the city and the presence of both working-class and bourgeois women, ‘collided in the modern metropolis in a way that made it increasingly difficult to maintain the polarization of women into either whores or wives and mothers that had been established by bourgeois morality’ (Ankum 1997: 166). In the metropolis after World War I, the increased female labor force was split along the line of class difference: ‘The “clean” occupation of office work opened up acceptable career opportunities for women from upper-class backgrounds who would

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have refused a job in the traditional urban female workplace: behind or in front of the counter in dubious establishments providing entertainment and/or prostitution’ (Lütgens 1997: 93). Grete Rumfort in The Joyless Street is a classic example of a young woman from a bourgeois background who enters the public in search of a respectable job opportunity, desperately needed to support her family. Alas, the ‘clean’ space of office work for the bourgeois daughters often proved less secure than the promise of acceptable working conditions would suggest. Katharina von Ankum specifically refers to Pabst’s film to illustrate the precarious condition of women in the domain of the public: ‘Sexual advances were considered an occupational hazard for women, and the sex appeal exuded by a stenographer or sales clerk was considered at least as important as her professional qualifications’ (Ankum 1997: 165). Indeed, Trebitsch (M. Raskatoff), the boss of a small city office is more interested in the beauty of his secretary Grete Rumfort than in her ability to

19. Office hours in The Joyless Street (1925)

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type. The organization of the semi-private office space is such that the boss’s superior position is emphasized through his separated box-like study, which is located above the room of his employees. Whoever wants to meet him has to climb up the stairs. This set up once more recalls a private theater box and enhances the notion of theatricality as noted earlier. The superior position of the box guarantees the boss visual control over the workers. At the same time, he can also create intimacy by closing the curtains and indulge in his private obsessions, which essentially means harassing his female employees. Grete, for example, is frequently called upstairs and assaulted by her superior, who insinuates that if she becomes his lover she will ‘move up’ in her position. When the disgusted Grete declines and gets fired, another office girl is called ‘upstairs’. Unlike Grete, the new girl hops up the stairs happily, anticipating the joys of getting ‘promoted’ after paying her sexual dues. In a medium close-up of her legs, the camera tilts with her legs moving up the stairs. Pabst even repeats the shot in slow motion to stress the girl’s willing eagerness to better her position, which means, to sell her body. Moreover, the medium close-up of her legs and shoes immediately draws a connection to the prostitutes and insinuates that the secretary also comes from the lower classes. The bourgeois Grete and her morally superior position are clearly set apart from the questionable attitudes of her proletarian co-workers. However, the same effort to move upward is undertaken by Marie Lechner, when she visits her lover Egon Stirner and climbs up the stairs to reach his middle-class apartment. Social climbing, then, attempted by female protagonists, is visualized through an upward movement, not least because it is dialectically linked with the lowering of her moral position, marked by a movement downward. Else and Marie have to go down low, into the butcher’s basement, and Else goes even lower than low, because the butcher’s pantry, where the sexual exchange takes place, is positioned slightly below the basement level. When, at the end of the film, Else is burned alive, however, she dies on the top floor of a house, that is, high up and not, as when she was with the butcher, ‘down low’. Her spatial position ‘up high’ suggests her regained moral position in death. Hence, within this vertical arrangement of space, Pabst articulates both the superiority of class, but also the status of morality. In my earlier chapter on the films of Erich von Stroheim, I have argued that the distribution of power in fin-de-siècle Vienna was ingrained in the topography of the city. It rested upon a horizontal spatial model, in which the inner city as the center of political and religious power was segregated from the outskirts and the proletarian masses. In Pabst’s depiction of postwar Vienna, however, this horizontal model of class stratification is abandoned. Due to the abolishment of the old regime and the absence of the

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Kaiser as the organizing principle of power in the center, class difference is no longer articulated through the distance between center and periphery, between the inner city and the outskirts, between the aristocrat and the working girl. Rather, the horizontal division between classes is displaced onto a vertical one: the former categories of the ‘inner’ versus the ‘outer’ are replaced by parameters of ‘high’ versus ‘low’. Implied in this change of parameters is the shift from the notion of a topographical distance to a threatening proximity between the classes, notably between the middle class and the mass of proletarians. In The Joyless Street, the menacing decline of the middle class in the pressing year of 1921 is articulated spatially within a building in a shabby street, where nothing more than different floors keep the social hierarchies in place. Rather than being situated at the outskirts, Melchiorgasse is inbetween, a district squeezed between the Ringstraße and the Gürtel (the Linienwall). This (the seventh) district belonged to one of the ‘inner suburbs, which had begun as settlements of bourgeoisie and artisans alike [and] gradually became more middle class’ (Olsen 1986: 151). The two main characters Grete and Marie live in the same house without ever speaking to each other or having closer contact. It is interesting to note that this strictly enforced separation within a confined space is rooted in a tradition of urban development typical for Vienna that can be traced back to earlier centuries. As the historian Donald J. Olsen has shown, from the sixteenth century onwards, Vienna had been ‘on the forefront of urban developments: in the erection of massive blocks of flats’ (Ibid.: 66). Due to housing shortage, multiple dwellings were erected to accommodate different families within one and the same building. These living conditions produced a proximity between the parties who were likely to intermingle on the staircase, a circumstance that caused anxiety about the social and moral consequences of flat-living among contemporaries. But, as Olsen points out, even within the same dwelling, distinctions were firmly kept in place. For example, vertical differentiation during the liberal era (Hochgründerzeit) between 1865 and 1889 was sharply expressed in the façade of buildings: the first floor belonged to the house owner and was, in contrast to the rest of the façade, impressively decorated. Internal differentiation was also kept in place. While in Paris the size of the apartments in a standard building would diminish the further one went up, the outside façade of the house would still show the same decoration. Also, the main staircase would serve for all parties from the first up to the fifth floor. In a Ringstraße building in Vienna, by contrast, the main staircase would only go up to the second floor, the belle étage, maybe sometimes to the third floor. Everybody else had to use the

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back stairs. Embarrassing encounters between the owners and other people below their own class status could thus be avoided (Olsen 1986: 155–156). In light of such vertical differentiation, even within one and the same building, it is less of a surprise that the two strands of narrative concerning the fate of the middle-class woman and her proletarian counterpart are so strictly separated in The Joyless Street.

Mother and Whore: The Convolution of the Inside and the Outside World In her discussion of Irmgard Keun’s Weimar classic Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artifical Silk Girl), published in 1932, Katharina von Ankum reads this famous novel about a young, uneducated woman struggling to make a living in Berlin without becoming a prostitute as a prototypical story of female urban experience of modernity. Right at the beginning of the narrative, the main protagonist, Doris, steals an expensive fur coat, through which she ‘heightens her exchange value and also makes herself outwardly recognizable as a commodity’ (Ankum 1997: 162). Virtually the same process is taking place in The Joyless Street, when Grete Rumfort tries on a fur coat in the saloon of Frau Greifer (Valeska Gert) and— without realizing it—heightens her exchange value as a desirable commodity. Frau Greifer, on the other hand, immediately recognizes Grete’s potential for her nightclub business and talks her into buying the expensive coat. Pabst establishes this scene, taking place in a dressing room, in a long shot in which three levels of action take place. In the background, a mirror is placed, framed by curtains. Thus, the notion of theatricality is introduced and marks the space in front of the mirror clearly off as a stage on which a spectacle will take place. Grete enters the space and is introduced to the important ‘prop’ of the scene, the fur coat, which is presented to her by Frau Greifer. Grete sees the coat and her face changes: Pabst cuts to a medium close-up of Grete’s face that takes on a dreamy expression; she then moves her head in a half circle from the right to the left, still keeping the entranced look. Pabst then cuts to a medium close-up of Frau Greifer, who mirrors Grete’s movement in that she also moves her head, except in a different direction, from right to left. She holds the furs to her cheeks and has a sardonic smile. Both her movement and the expression of her face mock and mirror the image of the swept-away Grete, who finally puts on the coat. In a re-establishing shot, two women, the two prostitutes who earlier dealt with Geiringer, enter the frame from the left and take their places

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in the foreground on the right side of the frame, positioned as spectators of the unfolding scene in the background. Then, in a medium shot, Marie Lechner enters, disrupts the spectacle and demands to speak to Frau Greifer in private. She is directed into the next room. Right before she exits, in a long shot, three levels of action unfold: Grete poses in front of the mirror in the back, Marie Lechner walks through the frame to leave on the right side, and the two women chat to each other in the foreground. In capturing three activities in one shot, Pabst, for a second, holds various alternatives of female spectacle and female spectatorship in one frame. It is Grete who completely ‘becomes’ the image gazing desirously at herself in front of the mirror in which her image is reflected. She is narcissistically absorbed by her own reflection and epitomizes Mary Ann Doane’s well-known psychoanalytical approach to female spectatorship and the masquerade, in which she claims that classic Hollywood narratives produce an image of women for the pleasure and reassurance of the male viewer. In order to separate himself from this image, she argues, the male spectator develops strategies of sadism and fetishism to create a distance from which he can safely take the position of voyeur. The female spectator, on the other hand, is too close to the image, tends to over-identify with it and thus threatens to ‘become’ the image. The only way to develop a kind of female fetishism

20. ‘Absorbed by her own image’: Greta Garbo in The Joyless Street (1925)

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to create a distance between woman and the image is achieved through the masquerade (Doane 1991; Petro 1997: 58).22 Grete, for her part, is so absorbed by the beauty of her own image that she completely identifies with herself as a spectacle and fails to develop a distanciating masquerade; thus, she gives up the position of a potential spectator. In the reading of Anton Kaes, this (and similar) scene(s) in front of the mirror, subject Grete to the fetishistic gaze of the film viewer, who, according to Kaes, is positioned by the camera as the voyeur. Hence, these scenes seem to be in tension with the socially critical style of the New Objectivity, otherwise used by Pabst (Kaes 2004: 58). What this reading does not take into account, however, is the exchange of glances between Frau Greifer and the two girls in the foreground, who also occupy viewing positions available to the spectators of the film. Immediately after the spectacular shots of Grete in the mirror, we see Frau Greifer turning her face to the two women, signaling to them to confirm her ‘decency’ as a dressmaker and business woman. The two girls put on fake smiles and reassure Grete of Frau Greifer’s respectability. Grete, however, is too taken with her self-reflection and thus misses the complicit glances exchanged by Frau Greifer and the prostitutes. The two girls are ‘in the know’ about what is going on, namely, the transformation of a naïve young woman into a whore. They pretend not to know by watching the spectacle with ironic, cynical, almost bored detachment: they have been transformed into whores themselves and have now gained distance from the notion of woman-as-spectacle, to the extent that they can perform their own female self-representation in either parodistic or fetishistic nature (as they did with Geiringer). The exchange of glances between Greifer and the girls, which is witnessed by the film viewer, potentially unsettles his positioning as voyeur, because their cynical reactions expose and reflect upon the voyeuristic structure of looking and undermine its power by drawing attention to it. And sure enough, it is again the spatial arrangement that negotiates the market quality of modernity. In these scenes, the mirror takes on a specific function in the mise-en-scène, which recalls Loos’s use of mirrors. As Colomina notes, Loos often inserted mirrors into his interior design, in order to ‘promote the interplay between reality and illusion, between the actual and virtual, undermining the status of the boundary between inside and outside’ (Colomina 1994: 255). It is precisely this permeability between the public and the private that Pabst plays out. His virtuoso use of mirrors in the mise-en-scène heightens the dramatic impact, when, toward the end of the film, Grete is (almost) forced into prostitution.23 In this particular scene, she has to undress for her scandalous appearance on stage in Greifer’s salon, and the maid of Frau Greifer forces

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her to put on a dress that hardly covers her breasts. First, Grete is positioned in a medium shot with her back to the mirror. In the following long shot, the maid appears in the mirror behind Grete’s back; the two women start to struggle. A little later, we see the defeated Grete in a long shot, sitting in front of the three-faced mirror without looking at herself, dressed in Frau Greifer’s revealing outfit. Suddenly, as we can see in the mirror, a curtain in the back opens up and a Russian waiter enters the room. His image is tripled in the mirror and looms threateningly over the shocked Grete, who can hardly jump up before he starts pursuing her. The intruders—both Frau Greifer’s maid Frl. Henriette (Gräfin Tolstoi) and the waiter—literally appear in and through the mirror and threaten to extinguish the integrity of Grete. Grete, who had so much enjoyed her own appearance in Frau Greifer’s mirror, is now haunted by the very same mirror’s reflections. The mirror heightens her precarious positioning as a woman in a commercial landscape that threatens to expose and to circulate her image for the eyes of a voyeuristic public. But unlike the proletarian Else, who in a similarly pressed situation was forced into prostitution, Grete is saved at the last minute by her romantic love interest, the American Red Cross worker Davy (Einar Hanson). Davy, who visited Frau Greifer’s establishment to enjoy the company of prostitutes, is furious to find his virtuous Grete there. Enraged, he shouts at the desperate Grete and, in a fury, wants to take off. On his way out, he opens a wrong door and all of a sudden enters the melodramatic scene of misery as behind the door he finds the miserable Else together with her husband and the baby. Spatially, this arrangement of rooms appears rather illogical: it is not very likely that you open a wrong door in a brothel and all of a sudden you are standing in front of an impoverished and hungry family. Until this point, Pabst had built up two meticulously separated worlds by means of contrast montage and narrative: the hungry crowds in front of the butcher’s shop versus the dancing nouveaux riches in the Carlton Hotel, the ‘famous Viennese girls’ drinking champagne in the bars versus the starving women in the streets, the story of the proletarian girl who never meets her bourgeois neighbor. These separated worlds suddenly collapse in the image of Else and her family in the room next door to the brothel. The fate of Else epitomizes the worst fears that underpin the fundaments of the patriarchal bourgeois family ideology. The traditional model of femininity, which neatly separates the role of woman as either mother or whore, either confined to the realm of the domestic or to the domain of the street, is fundamentally eroded. Instead, what this melodramatic staging in Greifer’s club suggests is that the inside in fact did become the outside. The ideal of the safe home, desperately held on to by the Rumfort family, has finally been invaded by

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the poverty of the outside world and now looks as miserable as the joyless street. The ideal of the desexualized mother of the private realm is equated with the sexualized prostitute from the outside world, i.e. Else the mother is also Else the whore; the private space of the family union has become a part of the semi-public space of a brothel. After realizing Grete’s moral superiority over the other prostitutes in the brothel, the American officer Davy puts the fur coat over her shivering body to cover her nakedness. With this gesture, he points toward his future role as supporting husband, who will guarantee his wife protection from the intruding gazes of others; at the same time, he takes possession of her as a commodity that, from now on, only belongs to him as the sole proprietor. Back home at Rumfort’s, the two lovers embrace in front of a curtain framing the window of the living room, and the theatricality of their romantic happy ending is all too obvious. The camera is positioned inside the living room and frames the couple in front of the window, looking out onto the street. In this final shot, the window clearly demarcates the split between inside and outside and neatly separates the home from the streets. The threatened bleeding in of the outside into the domestic sphere can be prevented, and the ‘reinstatement of an ideal social harmony’ (Guerin 2005: 174) is secured. Spatially, this ‘happy ending’ is manifested in the positioning of the couple inside the domestic realm, and it also gestures toward the future of Grete as a married housewife, confined to the safe space of domestic bliss and subordinated under the patriarchal order of her husband and provider.

Challenging the Male Gaze: The Female Subject in Armor Marie Lechner’s trajectory follows a completely different path. Whereas Grete, as the mirror image of male desire, conforms to her prescribed gender role by adjusting herself to a male bourgeois ideal of womanhood, Marie challenges the dominating male gaze insofar as she develops a self-armoring coldness in order to distance herself from her own image and, thus, to accomplish mastery over it. This adaptive mechanism is achieved after Marie’s detection of Egon Stirner’s betrayal with Lia Leid and is bound up with the spatial set-up in the labyrinthian house of Frau Greifer, where all the rooms are arranged along a horizontal axis and separated from each other through doors framed by curtains. Each room opens up to another room, and each room sets the stage for an unfolding spectacle. Marie, for example, while waiting for Frau Greifer, hears noise coming out of the room next to her, opens a curtained door and becomes witness to a party scene

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with a millionaire named Ganez (Robert Garrison) and various girls. Once she has caught his eye, Ganez offers her money in exchange for her body. Marie accepts because her ‘fiancé’ Stirner had suggested to her that he needed cash. At midnight, alone with Ganez in a room, Marie again hears voices from the room next door and asks Ganez to wait for her in yet another room. As soon as he leaves, Marie stands on a bed in front of closed curtains, opens them and gazes through a glass window, from a high angle, into the adjacent room. In there, she sees Stirner sitting on a bed with Lia Leid: the two embrace and are obviously about to engage in a sexual encounter. As we learn later, Marie strangles Lia to death after Stirner has left, and only at the end confesses her murder to free the wrongly accused Stirner. The sight of Stirner and Lia having sex in a brothel puts Marie in a state of shock. Up to that point, she had viewed her own prostitution as an act of true love for someone who guaranteed her, in return, the status of originality and authenticity. Watching Stirner making love to another woman debunks

21. Turning into a ‘cold persona’: Asta Nielsen in The Joyless Street (1925)

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her romantic concept of self-sacrifice and makes her realize her status as interchangeable commodity. From that moment on, Marie turns into a ‘cold persona’, puts on a mask of detachment and distances herself from the social world to a point were she becomes unreadable by her environment. Pabst again takes up the theme of consumerism, femininity, and display in a scene where Ganez takes Marie on a shopping trip. In a high-class boutique, a female model presents an expensive dress to them in a private fashion show. While she parades in front of her customers, Marie becomes as lifeless as the window dummy we saw earlier in the film. Later, they go to a jeweler’s shop, where again, Ganez has her put on different necklaces. Marie keeps the detached look. When he hands her a mirror, Marie looks at her reflection with no visible reaction on her face: she embodies a commodity now, and she knows it. At the same time as Marie gains control over her image by putting on the mask of disaffection, Ganez loses his control over her, no matter how much he tries to fashion her for his private desires. In frequent close-ups of his face—a style of shot usually applied to frame female protagonists in order to investigate their beauty—we see him become increasingly angry. Finally, in an extreme close-up on him, he says to her: ‘Your coldness and your indifference are unbearable. Do you have no desire at all?’ By cutting so close to Ganez’s face, Pabst emphasizes Ganez’s loss of control over Marie by showing him ‘too near’, ‘too close’ to the camera, suggesting that he is about to give up the required distance to maintain his safe position as a voyeur. When she finally tells the (false) story of how she observed the killing of Lia Leid, Marie stages her own transformation into a commodity as a re-enactment of her crime in a private spectacle for Ganez. Only this time, he is almost overwhelmed by the spectacle, not least because, at one point, Marie, in her rage, almost strangles him. In this scene, she is completely ornamented: her face is painted and she wears a peculiar wig that surrounds her face like an artificial cornice, emphasizing her mask-like appearance. Marie has completed her own image as commodity and taken control. Finally, after she has finished her performance and falsely accused Stirner of murdering Lia, Marie puts down her public mask, her armor, that is, the jewelry Ganez has bought her. She is in a state of exhaustion when she exits the stage of her own drama. We last see her sitting next to Stirner, confessing her crime in a flashback, which this time has herself, Marie, as the murderer of Lia Leid. The police officer gets up and congratulates Stirner on his new freedom; the two men shake hands over Marie’s face. Stirner kisses Marie’s hand and she says: ‘I have always and only loved you.’ Her fate is sealed, of course, but she fails on her own terms. As Kracauer accurately put it: ‘Asta Nielsen as the kept woman demonstrates that uncompromising love is likely

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to perish in a society in which marketable good supplant the essentials. However, she is an outsider, emotionally and socially’ (Kracauer 1974: 168).

The Transfer of Agency: Reclaiming the Joyless Streets For Patrice Petro, who prominently commented upon The Joyless Street in her larger study on Weimer cinema and visual culture, the separate dramas between the proletarian and the middle-class women encourage different modes of identification on the part of the spectator. In her reading, the double focus of the narrative reflects gender specific responses to modernity in that it tells manifold stories: the drama of Grete Rumfort addresses the male anxiety of the middle class and their endangered class status, and resolves it in a neat, if theatrical, happy ending. The highly melodramatic narrative concerning the fate of the proletarian woman, on the other hand, is less comforting. In Marie’s doomed love for Egon Stirner and her willingness to prostitute herself for him, female desire, guilt, and repressed anger are articulated. The image of Marie’s friend Else toward the end of the narrative, who angrily knocks on the butcher’s door to get meat for her child, becomes a singular motif for unleashed female rage; it ‘indicates that the contours of female subjectivity and desire were markedly different from those typically associated with the male subject in Weimar’ (Petro 1990: 40). Thus, Petro reads Pabst’s The Joyless Street as a multi-layered document that reflects upon different gender perspectives vis-à-vis modernity. However, as Jan-Christopher Horak has pointed out, Petro’s reading of the film derived from a mutilated and censored version of The Joyless Street, which by no means represented the original. Since there exists no surviving original of the film, even the most accomplished version to date, the restored version from 1998, is ‘only a subjective attempt at a reconstruction’ (Horak 1998). Looking at this version of The Joyless Street from 1998, one can push Petro’s reading further. Toward the end of the film, the hungry and enraged crowd, mostly old women—prominently amongst them Marie’s mother—gather in front of Frau Greifer’s establishment and protest against the indulging and rich customers inside the club. In the midst of the ensuing chaos, Else approaches the butcher again for meat for her starving child. After he refuses, Else goes into a fit of rage and kills him with his own axe. She manages to run away from the scene of the crime, but we finally see her trapped in a burning house, together with her husband and her baby. In

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a last desperate attempt, the husband manages to save the child by roping it down to the helpless crowd of onlookers in the street. He and Else are burned to death, but the baby rests securely in the arms of an old woman, who is surrounded by two other old women. By leaving her baby to them, Else symbolically transfers agency to them by making them ‘(re)productive’, by handing them the child as a potential protagonist for the future, for change, and for the possibility to act on behalf of the disempowered crowd. In other words, at the end of the narrative and despite the melodramatic final image, it is the poor crowd and particularly the old women, the potential mothers of the sacrificed young women Marie and Else, who not only trigger a riot, but who recuperate the street and who gain authority. In that manner, the romantic happy ending of Grete fades out in comparison to the emotional impact achieved through the death of Else and the rescue of her child. The child comes to signify a potential avenger of the misery of his or her (we do not know the baby’s gender) mother Else and her friend Marie and opens up a potential line of flight, of change, of agency. The original film script by Haas confirms the optimistic notion attached to the working-class people as potential agents of history, whereas the representative of the bourgeois class, Hofrat Rumfort, explicitly withdraws from the modern world. The two final scenes in the script read as follows: first, we see the old Hofrat Rumfort sitting in his living room, and the intertitle reads: ‘I became too old, and my world has broken down. He who is as old as I am, shall not try to start a new life.’24 The next and final scene, however, rests on the old woman, happily holding Else’s child. She says, ‘You belong to all of us, to the whole Melchiorgasse. You are going to be a happier person than us old people’ (Haas ca. 1924: 280). The script closes on the image of a happy crowd cheering the saved baby.

Pabst’s Film Adaptation of Bettauer’s Book: Omitting the (Anti-) Semitic Discourse in The Joyless Street In the closing section of this chapter, I would like to discuss another aspect of The Joyless Street, which opens up when one compares Hugo Bettauer’s original novel with the film script and the final film. To this day, it is hard to determine which scenes from the original script were cut during the film shoot and which were lost in the process of censorship. The Austrian scholar Josef Schuchnig, for example, argues that the Austrian censors cut out all the scenes from the original film that touched upon the miserable economic and political conditions in Austria, that criticized the performance of the

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Austrian army during the war, the then weak position of Austria vis-à-vis neighboring states, or scenes that articulated a general doubt about the viability of Austria as an independent nation (Schuchnig 1976: 105 ff.). In fact, the original film script contains a handful of scenes that openly address the aforementioned topics and that must have upset the Austrian censors. However, even the most completely restored version from 1998 is missing original material, which makes it hard to come to a conclusion regarding the whereabouts of the missing scenes from the script, especially since there are no records of Austrian censor lists available. Overall, Pabst and Haas made major alterations for the film adaptation, one of them being the closure of the story: Pabst’s film ends with the burning house, whereas Bettauer’s book closes with the happy marriage of Grete Rumfort and her moving away from Melchiorgasse. In fact, Pabst only kept the major protagonists, the different social milieus and the murder of Lia Leid. The role of the butcher Geiringer, for example, was invented by Pabst, because he wanted to give the famous Weimar stage actor Werner Krauss a part in his film. Geiringer’s murderess, Else, is also a fabrication of the director and the scriptwriter. Further, Pabst leaves out minor figures and their associated plot lines, plays down the criminal aspect of the story and the concomitant investigations, and focuses on the female protagonists and their trajectory. One of the most significant changes from novel to film is the introduction of the American Red Cross worker, who comes to replace a major character in Bettauer’s novel, namely a middle-aged man named Otto Demel.25 The latter is introduced as a prominent Viennese journalist, who is popular with his huge public readership and takes on a central role in the novel by observing and commenting upon the unfolding dramas. Even though the novel is written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, Bettauer nevertheless frequently envisions the events through the consciousness of Demel and attributes to him the source of moral integrity. As Hall has pointed out, Demel is clearly built upon Bettauer’s benevolent and sometimes annoyingly complacent self-image as a sophisticated author and journalist (Hall 1978: 34). Demel, in other words, voices quite openly the opinion of the author Bettauer and plays a decisive part in the story. He, and not Davy, is the one who moves in with the Rumforts and it is he who finally saves Grete and her family by proposing marriage to her. By eliminating the character of Demel from the film, Pabst symbolically gets rid of Bettauer by extinguishing the implicit narrator of the story. The character of Otto Demel epitomizes Bettauer’s attempt to leave authorial traces in the enunciation and to inscribe his own voice into the presentation

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of the story events. Pabst silences Bettauer’s voice by extinguishing him from the enunciation and by keeping only the main plot points. What is absent, then, in Pabst’s version, is Bettauer’s distinct look at the Jews of Vienna and the (anti-Semitic) reactions of the rest of the population. Pabst, in other words, omits the Jewish topics of the novel and solely focuses upon issues of class and gender. Why he and his scriptwriter chose to do so has most likely to do with Bettauer’s own ambivalent stance toward Jewish identity—after all, he converted to Protestantism—and the manner in which his description of Jewish life frequently catered to already existing anti-Semitic prejudices. Bettauer not only had enemies among the antiSemites, but also among his own Jewish contemporaries. In his book City without Jews, Hugo Bettauer addressed the virulent problematic of anti-Semitism in Vienna that had reached a high point in the early years of the new republic of Austria. For the prominent Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer, for example, the rise of anti-Semitism after the War was due to various reasons: one was a circulating legend, which claimed that it was the fault of the Jews that the war was lost (Jüdische Kriegsschuld); further, particularly the pauperized middle class held the false belief that it was mostly Jewish people who profited from the loss of the war and who enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle among the nouveaux riches. The anti-Semitic press heated up the prejudice that particularly Jews were involved in racketeering, and veiled the fact that all parts of the population were equally involved. Also, anti-Semitic attacks were launched against Jews who belonged to the party of the Social Democrats and fueled the cliché of Jewish Bolsheviks who aimed for world domination. The mass flight of Eastern European Jews to Vienna due to Russian pogroms in Galicia and the Bukowina additionally sparked anti-Semitic resentments and blamed the enforced presence of Eastern European Jews in Vienna as responsible for a general food and housing shortage (Gletthofer 1992: 108–109). Moreover, the non-assimilated, often extremely poor Eastern European Jews lived in tension with the long-established, assimilated Jewish families, who experienced the new arrival of non-assimilated Jews as a threat to their own precarious status. Bettauer himself advocated the full assimilation of the Jewish population to their non-Jewish environment and, due to his convictions, gave stereotyped accounts of non-assimilated Eastern European Jews and Zionists in his books. In City without Jews, for example, he openly worked with clichés, picking up on the widely held anti-Semitic assumption of the worldwide influence of Jewish capital on the global economy. Bettauer was also prone to condescending remarks in his depiction of Eastern Jews, when, for instance, he depicted Galician

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Jews as beggars or operators with ‘Kaftan and curls’; for them, he claims, it would not really make a difference whether they begged for money in Vienna, Berlin, or Paris. He also furthered the distance between assimilated and Eastern Jews when one of his characters—supposedly based on Arthur Schnitzler—complains that he, as an assimilated Jew and successful writer, had to leave Vienna the same way ‘as any Galician refugee who only came to Vienna due to a wave of speculation’ (Bettauer 1924: 32). In The Joyless Street, Bettauer addresses the Jewish presence in the city and the resulting ‘problematic’ in various manners; for example, he does not hesitate to cast the worst war profiteers and most unsympathetic stock exchange operators protagonists with obvious Jewish names, such as Moritz Zipperer from Czernowitz. The character of Otto Demel, on the other hand, whose confession is not mentioned, takes on a morally superior stance both toward his Jewish and his Christian environment. Hence, Demel reflects and comments upon the unfolding events that originate in the much-contested milieu of the nouveaux riches, represented by the family Rosenow. The Rosenows—formerly Rosenstrauch—are described as a Jewish family from Eastern Europe that had only recently moved to Vienna, where they made a fortune. Particularly Mrs. Rosenow, the mother of the very well-adapted Regina Rosenow, still struggles in a somewhat comical manner to leave her Eastern European roots behind and to properly perform the societal codes as exercised at her own dinner party. Bettauer sympathetically describes Regina’s pains when, in front of her noble Christian friends, her mother embarrasses herself and her daughter with the clichéd, overly protective behavior of the Jewish mother. Regina is depicted as a modern woman, who openly follows her sexual desires. As already mentioned, Bettauer, in an issue of his magazine He and She from February 1924, explicitly advocated the ‘erotic revolution’ and propelled equal rights for men and women in sexual matters. He distinctly voiced progressive opinions of female rights in terms of sexual emancipation, of the decriminalization of abortion laws, of homosexuality, and of prostitution. His liberal stance, however, was somewhat limited, since Bettauer viewed the fulfillment of female selfexpression only in sexual terms and in relation to men. Thus, Bettauer was more indebted to a traditional image of woman than his writings would suggest (Werderitsch 2000: 30). The limitations of his liberal opinions become even more evident in his treatment of female sexuality in his literary output. In The Joyless Street, for example, it is interesting to note that with regard to Jewish identity the project of successful assimilation is measured by the sexual morale of the female protagonist. Take, for example, the sophisticated and well-adjusted

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Regina Rosenow: Bettauer paints her as a modern, emancipated, and confident young woman, who freely acts upon her own desires. Before seriously contemplating marriage with Stirner, Regina, who has already lost her virginity, demands to spend a couple of nights with him beforehand to find out if he meets her erotic standards. But once Stirner is imprisoned and accused of murder, Regina immediately drops her emancipated attitude and suddenly wishes to be romantically united with him; she even begs his forgiveness for her pre-marital sexual activities. Shortly before this reunion, Regina meets Demel and tearfully confesses to him her serious commitment to Stirner. Demel, for his part, is deeply moved and, while watching her crying, comes to the following insight: ‘[…] As soon as women are in love, they are all the same […] love levels all differences which are only external’ (Bettauer 1924: 202, my translation). For Regina, the successfully assimilated, sexually emancipated modern girl, it is only the deep love for her future husband that finally makes her a sensitive and mature woman and lets her grow as a human being. Her personal development runs counter to that of Lia Leid, the most interesting and troubled Jewish figure in Bettauer’s The Joyless Street. Lia Leid is the pivotal character, who instigates the most openly voiced anti-Semitic resentments of the novel. As we learn at the end of the novel, Marie Lechner not only killed Lia Leid because of her love for Egon Stirner, but also out of (racist) hatred for a woman she already knew from her school days. In her final monologue in front of the judge, and in her attempt to prove Stirner’s innocence, Marie tells her own life story, which differs significantly from her trajectory in Pabst’s treatment. It turns out that Marie suffered the fate of ‘the Viennese girl from the lower classes who has the good or the bad luck to be beautiful’ (Ibid.: 136). Her father was once a decent worker who had lost one arm and one leg in the war and turned into an unemployed brute and alcoholic. As a young girl, Marie was poor, but innocent, strikingly beautiful but resistant to sexual advances from strange men. In her own account, Marie met Lia Leid—formerly Lia Holzer—for the first time in school; she describes her as a beautiful, coquettish Jewish girl I disliked from the beginning. She was as poor as most of us girls, but she was always better dressed, wore nylons and pretty shoes, and when asked where she got them from, she laughed and said that men were so nice to her and would shower her with presents without even demanding a kiss. She was lazy and didn’t learn at school, but all the teachers were in love with her, so she always got better marks than I did, even though I studied for hours and hours (Ibid.: 251, my translation).

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According to Marie, the only thing that Lia had on her mind was attracting the gazes of men, and when Marie once told her that she would not walk with her in the street anymore because of that, Lia replies to her: ‘I’m happy that I don’t have to walk with you anymore, because every one can tell from afar that you are from proletarian descent’ (Ibid., my translation). Later, Lia manages to class-pass, by marrying a rich Jewish lawyer, Dr. Leid, whom she cheats upon from the beginning of their marriage. Marie, on her part, is so poor that she has to leave school and hardly manages to support her family with her meager income (and at this point, her fate resembles that of Grete’s). She meets the well-off Stirner and desperately falls in love with him. Stirner becomes her lover and supporter, but finally gets tired of her and pursues other affairs. Marie never stops loving him and starts to work as a prostitute; her fate is sealed when she contracts tuberculosis and, on top of everything, develops an addiction to morphine. When she finally learns that Stirner is about to initiate an affair with the rich Lia Leid, Marie is overwhelmed by hatred and jealousy and ends up murdering her rival. In her melodramatic account of her miserable fate in the courtroom, the blood-coughing Marie manages not only to articulate anti-Semitic resentments against her Jewish antagonist, but also to attract the sympathy of the jury and to leave the audience in tears (Ibid.: 265–266). In the end, it is Marie who appears to be the victim of Lia Leid, whereas the strangled woman is morally debunked in such a way that she appears to have deserved her punishment. Why Bettauer deliberately painted such an unabashedly unsympathetic, nymphomaniac, explicitly Jewish female character that would calculably cater to anti-Semitic resentment, remains hard to understand. In beginning to answer this question, it is useful to take a closer look at Bettauer’s own stance vis-à-vis gender politics, assimilation, and aspects of anti-Semitism. The thoughts of Otto Demel, who is portrayed as a close friend of Lia Leid’s husband, Dr. Leid, are indicative. When Demel, in his function as a journalist, accompanies the investigating police officer to an interview with Lia Leid’s maid, the girl freely reports on the frivolous conducts and numerous affairs of her former employer. In addition, she mentions that Lia had mocked the poor sexual performances of her older husband (Leid is a little over forty). Demel is disgusted by the humiliation of his friend in front of the servants and contemplates the sexually liberal behavior of modern Jewish women: ‘This attitude was, generally speaking, the modern moral stance of those women, who had left the ghetto, the harem, the subordination too quickly! [Otto Demel] shivered inside and thought: “Thank God that I’m not married!”’ (Ibid.: 38, my translation). Demel articulates antipathy against Jewish women who had only recently

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left the ghetto—in other words, the world of Eastern Jews—and who had not yet accomplished the task of successful acculturation. To put it differently: Bettauer, the Westernized, assimilated, converted Jew projects his own antipathy against Eastern Jews onto the body of the modern Jewess, despite, and conflicting with, his supposedly progressive stance on sexual matters. In doing so, he conflates his resentment toward ghetto Jews with anti-feminist feelings typical of the time. The cultural historian Sander Gilman has made a compelling argument about the gendering of stereotypes when he claims that in fin-de-siècle German culture, two related images of difference were collapsed: the misogynist image of the femme fatale and the anti-Semitic image of the belle juive (‘beautiful Jewess’) (Gilman 1998: 71). Originally, the image of the belle juive had a positive connotation in the arts—predominantly literature and painting—of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the cliché of the belle juive was increasingly sexualized and finally came to stand for ‘dangerous beauty’. At the turn of the century, in reaction to the threat presented by erotic and intellectual women, ‘Jewess’ and ‘gypsy woman’ come to signify the desirable, but menacing ‘dark woman’ (Kohlbauer-Fritz 1998: 109–110, my translation). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Gilman argues, the destructive Jewish female was a typical image in the common discourse, and came to be equated with the modern woman. To support his argument, Gilman introduces the writing of the German Jewish author Else Croner, who, in a publication from 1913, came to explore the image of the ‘modern Jewess’: ‘Croner’s text presents a post-1900 attempt on the part of a self-identified Jewish woman to construct, and thus rescue, the image of the Jewish woman as different from both the anti-Semitic image of the male Jew and the misogynist image of the woman (Gilman 1998: 84). Croner constructs a countertype image of the ‘modern Jewess’ in that she claims a biological difference between Jewish (oriental) and non-Jewish (occidental) women as the starting point of her reflections. The Jewish woman usually matures earlier than other women, Croner argues, a fact that was recognized in the social structures of the ghetto and that led to the common practice of arranged marriages for young Jewish girls. Due to the introduction of ‘Westernized’ norms, the Jewish woman—characterized as highly sensual and sexual—married later and later. According to Croner, the emancipated Jewess had two very different directions in which she could develop at this point of history—and the following part of her argument reveals how Croner projects all the negative stereotypes of the Jew and the woman onto the East and Eastern Jewish women: ‘The Russian Jewess is the destructive

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seductress. […] Once she abandons the confines of the ghetto, the Russian Jewess, unlike the German Jewess, is given no alternative in her culture but to revert to a more primitive and intuitive sexuality’ (quoted in Ibid.: 85). The German Jewess, on the other hand, governs her sexuality through her intellect, which eventually grants her more control over the male. In other words, the difference between an acceptable and a destructive independence of the modern woman becomes the difference between the Eastern and the Western Jewess: ‘Here, the position of the acculturated Jewish woman becomes the antithesis of the universalizing image of the female according to fin-de-siècle thinkers such as Otto Weininger, whose image of the female is, in point of fact, identical to that of Croner’s Eastern Jewess’ (Ibid.: 86). Clearly, Croner’s stereotyping reverberates in Bettauer’s fictional writing and structures the representation of female sexuality in The Joyless Street. Regina Rosenow embodies the independent modern Jewess, who comes to terms with her thriving sensuality in accordance with Western norms. Lia Leid, on the other hand, represents the ‘dark woman’, who had only recently ‘left the ghetto’; the femme fatale attributed with features of the Eastern Jewess, whose destructive sexuality and insatiable hunger for sexual encounters ruins her environment and eventually herself. Bettauer cleverly uses this cliché of the Eastern Jewess as femme fatale in a similar manner to Else Croner. By conflating the misogynist image of the femme fatale with the body of the Eastern Jewess, who exercises her destructive qualities on both her Jewish and non-Jewish environment alike, Bettauer sides with the betrayed Western Jewish male (Dr. Leid) as much as with the Christian female (Marie). At the same time, Bettauer praises the development of Regina Rosenow as the positive prototype of the modern Jewess, who eventually becomes invisible as a Jewess as she casts off any traces of difference and, instead, epitomizes the universal image of the ‘woman in love’. Bettauer’s narrative strategies for providing identification with characters voicing anti-Jewish resentments and prejudices most likely contributed to the wide readership he found in the ranks of the middle and lower middle classes. Béla Balàzs wrote an insightful homage to Bettauer that was printed in Die Bühne at the same time as Bettauer was fighting for his life in the hospital.26 In his essay ‘Bettauer—Eine Wiener Erscheinung’ (‘Bettauer—A Viennese Phenomenon’), which was written half a year before Bettauer’s death but only printed after Bettauer’s assassination, Balázs maintains a somewhat ironic tone in describing Bettauer’s qualities as an author and journalist who manages to meet the popular taste of the ‘common people’ for scandals and crimes. Bettauer’s real achievement,

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Balázs concludes, is precisely his ability to be successful with his Christian readership, because this success would prove the common assumption wrong, namely, that a sophisticated urban Jewish journalist (like Balázs himself), associated with the intellectual Jewish milieu of the coffeehouses, was unable to reach the heart of ‘the people’. For Balázs, Bettauer came to stand as the living (and soon to be dead) proof that it was possible to close the often manufactured gap between the Christian (and somewhat provincial) petit bourgeoisie and Jewish intellectual culture (or, as Balázs calls it, the ‘Kaffeehausintellektualität’—‘the coffeehouse intelligentsia’). That Bettauer—voluntarily or involuntarily—had to cater to anti-Semitic clichés in order to keep the regard of his readership is a strategy Balázs was not willing to analyze. Instead, he kept a positive outlook: his essay closes on the notion that Bettauer and his readership both come to stand for Vienna—the nice, and sweet, and smiling city. That Balázs’s optimism, which also played down the anti-Semitic climate of the time, was a strategy in itself is all too obvious: after all, it took him more than half a year to even find a publication in Vienna that was willing to print his positive article on the highly controversial Jewish journalist Hugo Bettauer.

Death in the Mirror: The Killing of a Jewish Femme Fatale In light of the complicated and convoluted relationship between Bettauer, Jewish identity, and his (Christian) readership, it is no surprise that Pabst dropped any explicit references to a Jewish presence in the story world of The Joyless Street altogether.27 However, a curious remark by Pabst himself may serve as an oblique reference to the process of making invisible issues of Jewish identity in his film. In 1927, he gave an interview to the American writer and poet Hilda Doolittle—writing under the pseudonym H.D.—for the British film magazine Close up, who turned out to be a particular fan of The Joyless Street. Toward the end of their conversation, Doolittle brings up the issue of the murder case and refers to the scene in the hotel room, where the corpse of the dead woman Lia Leid is found. She tells Pabst that she had a hard time detecting the dead body and actually overlooked the corpse when watching the film for the first time. But then, on her second viewing ‘[…] I did make a point of looking for the dead body and did see it. […] Is it possible that in the earlier version the shots showing the dead woman on the floor were for some reason deleted?’ ‘Ah,’ interrupted Mr. Pabst delightedly, ‘I did not mean you to see the body of the murdered woman on the floor’ (Close Up 1927: 68).

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Pabst’s cryptic statement appears symptomatic of the fate of Lia Leid. The (feminist) literature on The Joyless Street has paid little or no attention to her sojourn and typically focused on the trajectories of Marie Lechner and Grete Rumfort. But it is interesting to note that in the choice of his actress, Pabst deliberately played into the circulating image of the ‘dark woman’ by casting Tamara Tolstoi. Her dark and wild hair and the black make-up around her eyes reinforce her appearance as the exotic, ‘Eastern’-looking woman. A contemporary Viennese reviewer of The Joyless Street picked up on that note when he observed: ‘An interesting newcomer is the French artist Gräfin Tolstoi. Her coarse Slavic facial features and her cat like movements, combined with her lowering gaze provide for an exotic and interesting performance’ (Neue Freie Presse, 18 November 1925).28 Clearly, this description reverberates with the fantasy of a femme fatale who moves around like an animal and hunts men. Also, judging her physiognomy as somewhat vulgar—the ‘coarse Slavic features’—reinforces the cliché of the ‘dark woman’ from the East and her uncontrollable sexuality. Among the main female protagonists, Lia Leid is certainly the one who most openly pursues her sexual desires and she is punished with death. She is not acting under the pressure of poverty like Else or the prostitutes who sell their bodies in order to survive; nor is she motivated by true love like Marie Lechner in her desire for Egon Stirner. Lia Leid is an adulteress, who—like men—is willing to pay for her sexual gratification. Overall, Lia Leid is the most transgressive female figure in The Joyless Street and she is punished with death. Also, and in that respect the film resembles the mood in the book, sympathy rests with the murderess, not with the victim. The tragic fate of Marie Lechner and the manner in which the audience is cued into her subjectivity, totally overshadows the short screen time of Lia Leid and her pursuit of sexual gratification. On a final note: Lia Leid, like Marie Lechner and Grete Rumfort, also looks at herself in the mirror. Right after Stirner left the hotel room where the sexual encounter took place, Lia stays by herself and starts rearranging her hair. In a spectacular medium close-up, we see Lia’s face from the right side. She shows a pleased and satisfied expression and holds the mirror in front of her face. Whereas Grete narcissistically loses herself in her own mirror image, and whereas Marie Lechner confirmed her distance from her own image in the mirror, Lia Leid looks into the mirror and sees death. Suddenly, two hands penetrate the image on the left side of the frame and slowly approach Lia’s neck. Then there is a cut, but we know that the scene ends with Lia’s strangling.

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22. ‘Death in the mirror’: The Joyless Street (1925)

Her image literally gets eradicated. The sexually aggressive woman gets punished for her transgression. In G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street, she comes to signify the seductive femme fatale, a quintessential image of the cinema. Hugo Bettauer’s Jewish woman from the East has been made invisible. Perhaps Pabst ironically acknowledged this strategy when he told Hilda Doolittle that it would be best if she did not see the dead woman. Pabst’s ‘omission’ of Lia Leid’s body points to a form of displacement, which governs the trajectory of The Joyless Street on a larger scale. If Austrian cinema can be viewed as an extraterritorial cinema with fluid borders, as outlined earlier, then Pabst’s The Joyless Street serves as a case in point to exhibit the logic of extraterritoriality within a particular film:29 this logic informed both the status of The Joyless Street as an aesthetic object, as much as it registered within the film text itself. As Horak has shown, due to the heavy cutting and re-editing of the film for political and moral reasons, different narratives of The Joyless Street appeared in various countries (Horak 1998). The extraterritorial circulation,

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in other words, subjected the film to different state laws, thereby affecting the status of the remaining film copies to this day, because it was (and still is) impossible to secure an authentic version of Pabst’s film. Furthermore, Pabst’s move from Vienna to Berlin registers—metaphorically speaking—in the transfer of Bettauer’s Viennese novel to Pabst’s Weimar film. Bettauer’s book was deeply involved with cultural discourses, pertinent to the social and intellectual life in Vienna, and reflected on anti-Semitic invectives launched against Jewish citizens, as much as it engaged with questions of Jewish identity and Jewish assimilation. Bettauer collapsed his own resentments toward non-assimilated Eastern Jews onto the figure of the modern Jewess, thereby merging his antipathy against Jews from the ghetto with anti-feminist stereotypes. In adapting Bettauer’s book, Pabst and Haas dropped the Jewish intertext and displaced Bettauer’s resentment against the modern Jewess onto the image of the exotic woman. This act of a generalized ‘exoticization’ of the female figure—as opposed to the stigmatization of the Eastern Jewish woman—points toward a more complex process of ‘ex-territorialization’. The discourse of ethnic stereotyping is shifted toward a different discursive context, within which anti-Semitism is transformed into anti-feminism.

5.

The Sound of Make-Believe Ernst Lubitsch and the World of the Operetta

Introduction When, in December of 1925, the silent operetta film Ein Walzertraum, by German director Ludwig Berger, opened in Berlin, it did not go unnoticed by the US trade paper Variety. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Trask’, a reviewer had some sardonic observations to make about Berger’s otherwise highly praised work: So, this is the great German film for which Germany has been waiting so long! Universally received by the press as a masterpiece. There can be no doubt that this picture will do very nicely on the Continent and will probably finish up by showing a profit for its producers.  But how do they have the nerve to take it seriously here? It simply drips the undiluted hokum—sentimental sob stuff mixed up with the sort of motivation typical for a musical comedy libretto. […] And, furthermore, it is purely local in its appeal, demanding sympathy and delight in the Vienna waltz and the whole court and café life of Austria. […] Ludwig Berger’s direction is not bad–even quite subtle at times. But it is not exceptional. At least ten men in America could have passed it. […] An ‘echt deutscher film’! (Variety, 27 January 1926).

Trask’s condescending remarks about Berger’s operetta adaptation blatantly display the unease of the US reviewer toward a non-American film. The strategies he or she uses to dismiss the work refer to both the narrative of the film and the competence of its direction. The critic stresses the superior technological know-how of American directors vis-à-vis their German counterparts and also insists that the film will not meet American tastes in terms of its content. These objections feed into heated domestic debates about the impact of foreign films on the American film industry and their suitability for US audiences, a discussion that took on new urgency after the end of World War I (Petrie 2002: 8). Ernst Lubitsch’s costume drama Passion, for example, which in 1920 was the first German film to be shown in the US after the war, was initially highly praised for its artistic merits by film critics. But the period of welcoming European films as a challenging alternative to American products at the

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beginning of the 1920s was short.1 Notwithstanding the original enthusiasm of trade papers and magazines for foreign films, by the mid-1920s the mood toward continental filmmaking had changed, and, near the end of the decade, it had turned into outright hostility. American reviewers, especially those most in touch with popular moods, hailed the superiority of American filmmaking and rejected continental works for their lack of commercial appeal.2 The very attribute ‘artistic’ for a foreign film became a term of abuse. Regarded as essentially un-American, continental filmmakers were expected to adapt to the taste of an unsophisticated mass audience, if they wanted to survive (Ibid.: 21). But who was to know the tastes of the American mass audience? For ‘Trask’, the answer was clear: Ein Walzertraum was parochial because of its purely ‘local appeal’, a view that presupposed that, in the US, there was not enough ‘sympathy and delight in the Vienna waltz and the whole court and café life of Austria’. Or was there? Interestingly, six months later, in July 1926, upon the US release of Berger’s The Waltz Dream,3 the tables had turned: ‘This German UFA bunch knows how to make pictures!,’ stated a Variety reviewer writing under the pseudonym ‘Sisk’ enthusiastically: ‘The Waltz Dream’ strikes the bull’s eye with a vengeance. Its players are unknown here; its director hasn’t turned out anything that has previously met with success here, and the operetta itself hasn’t had a vogue for a good many years, but this picture will make itself liked anywhere. That is, if the people appreciate a subtle, rollicking, naughty, romantic love story filled to the overflowing with the sweet and rhythmic measures of all the waltzes that ever came from Vienna. […] (Variety, 28 July 1926). 4

Obviously, American audiences did appreciate a naughty love story from Vienna, because Berger’s The Waltz Dream, shot in Berlin and Vienna in 1925 and released in the US in 1926, became a great international success, earned the director favorable reviews and, not least, a contract with Hollywood. It was also there, in Hollywood of 1931, that Berger’s The Waltz Dream was to be remade, not by the director himself, but by another German expatriate: Ernst Lubitsch. Ernst Lubitsch had been scheduled to shoot the operetta film in 1922, when still in Germany. In September 1922, the German Lichtbild-Bühne duly noted that Lubitsch was preparing the filming of Ein Walzertraum (Prinzler, Patalas 1984: 222–223). The director abandoned the project in favor of a call to America by Mary Pickford and left Germany on 2 December 1922

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as ‘the first German to emigrate to Hollywood after World War’ (Eyman 1993: 88). Almost ten years later, he picked up the project for his second sound film in Hollywood, and directed a remake of The Waltz Dream called The Smiling Lieutenant. This chapter focuses on the influence of the Viennese operetta on the work of director Ernst Lubitsch and his American cycle of fairy-tale musicals. I argue that by working within the framework of the Viennese operetta, Lubitsch draws heavily on a particular Jewish sensibility, which shaped the mass cultural production of fin-de-siècle Vienna up to the early 1930s. The Jewish experience of otherness and exclusion, I argue, is collapsed into the figure of the Viennese girl, who also comes to play a significant role in The Smiling Lieutenant. Lubitsch’s closeness to this particular character is felt through the authorial presence of an author/narrator. When the Viennese girl gets eliminated from the narrative, the joyful atmosphere of the fairy-tale musical is disrupted and melodramatic overtones are introduced. Despite her status as the ‘marked woman’, who threatens the bond of a married couple, her sympathetic treatment allows for subversive interpretative strategies with respect to issues of identity and otherness.

‘Retrospective Utopia’: The Myth of Vienna and the Operetta Taking the sneering remark from the first review of Variety seriously, one might legitimately ask whether American sympathy for Austrian court life, coffeehouses, and the Vienna waltzes was, indeed, that great. Moreover, what imaginations and fancies of Vienna shaped American minds? What role did music play, and, particularly, the operetta, in constituting the image of the city? Siegfried Kracauer provides a ready-made answer. When writing about the success of Ludwig Berger’s The Waltz Dream of 1925, he gravely commented upon the dreadful influence the film’s escapist and nostalgic image of Vienna had on international screens: Trained in romanticizing the past, Ludwig Berger staged Ein Walzertraum (Waltz Dream, 1925) after an operetta by Oscar Straus—one of the few German films to become a hit in America. This model film operetta not only satirized court life with a charm kindred to Lubitsch’s, but also established that enchanted Vienna which was to haunt the screen from then on. Its components were gentle archdukes, tender flirting in a suburban garden restaurant, Johann Strauss, Schubert and the venerable

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old Emperor. The persistent image of this retrospective utopia overshadowed the misery of twentieth century Vienna (Kracauer 1974: 141).

In a similar vein, in his analysis of Hollywood’s expectations of Germanspeaking émigrés from Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, Thomas Elsaesser states that ‘whatever directors had been known for at home, all that American producers could think of was Old Vienna’ (Elsaesser 1999: 116). His case is, amongst others, the first Hollywood assignment of the Austrian emigrant E.A. Dupont, who made his name with the distinctly modern drama Varieté in Germany in 1925, but was nevertheless scheduled to shoot Love Me and the World Is Mine, a film considered ‘another piece of Viennese schmaltz’ by critics (Ibid.). It was not only fiction film that successfully perpetrated the image of turn-of-the-century aristocratic Vienna and her typical operetta personnel; the accuracy of Kracauer’s comment on the persistence of Old Vienna’s ‘retrospective utopia’, even during historical hardships, is striking if one looks at a short documentary by James A. Fitzpatrick.5 Starting in the early 1930s, Fitzpatrick produced a series of travelogues for MGM called Fitzpatrick’s Traveltalks, where (foreign) places—from Europe to South America to Kentucky—were featured in short documentaries for cinema audiences. In February 1938, one strenuous year before the outbreak of World War II and shortly before the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria to Germany, one of Fitzpatrick’s Traveltalks featured a nine-minute short called Glimpses of Austria, photographed by Winton C. Hoch. The script meticulously describes what was shown on screen and demonstrates how the dominant images of tourist Austria were circulated for American audiences, regardless of the historical circumstances.6 As the film script elaborates, Glimpses of Austria starts with a fade in on Schönbrunn, the royal castle, while a voice-over explains: ‘Vienna […] is one of the most historic cities in the world […].’ Then, a couple of long shots are described that give images of tourist attractions, churches, and the state opera. The commentary continues: ‘Austria has always been a patron of great music […].’ We cut to a Heuriger with wine gardens and the voiceover: ‘Join in the spirit of gayety and song.’ Different people start singing the following lyrics in English: ‘There is joy in the city that loves to sing. Oh, drink, let us drink […] all our cares away.’ The script continues with a description of dancing people in the streets, followed by a medium close-up of the Johann Strauss memorial in the Stadtpark, and the Danube. Finally, we leave Vienna to move on to tourist sites in the Austrian landscapes (James A. Fitzpatrick Traveltalks. Margaret Herrick Library: MGM, 1938).

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Especially the beginning of the documentary recapitulates all the dominant images that had successfully informed the stereotypical tourist discourse on Vienna since the late nineteenth century, particularly its officially endorsed promotion as Musikstadt Wien (‘Vienna, City of Music’). On the one hand, Vienna is introduced in the Traveltalks as the city of historic monuments and high culture; on the other hand, it also provides popular entertainment sites such as the Viennese woods and the vineyards where people get drunk and forget their sorrows. Images of ‘high’ culture and ‘low’ entertainment are connected via the music, notably the waltz tunes of Johann Strauss. Clearly, the waltz is able to synthesize high and low: As we shall see later, music glosses over class hierarchies as much as it solidifies gender difference. How great the impact of the stage and later the film operetta on the hegemonic representation of Vienna really was becomes obvious in the quoted lyrics of the drinking song. Chanted by the people at the Heuriger, their sentimental yearning for oblivion undoubtedly echoes the lines of the drinking song of the famous stage operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat) conceived three decades earlier by Johann Strauss, in 1874: ‘Happy is he who forgets what cannot be changed.’ But Vienna’s association with music did not start with the emergence of the stage operetta. In the American perception, as the musical scholar Michael Saffle has shown, Vienna had, by 1865, become associated with ‘classical’ music making, and attached to famous ‘German’ composers such as Händel, Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven. The reason for this connection can be found in the fact that, for educated Americans, ‘classical’ musicmaking was generally associated with Central Europe and particularly with Germany. Austria came to be viewed as ‘German’, because, as a part of the German-speaking world, it was considered to share its cultural values and attitudes. Due to this confusion, many Americans came to think of Viennese music as ‘German’, and thus, believed composers such as Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart to be typically ‘Viennese’, despite the fact, that none of them were born in Vienna. The Austrians themselves, of course, were also interested in circulating the cliché of Vienna as the fount of classical music. An entry in the first official city tourist guide, the Viennese Baedeker from 1868, signals the beginning of the self-promotion of Vienna as a city of music, where ‘music’ and ‘Vienna’ are bound up with each other (Nussbaumer 2007: 31). For knowledgeable Americans, Vienna was not only wedded to the names of the old musical masters; rather, they were aware that Vienna between the 1870s and the 1890s was the locus of the Strauss dynasty and

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the operetta. The influence of the latter had a great impact on the musical taste of American audiences, especially between the 1890s and 1910s. As Saffle contends, ‘the operetta image of Vienna and its satellite cities as pleasure gardens of melody and love meshed perfectly with the musical tastes of the belle-époque America’ (Saffle 2001: 65). It also matched with the more refined literary tastes of novels by Henry James and Edith Wharton, both very popular at the time. In addition, as Saffle points out, both Bram Stoker’s Dracula, taking place in Hungary and Transylvania, and the success of Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda, set in a fantastic Ruritanian kingdom, had played their role in the American appetite for the exotic pleasures of ‘picture-book’ Vienna (Ibid.: 64–65). The operetta was a product of cosmopolitanism in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.7 Thus, the genre introduced many rural elements from the empire, such as various dances: the polka or the czardas were danced in elegant ballrooms and added to the lavish spectacle displayed. The most famous dance, however, was the waltz. Starting in the mid-1880s, the work of Johann Strauss, ‘king of the waltz’, swept the stages in the US and Americans ‘were thrilled at the sight of a world in which adultery is the rule, champagne flows freely, and a trip to prison is an amusing interlude rather than a moral blow’ (Altman 1989: 135). Johann Strauss introduced to the musical theater a ‘new comic tradition, [...] later to be furthered by Léhar and Lubitsch’ (Ibid.). Strauss is also the composer of one of the most influential Viennese stage operettas, namely Die Fledermaus. Die Fledermaus firmly established some of the most significant stage operetta conventions: the use of disguises and masquerades as a means of deception, sexual innuendos, and the magnificent influence of ‘King Champagne’, who fosters brotherhood, Viennese Gemütlichkeit (‘coziness’) and, most notably, blurs class differences (Traubner 1996: 27–28). Also, the connection between drink and song f inds its particular resonance in the Heurigenkultur (‘vineyard culture’) of the vineyards at the periphery of Vienna where wine is served to drinking crowds.8 What Traubner calls the modus operandi of the Viennese operetta is encapsulated in an already quoted drinking song, set to a waltz tune by Strauss in Die Fledermaus: ‘Glücklich ist, wer vergißt, was doch nicht zu ändern ist’ (‘Happy is he who ignores that which cannot be changed’). How formative this song became for the self-representation of the entire Austrian culture and its reception can be measured in the aforementioned US travelogue from 1938. For Americans, the Viennese operetta presented itself as a dynamic mixture of ‘sensuality, loyalty and ironic skepticism,’ all brought together through ‘music and humor’ (Hánák 1998: 136).

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The world of the Viennese operetta, in other words, comprised splendid balls, royal palaces, and traditional vineyards, places peopled with dashing aristocrats, frivolous girls, and other picturesque folks from the lower classes. The genre admires, but also ridicules members of the aristocracy. Power relations are inverted, but in a comical manner, whereas ‘real’ politics are of minor importance. Thus, for instance, the ‘industrial proletariat’ is conspicuously absent in the world of the operetta (Klotz 1980: 46). In terms of historical classification, official accounts of musical history usually distinguish between two main eras of Viennese operetta: Johann Strauss (father) and Johann Strauss II (son), together with Franz von Suppé and Carl Millöcker comprised the so-called golden age of the operetta until roughly the end of the nineteenth century. Johann Strauss II made a significant contribution to the distinguishing feature of the genre: the waltz (Traubner 1996: 25ff.). Until the turn of the century, the operetta of the multicultural monarchy mostly addressed and catered to the established, upper-class (Jewish) bourgeoisie of the liberal era and expressed their refined lifestyle and taste. After the turn of the century, the golden age of the operetta was followed by the silver age, with famous composers such as Franz Léhar, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall. Léhar’s The Merry Widow from 1905 counts as the first modern operetta and the hallmark of the whole genre. As Altman points out, whereas Strauss had used the waltz for the finale in order to celebrate the restored peace to the kingdom, Léhar made the waltz ‘the very agent of love’ (Altman 1989: 136). Also, during the silver era, the demography of the operetta audience changed, and the genre catered increasingly to the taste of the urban middle classes, rather then the upper-class bourgeoisie (Csáky, 1998: 62–63). The composers and their work from the silver age were also the ones who became most relevant for cinema—a good example being The Merry Widow, but also, of course, Oscar Straus’ Ein Walzertraum from 1907. When it traveled overseas, The Merry Widow became a triumphant success in New York in 1907, before it toured the American provinces and initiated a waltz craze, instigating dance competitions including one where couples competed to be named best ‘Sonia and Danilo’.9 Interestingly, though, critics understood Léhar’s operetta in terms of the stereotypes of days gone by. Quite new and daring, however, was the display of eroticism, which fascinated American audiences—especially the waltzes, which, as noted earlier, gained new prominence in The Merry Widow (Saff le 2001: 65–66). The waltz came to represent the

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f irst musical tune that transported ‘the message of forbidden desire’ and increasingly grew into the (visual) cliché that ‘to dance is to love’ (Altman 1989: 136).

The Meaning of the Waltz: The High, the Low, and the Great Fall Originally, the most revolutionary aspects of the waltz comprised the tight embrace of the dancing couple, but also the fact that the waltz was not specifically bound to a class: both the aristocracy and common people enjoyed dancing it. Before the emergence of the waltz, geometrical dancing formations of the aristocracy, most notably the minuet, had dominated from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (Czerny 2007: 31). The waltz succeeded the minuet. Whereas the latter dance stylized the rituals of courtship, the former celebrated the newly formed couple. The waltz expressed the subjectivity of two dancing individuals: the collective ‘us’ is surpassed by the ‘you and I’: ‘In that sense, the minuet signif ies convention, whereas the waltz transgresses convention. Every movement of the minuet could have been danced without music. Dancing the waltz without music in public was absolutely unthinkable’ (Weigel 1965: 32, my translation). Another notable characteristic of the waltz is its rhythm: Due to its three-four time, the movement of the waltz remains open and fragmentary and never comes to an end. On the contrary, the waltz rhythm suggests ‘the transgression of time’ and ‘stylizes eternity’ (Ibid.: 40). Also, the waltz is not a forward movement, but goes in circles, just for the sake of movement. Hence, ‘the waltz does not want to end. […] The end of the waltz is a trauma for the dancers, a great fall […]’ (Ibid.: 41, my translation). What Weigel is pointing at is the affinity of the waltz to feelings of ecstasy and a state of intoxication that makes one forget the passing of time. Once the waltz movement comes to an end, a painful feeling remains, comparable to a hangover after a great drunkenness. The modernity of the waltz rests on its combination of nostalgia and the sophistication of modern consciousness; on the yearning for eternity and the knowledge of the transitory and the fleeting. The waltz celebrates the moment, but has a melancholic understanding of time passing; the wisdom of the waltz anticipates the great fall. Consequently, the waltz can take on very different meanings, which is one of the reasons why it became such a prominent musical icon in cinema, especially in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

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Ernst Lubitsch, for example, plays upon the aforementioned connotation of the waltz as an expression of erotic desire. He translates the erotic tensions between a male and a female protagonist into the metaphor of the waltz, ‘the ultimate, perfect vision of surrogate sex, coupling without consummation’ (Schwartz 1975: 13). In discussing Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow from 1934, ‘the sexiest musical of the Thirties—perhaps the sexiest musical ever,’ Nancy Schwartz goes so far as to claim: ‘If the film wasn’t censored more than it seems to have been, it is because the Hays Office didn’t understand the meaning of the waltz’ (Ibid.). Another interesting example about the meaning of the waltz is provided by a Hollywood production from Paramount. Gladys Swarthout, starring next to Fred MacMurray, played the romantic lead in a little known musical comedy called Champagne Waltz (1937) by A. Edward Sutherland. One of the writing credits was Billy Wilder’s and it is noteworthy that Champagne Waltz encapsulated the basic antagonisms shaping the plot of Wilder’s later musical The Emperor Waltz, which he directed in 1948. Champagne Waltz draws its comedy from milking the clichés associated with both the Old and the New World, with high culture and low entertainment, respectively. Nationalities—American and Austrian—and their musical traditions mark the dividing line along which cultural and sexual difference is distributed. MacMurray plays Buzzy Bellew, a funky American jazz musician who arrives in 1930s Vienna and opens up a jazz club right next door to a waltz palace, run by the grandson of Johann Strauss and his grand daughter Else. At the beginning of the film, the waltz palace is crowded with elegant couples waltzing through expensively decorated ballrooms, thereby upholding the legacy of imperial Vienna, aristocratic posture, and great Strauss music. But as soon as the jazz club opens its doors, customers increasingly prefer the American way of entertainment. Rather than dancing in a strict couple formation within a royal, and, thus hierarchical ballroom setting, young people dance casually to Bellew’s swing and jazz tunes and enjoy the modern art deco ambience of the club. The stiff waltz routines at the Strauss ballroom are also contrasted with a scene at a Heuriger, where a mixed crowd waltzes in the garden. An Austrian-style folklore band, with men in Lederhosen and women in Dirndl dresses plays music (‘Merry-Go-Round’) and performs a dance routine that mocks the formality of the official waltz. In this way, they demonstrate the ability of the waltz to adapt to the formalities of ‘high’ culture as much as to the pleasures of ‘low’ entertainment. The motif of the fertile fusion between high and low is picked up again later in the

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narrative, after Buzzy returns to the America of the depression era. Back home, he is only one jazz player among many and nothing special at all; the clubs at which he performs ever more shabby. Meanwhile, in Vienna, the waltz palace has to close its doors as well. Finally, Buzzy comes up with the great business idea to fuse his jazz skills with the Strauss waltzes. At the end of the narrative, we see an elegant dance club at the top of a sky scraper, where grandson Peter Strauss and Buzzy Bellew exchange their instruments: Buzzy takes over the violin, and Strauss the saxophone, and a large orchestra performs the ‘Blue Danube’ waltz in a jazzed-up version. In a long shot of the flashing neon lights of the new club, the word ‘Waltz’ is put in a vertical line and ‘Jazz’ in a horizontal, both sharing the same ‘a’. The successful fusion of waltz and jazz is sealed in the final choreography of the huge orchestra in the club, organized in a perfectly geometrical pattern. Transplanted into the setting of urban America, the Viennese waltz once more proved its adaptability. It levels out difference of gender and nationality, connects high cultural pretensions with commercial pleasures, and successfully assimilates to the standards of American entertainment. Alfred Hitchcock used the waltz to quite different ends. In Shadow of a Doubt from 1943, waltz tunes anticipate the fateful and murderous actions to come. Joseph Cotton plays Uncle Charlie—the adored uncle of his niece Young Charlie (Teresa Wright)—who marries rich women and kills them for their money. Therefore, the police call him the merry widow murderer. Already during the opening titles, Hitchcock introduces the motif of the widow, when he shows a long shot of dancing couples waltzing to the distorted tunes of Léhar’s Merry Widow waltz. Throughout the film, the musical motif of this particular waltz recurs in an off-key version and has an uncanny quality to it, because it is clearly linked to Uncle Charlie. It appears both on the sound track, but also within the diegesis, when Young Charlie hums the sound of the waltz, trying to remember where it comes from. In the case of Shadow of a Doubt, the waltz indeed suggests a great fall: when toward the end of the narrative, Young Charlie pushes her uncle out of a moving train in self-defense, Uncle Charlie’s fatal fall is illustrated by the succeeding shot, which once again shows couples waltzing to the sinister, off-key strains of Léhar’s waltz. But the waltz in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt also points to another trauma: the loss of innocence in the life of Young Charlie, the beloved niece of the murderous Uncle Charlie.10 Hence, the durability of the Viennese waltz in international cinema derives from its capacity to take on diverse meanings, both on a visual

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and on an aural level. Dancing the waltz celebrates romance and sexual desire, excess and euphoria, and often provides the opportunity in the mise-en-scène for the excessive display of production values. The waltz can reconcile oppositions and mitigate differences due to the pull of its dizzying energy. But waltz tunes are also able to transmit the notion of nostalgia, loss, and breakdown—features intensely bound up with the experience of modernity.

Contested Territory: The Operetta and Its Allure for Cinema As much as the Viennese operetta, Austria’s famous export flourished successfully at home and abroad, it was contested territory within the Austrian (and German) cultural scene—at least among intellectuals. Especially after the end of the monarchy, cultural critics such as Karl Kraus dismissed Viennese operettas for their nostalgic Habsburg kitsch and their pathetic and sentimental fairy-tale happy endings. For Kraus and others like Siegfried Kracauer,11 the Viennese operetta was a detestable derivate of its French origins. Conceived in the mid-nineteenth century by the composers Hervé and Jacques Offenbach in Paris, the genre counted as satirical and intelligent metropolitan mass entertainment for the emergent middle class. Kraus and Kracauer hailed the French operetta, but once restructured in Vienna and Berlin, it had become more sentimental and less satirical, its plots combined escapism with mild satire, and, according to its opponents, lost their potential for social criticism. In his collection of essays, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his time from 1948, Hermann Broch, a contemporary of Kraus’, attempted to understand the reasons that had led to the disaster of World War II. In his study, he diagnosed the city of Vienna as the center of a ‘value vacuum’ that was characteristic of its time and its concomitant cultural and political problems. For Broch, the operetta signified the quintessence of cultural decline and political inwardness. According to his argument, the operetta became a prominent feature of Vienna’s ‘self-provincialization’ and retreat into the past after 1848, the year of the failed bourgeois revolution. What he calls ‘Vienna’s Gay Apocalypse’ referred to the psychological and historical condition of the bourgeoisie at the end of the nineteenth century, threatened by the slow decline of the monarchy and the loss of a value system (Wagner 1987: 21). Building upon the already existing Viennese mentality of pleasure-seeking, the bourgeoisie developed strategies of denial and retreated into hedonism, symptomatically encapsulated in

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the operetta genre, the epitome of ‘a specif ic vacuum-product’ (Broch 1984: 65). It was precisely the lack of substance and the celebration of pretense and play-acting, encapsulated in the operetta so despised by Broch, that proved most durable for cinema. From the perspective of Hollywood, the attraction of a city such as Vienna or Paris rested, not least, on an association with the operetta. Both Vienna and Paris were societies of the spectacle, cities of make-believe and of the show. The decadence of the Hapsburg Monarchy was in some ways the pervasive sense of impersonation, of pretending to be in possession of values and status that relied for credibility not on substance but on a convincing performance, on persuading others to take an appearance for the reality (Elsaesser 1999: 112).

Also, in Austria and Germany, where the stage operetta played a major role in mass entertainment, the relationship between film production and operetta was particularly close, right from the beginning of cinema. It became a most fruitful source of inspiration with regard to both narrative and music; in addition, actors from the (operetta) stage appeared on film. One of the first features ever shot in Austria was the filming of a scene from a theater production of Straus’ Ein Walzertraum (1907) by the Austrian film pioneers Luise and Jakob Fleck (Bono 1998: 30). In Germany, as Michael Wedel argues, film production was, early on, greatly influenced by the world of the operetta—the work of Ernst Lubitsch being just one case in point (Wedel 1998: 89). As is to be expected, Siegfried Kracauer remarked, again, rather bitterly on this subject matter: ‘Any obsolete Viennese operetta was draped to the screen as long as it offered the public an opportunity of escaping from the prosaic republican world to the days of the late Hapsburg monarchy’ (Kracauer 1974: 141). Ludwig Berger, as well, had mixed feelings about the operetta and its sugary ingredients. In his autobiography, he remembers the evening when Erich Pommer, head of Ufa, Germany’s leading film production company, proposed The Waltz Dream to him: ‘I immediately felt uncomfortable. This operetta-world was full of false tones. […] ‘What a decline!’, my inner-voice complained’ (Berger 1953: 190, my translation).

Becoming Viennese: Music and Sexual Agency The success of Berger’s The Waltz Dream changed the relationship between German and Austrian filmmaking profoundly. The big Babelsberg

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production studios in Berlin, with their technical know-how, proved more competent in producing a ‘real’ Viennese operetta film than the Austrian film facilities (Traubner 1996: 76).12 Berger shot on location in Vienna and used landmarks such as the castle of Schönbrunn and monuments from the inner city. The Hungarian composer Ernö Rapée adapted Oscar Straus’ music for the score and added Viennese folk songs. Originally, the stage operetta The Waltz Dream was produced at Vienna’s Carltheater in 1907 and became tremendously successful. Richard Traubner reports that it was ‘second only to Die lustige Witwe in cumulative-performance stage popularity and for many the very embodiment of pre-war, Habsburg Vienna’ (Ibid.: 73–74). To heighten the Habsburg image, Berger’s The Waltz Dream opens with a long location shot of the royal castle Schönbrunn (as does the mentioned travelogue in 1938). The intertitle reads: ‘In old Vienna—that Vienna that waltzed to “The beautiful Blue Danube”—in the splendid days before the war—the Imperial Palace, home of Archduke Ferdinand, who looked upon love as a pastime, marriage as duty—and duty as something to be avoided.’ A certain count Eberhard von Flausenburg (Jakob Tiedtke), German cousin of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, stays for a visit in Schönbrunn and hopes to marry off his homely daughter Alix (Mady Christians) to a royal archduke. Alas, Alix bears all the characteristics of a typical ‘bluestocking’, complete with outmoded long skirts and modest hats. Her hair is much too long and gives her the look of a prudish Victorian princess. Finally, she lacks the charms and the ‘pervasive sense of impersonation’ to entertain and flatter arrogant young royals with light conversation. To avoid the company of the German guest, the Archduke sends his lieutenant instead, count Preyn, nicknamed Nux (Willy Fritsch), to entertain the boring princess. Nux is introduced as the quintessential Viennese man in uniform, whose military outfit primarily has the function of impressing women. He is the typical dashing lieutenant, who loves and is loved by a number of typical Viennese girls. In a long shot, Nux is introduced as he chases a young giggling girl around a table in his private chamber. Once Nux gets stuck with the German princess, he tries to entertain her with the tourist attractions of Vienna. During a ride in a typical horse-drawn carriage (Fiaker), Nux indicates various monuments to his royal companion. Starting from the castle, they quickly arrive at the Ringstraße, and Nux proudly points to several famous buildings such as the opera house, the royal theatre, and St. Stephan’s. Alix of Flausenburg is not impressed and counters every announcement by her tour guide with a bored: ‘We don’t waste time on such things—in Flausenburg.’

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Finally, they arrive in front of the Johann Strauss monument, ‘the king of waltz,’ as Nux announces. The princess answers with her stereotypical: ‘We don’t waste our time waltzing—in Flausenburg.’ This is the cue for Nux to pull his joker: a Heuriger in Grinzing. Once the princess is transported to the vineyards and seated between some Viennese folk, the tables turn for her companion. The princess starts drinking wine, gets tipsy, loosens her tight blouse and relaxes. They both start dancing a waltz, and Nux—full of waltz, wine, and enthusiasm—gives the princess a kiss. From then on, the officer is trapped. The princess wishes to marry him and he is in no position to decline. Nux, heartbroken, grieves in front of the Johann Strauss monument, sighing, ‘Vienna, how can I ever leave you?’ Once transferred to the German provincial town of Flausenburg and married to the princess, who, due to her royal status, occupies a superior position to the Prince Consort, Nux refuses to perform his marital duties on the wedding night. After an endless wedding ceremony, he changes his uniform to a civilian suit—i.e. a form of disguise—leaves the royal palace and seeks refuge in ‘Piesecke’s Biergarten’, a place comparable to the Heuriger. There, a touring orchestra of Viennese ladies entertains the patrons with their violins, and Nux immediately recovers from his erotic disinterest. He sends a little note to Franzi (Xenia Desni), the orchestra leader, and asks for the song ‘Tales from the Vienna forest’. The people sitting next to him are utterly offended because they read this behavior (quite rightly) as an erotic move and leave the table. The intertitle reads: ‘A vulgar flirtation—just like the lower classes.’ For the citizens of Flausenburg, the Biergarten, unlike the Heuriger, does not connote a sexual playground where people from different background mingle; instead, they view their venue as a place of honorable middleclass entertainment. The image of Franzi and her violin, however, triggers a sequence in which Nux starts dreaming of Vienna. In a long shot, we see him falling asleep, his head on the table. In his fantasy, the lost city is superimposed on the face of the Viennese girl. In a long shot, he envisions images of the Viennese woods and violins; f inally, a group of nymphs emerges from the Danube riverbanks and starts dropping flowers on the head of the dreaming man. The association of Viennese nature, violins, and beautiful girls is signif icant in that it picks up elements of the tourist discourse promoting Vienna as a ‘musical city’. In 1913, for example, an off icially commissioned guide praised the city as the genius loci of both classical music and popular tunes (such as the waltzes by the Strauss dynasty).

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According to this publication, Vienna provides the perfect environment for musical talent because of the idyllic nature surrounding the city and—most importantly—her beautiful and smiling women, who inspire the male composers to their immortal music. The tight association of nature—specif ically the Viennese woods—and the smiling women is clearly proposed. The Viennese woman is the lovely inspiration for male musical genius, and nature is the preferable place to consume her expertise (Nussbaumer 2007: 62–63). Thus, the Viennese woods are erotically charged (as are the Prater and the vineyards). The combination of the Viennese forest, sexual liberty, and male musical production is picked up in cinema, for example in the successful MGM bio-pic musical The Great Waltz (1938), directed by French director Julien Duvivier and scripted by the Austrian émigré Walter Reisch. There, the musical inspiration of Johann Strauss is not only identif ied with an adulterous relationship, as Rick Altman states (Altman 1987: 141), but these erotic encounters take place in the Viennese forest. In Berger’s The Waltz Dream the image of Vienna as a combination of nature, music, and women is visually enforced through superimpositions upon Franzi, who embodies the quintessential Viennese female through her musicality and permissiveness. The charming, flirtatious, and amicable Viennese man Nux, on the other hand, embodies the emblematic exponent of the ‘feminised image of “felix Austria”,’ especially vis-à-vis Germany (Elsaesser 2000: 334).13 The artificiality of these charming qualities of the quintessential Habsburg off icer becomes evident, however, when the Viennese man is dislocated from his Viennese habitat. Confronted with the German princess, who is superior in status and unable to read the Viennese codes of seduction, the inherent proximity of Viennese charms to effeminacy becomes threatening for the male protagonist, and impotence lurks. Nux needs the qualities of the Viennese girl, inferior in status, socially undemanding, and sexually submissive, to successfully perform masculinity and to articulate male desire. Franzi, the Viennese girl, immediately triggers the stereotypical response of the Viennese man, who instantly transforms himself into the professional seducer, used to habitually chasing women (as shown in the first shot of Nux) to act out his erotic routines. Immediately, he falls in love with his Viennese compatriot. Music in general, and waltz in particular, takes on even greater significance from this point on. The waltz not only transports messages of desire, but also becomes the measure for erotic prowess. To put it differently, the capacity to express musicality via dancing is directly linked to a successful

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23. ‘We have better music in Vienna‘: Xenia Desni as Viennese girl in The Waltz Dream (1925)

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gender performance. In her futile attempt to erotically attract her Viennese husband, Princess Alix tries to prove her musicality—that is, her sexual attractiveness—and grimly plays Richard Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyrie’ on her grand piano. She plays with such force that, in a medium close-up, we see framed photos of Alix’s ancestors jumping up and down on the instrument. The husband is not aroused, of course, but as the following intertitle reads, sardonically remarks on his wife’s performance, ‘we have better music in Vienna’—meaning, of course, that ‘we have more attractive women in Vienna’. To stress the equation between a certain kind of musicality and sexual potency, Berger cuts directly from Alix, squeezed in a medium shot behind her piano, to Franzi waltzing in a long shot with a violin through her room. Both women (who do not know of each other) are obviously in love. But whereas the latter expresses her emotions in gracefully fluid and liberated movements, the former’s constrained concert and her visibly tortured instrument express nothing but repressed desire.

24. ‘Playing at being Viennese’: Mady Christians and Xenia Desni in The Waltz Dream (1925)

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Franzi’s performance of femininity is definitely more successful than that of her rival. In the following scene, the Prince consort leaves his royal wife to make a visit to the Viennese girl. From this point on, however, the narrative strategies de-essentialize gender representation by drawing attention to its performative quality. In order to attract her Viennese husband, the princess hires the Viennese girl to teach her the required qualities she is missing: ‘To become Viennese, one must begin with the soul—and the soul of Vienna is a waltz—’reads the intertitle, and we next see both women sitting at the grand piano, practicing playing the waltz. But Franzi, due to her status as a musician, not only exemplifies the most sublime proponent of the Viennese girl, insofar as she literally embodies the essence of waltz, i.e. musicality. Interestingly, she also bears traits of the New Woman, a type of modern, independent ,and sexually open-minded female with spending power. The Viennese girl, in other words, displays contradictory aspects of femininity. She has her own profession and, therefore, is financially autonomous. Her outfit—bobbed hair, short skirts—are markers of a modern and attractive woman who knows what she wants and gets it, also in sexual matters. At the same time, and as already suggested above, she bears no threatening qualities to her male counterpart but fits into the normative rules of patriarchy; especially her knowledge of the waltz functions as the social lubricant to connect smoothly with the opposite sex. Once the woman is willing to waltz, she indicates her consent for a sexual encounter. In what follows, she teaches her rival not only how to play waltz tunes on the piano—that is, to overcome her frigidity—but also cuts the princess’s hair and shortens her skirt. She helps Alix to become ‘modern’, but only to the degree that it helps to please her husband. Alix, for example, decides to give up her superior status as a princess vis-à-vis her husband and signs a waiver in order to restore the ‘natural’ gender hierarchy. The strategy works immediately. When Nux enters the room, he sees his newly attractive wife and reflexively chases her around the table—the same way he did with one of his Viennese girls back home. But the transformation of Alix into a ‘desirable’ wife has not yet been completed. Franzi, who in the meantime has tearfully realized that she and the princess are in love with the same man, hides behind a screen and altruistically plays waltz tunes on the piano. Nux sees his wife in a long shot and, due to the restricted field of vision of his point-of-view, he thinks that it is her playing the waltz. He does not realize that it is Franzi behind the screen that furnishes the sound to the image. This illusionary synchronization of image and sound on the narrative level reunites husband and wife and, finally, allows for the couple formation.

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The transformation of the shrewd princess into a desirable sexual playmate has been successful and seems to affirm the assigned gender roles within patriarchal society. At the same time, gender roles are exposed as purely performative acts: Viennese femininity turns out to be a masquerade that can easily be learned or imitated, put on and taken off. The German princess proves the artificiality of this gender performance when she instantly succeeds in ‘playing at being Viennese’.14 Deception and masquerade become the modus operandi for successful gender performance. On the narrative level, the process of dubbing is made transparent and lays bare the mechanisms by which the ‘original’ Viennese girl becomes replaceable. The happy ending is spoiled and closes on a truly bitter note. Franzi, the Viennese girl, once again deceived by an unfaithful lover above her own class, leaves the royal palace, weeping. The intertitle reads: ‘It was all a waltz dream.’ Thus, the ‘false tunes of the operetta world’ that had bothered Berger when he took on the project, turn out to be less sentimental and more radically modern than one would have expected from Kracauer’s ‘retrospective utopia’. On a meta level, The Waltz Dream appears to be self-reflexive in that it comments upon the apparatus of cinema itself. The Viennese count is not only deceived by the new make-up of his wife, but also by the illusion of the unification of body and voice, image and sound. To us, the spectators, the body as a site of truth is revealed as cinematic effect, which exposes the mechanisms of ‘seeming’ and ‘being’ as interchangeable. Berger repeatedly draws attention to the ‘false premise’ on which the happy ending is based. When Nux hears the waltz tunes played on the piano in the next room, he turns his head and the intertitle reads: ‘My wife plays a waltz!’ The camera then immediately cuts to a medium close-up on Franzi’s weeping face, indicating the mistaken identity of the piano player. The camera reveals to us, the viewers, once more the ‘true’ source of musicality, and addresses us as the accomplices of the Viennese girl. We are ‘in the know’ about the artificial character of the ‘new’ wife, and we know about the ‘transparent duplicity’, as Elsaesser called it, of the newly established ground of their marriage. The means by which Berger makes the ‘dubbing process’ transparent gesture toward a new quality of the make-believe to be accomplished with the new technology of sound. By anticipating the sound technology on a visual level, Berger reveals the principle of make-believe, of putting-on-a-show, and of role-playing, inextricably bound up with the operetta genre, as a cinematic construct. As such, the trope of ‘becoming Viennese’ and ‘the making of’ a Viennese woman, are exposed as particular discursive mechanisms that are brought about by, and are well embedded in the particular components of the

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cinematic apparatus. Another ironic aspect lies in the fact that the advanced German film industry proved more competent in the achievement of producing a ‘quintessential’ Viennese film than the Austrian one. More pointedly: in Ludwig Berger’s The Waltz Dream, the Viennese myth in general, and the Viennese woman, in particular, are presented as a special effect of cinema.

Ernst Lubitsch and the Naughty Operetta Tradition In July of 1930, Variety ran an article that stated the following: Operettas are the hardest of all types of pictures to be sold now, with exhibs claimed sidestepping them if at all possible. One important indie in the east who declares the best of the operettas were duds for him, shelved one that he booked rather than take a chance on playing it (quoted in Bradley 1996: 166).

The fate of the operetta film in the history of American sound cinema was dire, but so was the early sound musical in general.15 At the beginning of the transition to sound in the late 1920s, Hollywood studios excelled in the production of musical films. By no means a homogenous body of work, these films comprised various musical sub-genres stemming from different theater traditions, such as the revue, the operetta, and the musical comedy (Crafton 1997: 314). In 1928, sixty musical films were released, in 1930 over seventy. But the year 1930 also marked the demise of its popularity: the musical lost its allure with audiences—and the studios looked for new formulas to invigorate the genre. The sub-genre of the so-called fairy-tale operetta, associated with the name of Ernst Lubitsch and his central players, Maurice Chevalier and/or Jeanette MacDonald, seemed to be a successful recipe for the box office. Lubitsch accomplished the transition to sound with great mastery. His first sound film The Love Parade (1929) teamed the Parisian music hall star and chansonnier Maurice Chevalier with the American stage singer Jeanette MacDonald and proved to be a big hit for the Paramount studio.16 As one of the top-grossing pictures in 1930, The Love Parade17 initiated the short cycle of highly stylized continental fairy-tale musicals, all featuring risqué scripts full of salacious and naughty moments and set in a faux-European aristocratic ambience (Balio 1995: 211–13). It is well-known today that Ernst Lubitsch’s affinity with the operetta preceded the transition to sound and The Love Parade. As Barry Salt has

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demonstrated, early on, Lubitsch and his then-collaborator Hans Kräly drew their inspiration from the musical theaters and operetta productions that dominated the theater scene in Central Europe from before World War I until the 1930s (Salt 1992: 66). As early as 1917, when still working in his native city of Berlin, Lubitsch made a feature film called Das fidele Gefängnis (The Merry Jail), based on the operetta Die Fledermaus, starring Emil Jannings as janitor Frosch. In 1919, Lubitsch shot three more silent films in Germany inspired by operettas: Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) was an adaptation of Leo Fall’s operetta Die Dollarprinzessin (1907), Madame DuBarry (Passion) followed partly the narrative of Carl Millöcker’s operetta Gräfin Dubarry from 1897, while Die Puppe (The Doll) adapted the French operetta La poupée by Edmond Audrans. In Hollywood, Lubitsch remade the plot of Das fidele Gefängnis in his silent sophisticated comedy So This Is Paris (1926), going back to the original source of Die Fledermaus, the French farce Le réveillon by Henry Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Also, his second successful US musical film after The Love Parade, Monte Carlo (1930), again starring Jeanette MacDonald, was partly based on a play by Hans Müller and partly on the operetta Monsieur Beaucaire. Finally, in 1931, Lubitsch shot The Smiling Lieutenant, a sound remake of Ludwig Berger’s The Waltz Dream from 1925 and the second to last fairy-tale operetta by Lubitsch, who was to close this cycle with The Merry Widow in 1934. As noted above, Lubitsch was scheduled to shoot Ein Walzertraum in 1922 for the German film company Ufa, but abandoned the project in favor of moving to America. Together with his German collaborator Hans Kräly, he had already worked on a scenario for the film based on the short story Nux, the prince consort (Nux, der Prinzgemahl) by Hans Müller. Müller’s novel provided the source for the Austrian writers Leopold Jacobson and Felix Dörmann who had adapted the material for the libretto of Oscar Straus’ operetta The Waltz Dream (1907). Lubitsch and Kräly both knew the operetta and went back to the original source for their film scenario. The Smiling Lieutenant was shot at Astoria Studios in New York and for the first time, Lubitsch also served as the producer. The composer Oscar Straus wrote the musical score himself and added some additional chansons for Maurice Chevalier to his original operetta (Grun 1955: 150). In The Smiling Lieutenant, Maurice Chevalier plays the Viennese officer Niki, who is caught in a love triangle with Claudette Colbert as the Viennese violinist Franzi and Miriam Hopkins, portraying Princess Anna of a provincial kingdom called Flausenthurm. Unlike Berger’s treatment, in which the prince consort meets the Viennese girl after he has married the German princess,

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The Smiling Lieutenant begins with a love affair between Niki and Franzi. When Anna arrives in Vienna, Niki winks at this new girlfriend Franzi just as the royal carriage passes by. Anna thinks he is smiling at her, and in the course of the following complications and the personal intervention of the Austrian emperor Kaiser Franz Joseph, Niki is ordered to marry Anna and leave Vienna. Franzi follows her former lover with her all-women band, the Viennese Swallows, to Flausenthurm and continues her affair with him. When Anna finds out about her rival, she tricks her into a visit to the royal castle and confronts her with the infidelity of her husband. First, the two women argue and slap each other in a rather comical manner; eventually, they reconcile and Franzi teaches Anna not only how to play the piano, but also advises her by means of a racy song to ‘Jazz Up Your Lingerie’. Finally, Franzi leaves the palace with the intention of giving up Niki to his royal wife and returning to Vienna. When she bids farewell, her melancholic self-sacrificing final sentence, ‘Girls who stay for breakfast usually don’t stay for dinner,’ introduces an oddly moralistic and self-deprecating tone to the film.18 It appears useful at this point to look at the conventions governing the fairy-tale musical in order to better understand the narrative structure of this particular film. In identifying the characteristics of the American film musical in general, Rick Altman has contended that the musical is organized around a dual-focus narrative. The structure of the narrative is informed by the duality of gender and fueled by the dynamic principle of the differences between male and female. By the end of the diegesis, the two value systems represented by the male and the female protagonists are adopted by each other and their differences are resolved (Altman 1989: 20–21). Specifying various sub-genres of the musical, Altman discerns the fairy tale musical and traces its roots back to the Viennese operetta and a tradition sparked by Franz Léhar’s stage operetta The Merry Widow. The fairy tale musical combined—although to various degrees—the Viennese operetta’s naughtiness and its willingness to play out hidden desires and to engage the spectator with topics such as adultery, infidelity, innuendo, double-entendre, and so on (Ibid.: 140). In addition to the libertinism of this tradition, the fairy-tale musical also borrows the narrative structure of a love/government parallel which, for example, is operating in Lubitsch’s The Love Parade, The Merry Widow, or The Smiling Lieutenant: the love life of a ruler is deficient and needs a private solution which, in return, benefits governmental affairs (Ibid.: 149). Finally, the ‘Ruritanian motif’ is introduced, usually a tiny, confined kingdom or otherwise insular space that comes to guarantee the utopia of the fairy-tale world, ‘where the old European norm of birth, gentility, and unquestioned riches be successfully

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combined with the American ideal of liberty, individual prowess, and personal charm’ (Ibid.: 158). At first sight, then, The Smiling Lieutenant fits perfectly into the scheme of Altman’s outline: sexual energy blatantly drives the plot, a love/ government parallel propels the narrative, we shift back and forth between the male and the female focus and their respective value systems, sharpened by the difference of class and nationality. Finally, we have the Ruritanian motif, the tiny kingdom of a German provincial town called Flausenthurm. Right at the beginning, the male focus of the narrative, centered on the Maurice Chevalier character Nikolaus von Prey, is introduced. The Smiling Lieutenant opens up with a title card reading ‘Vienna’, followed by two establishing shots of the opera house and the city skyline of baroque Vienna. We then cut to a high-angle shot in a stairwell in which the camera is positioned in such a way that the door of an apartment and the stairs leading up to this door can be observed. A man enters the shot and a pan follows him coming up the stairs and ringing at the doorbell. A close-up of the doorplate reveals the inhabitant of the apartment: a certain Count Nikolaus von Preyn. The man knocks; he has in his hands the unpaid bill of a tailor for a long list of military clothes.19 Since nobody opens, the tailor descends the stairs again. On his way down, he passes a young woman who runs up the staircase and also knocks on the door. The camera, still at the high angle, picks up on the girl and follows her movement upstairs. The young woman knocks, and this time, the door is opened from inside and she disappears into the apartment. Then, the passing of the night is suggested by the lighting of a lamp. On the non-diegetic sound track, a waltz tune sets in. Given the situation—a young girl stays overnight in a count’s apartment—one can assume that an erotic encounter takes place. Thus, the tunes of the waltz are explicitly connected to sexual activity. Finally, the door opens again, and the girl cheerfully leaves. Lubitsch repeats this observant camera position outside this apartment a couple of times in the first part of the narrative and therefore accentuates the presence of an author/narrator who examines the unfolding events taking place behind closed doors from the outside. With this camera position, the visual motif of closed doors and, consequently, the topic of exclusion, is introduced. The entire introductory sequence closes on a cut to the interior of the apartment: we go directly from the outside to the most intimate space of the inside, to the bedroom. In the bed sits count Niki (Chevalier) in his silk robe and he utters the first spoken syllable of the film: a yawn that suggests pleasant exhaustion after sexual gratification. Niki then dismisses his valet,

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25. ‘We’re used to night alarms’: Maurice Chevalier in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

who runs off for a date. This scene is followed by a montage sequence: the announcement of the relief of the guards through the blowing of a trumpet, instigating the hasty return to the barracks by the soldiers, one soldier leaving his girl in a park, another one jumping out of an open window. The sequence ends with a cut to the bedroom of the count again, who is now in his pyjamas, and, when he hears the trumpets, puts an officer’s helmet on his head. In a medium close-up he looks into the camera, directly addressing the spectator and breaks into his first song, ‘A soldier’s work is never done, although we never use a gun.’ The line ‘To arms! To arms! We’re used to night alarms!’ ending with ‘We give the girls a rat-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tah’ is enforced with a suggestive marching movement of the arm, culminating in the almost hysterically cheerful refrain ‘Toujours, l’amour in the Army!’

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This entire sequence comically suggests that the activities of the royal Austrian army are nothing more than amorous maneuvers conducted— depending on the status of the officer—on a public park bench, or, if he is of higher rank, in his private bedroom. Consequently, the ‘war’ we are going to follow is solely related to the battle of the sexes. The male protagonist, however, is clearly associated with tropes considered feminine. When he f irst appears in the f ilm, the count not only sits in his bed, an intimate space usually yoked to women, but he is also dressed in his nightgown. Furthermore, the visit by his tailor with the long list of unpaid items suggests the count’s aff inity to consumerism and the display of style. He breaks into his f irst song, and, while singing, parades on his own bed, playful and performative because his masculinity is based on spectacle. The effeminate, aristocratic Viennese character is introduced as the ‘musical man’ and comes to play the object of desire—again, a role usually played by women. At the same time, his masculinity is f irmly secured through the direct gaze into the camera and at the spectator to whom he promotes his sexually aggressive persona and, thus, addresses as a complicit male. Following Altman’s suggestion about the dual-focus narrative in the musical, the Chevalier character obviously holds the male focus. But it is not his female love interest, Franzi, who introduces the female perspective here; rather, she complements the male character in that she completely conforms to his desire; she is part of his value system. As in Berger’s version of the operetta, the Viennese girl functions as the supplement to the central male figure and solidif ies his supremacy. In addition, Franzi, the Viennese girl from the lower classes, is yoked to and marked by illicit encounters with (married) military men and their dubious intentions. This aspect of Franzi as a ‘marked woman’ is also introduced early on, when Niki, still in bed, is visited by another off icer, Max (Charles Ruggles). Max is married, but he has an eye on the violinist Franzi who conducts a women’s orchestra in a beer garden. Max wants Niki to accompany him as an alibi when he really wishes to befriend the girl. At f irst, Niki pretends to be morally appalled by his friend’s intentions, but then happily goes along. When Max tells his friend that the girl he has a crush on plays the violin, Niki immediately shows his superiority as a potential lover by bragging ‘I play the piano!’ Once the two friends have taken their seats in the audience of the beer garden and listen to Franzi’s orchestra, Max becomes lost in his thoughts, taps his fingers and makes a noise, which disrupts the concert. Franzi angrily turns around and hushes Max. From then on it is quite obvious that he has

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no chance with Franzi, whereas Niki winks suggestively. After her show, Franzi cuts off Max’s advances and even refuses to talk to him. The image of the abandoned Max at the end of the scene, when Franzi and Niki go home together and leave him behind, is best described by James Harvey’s apt remark about a similar scene with Ruggles in One Hour With You, where he is also left alone on the screen: ‘The Lubitsch ephiphany: alone on the screen, ditched and discomfited. In other movies, actors command the screen when they’re alone on it; in Lubitsch, they are stranded there’ (Harvey 1998: 31). Meanwhile, in Niki’s living room, the newly formed couple plays music together before they kiss. When Franzi wants to leave, Niki suggests that she stays for breakfast, that is, over night. She (first) refuses with an often quoted line of dialogue that links sexual activities—as is often the case in the films of Lubitsch, as for example in his operetta adaptation The Oyster Princess—to the consummation of food: ‘First tea, then supper, and then—maybe—breakfast!’ Again, she wants to leave, they kiss, and finally the camera cuts to the next scene where we see two hands making breakfast with eggs and bacon in a pan. The sexual gratification of the night spent together is sealed by a joyful, if slightly ironic love duet. They are both framed spatially together in a two-shot, having breakfast and exchanging remarkable song lyrics such as ‘You put magic in the muffin’ and ‘There is paradise in every slice of bacon.’ In her discussion of the early work of Ernst Lubitsch, Sabine Hake notes that the use of music in Lubitsch’s films starts losing critical potential once he left Germany for America: For reasons that have to do with a growing concern with questions of morality, music relinquishes its subversive quality, beginning with Lubitsch’s American silent comedies. […] The utopian potential inherent in music has given way to blatant erotic innuendos and a pragmatism that reduces music to a useful auxiliary in a seduction scene. This trend culminates in the f ilm musicals where the musical references become synonymous with sexual desire and romantic love. Even the act of playing music is reduced to blatantly erotic meanings […] (Hake 1992: 171).20

Hake’s critical observations are accurate with regards to the seduction scene cited above. The association of waltz tunes with sexual activities, as introduced within the first screen minute, is furthered when Niki and Franzi play music together before their actual lovemaking.

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26. Love duett with Claudette Colbert in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

The world of music, of waltz and song, and, consequently, sex, is yielded to the Viennese characters: first and foremost to Niki and, by extension, to Franzi as his submissive, complementary counterpart. The subversive qualities Hake misses in Lubitsch’s film musicals are not to be found in song in The Smiling Lieutenant; rather, they emanate from the world of speech, associated with the second female protagonist.

‘What a Speller!’: Noise and Speech versus Song and Dance The female perspective in the dual-focus narrative, which determines the course of the narrative vis-à-vis the male character, belongs to Princess Anna of Flausenthurm. When Anna enters the story world, the romance between Niki and Franzi is already well established: the familiar semantics connected to Habsburg Vienna—the romance between the dashing lieutenant and the commoner, complete with violins, the Heuriger, waltzes, and singing—have already been smoothly played out and f ind a closure within the f irst few minutes of the f ilm. In that

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sense, Lubitsch uses the Habsburg myth and its associated personnel as a shorthand to quickly introduce the sexually aggressive man in uniform; the permissive woman of a lower status, associated with the sites of commercial culture; romantic expression via musicality; and, f inally, through the f igure of the Kaiser, a hierarchical understanding of class and social behavior. Contrary to the realm of song and musicality yielded to the male protagonist, the world represented by his female counterpart is associated with words, noises, and shrieks: Anna, who speaks in a high-pitched girl’s intonation, makes her first appearance in a noisy, steaming engine. After the train has crossed the border from Germany to Austria, it is passed by a wagon with mooing cows. Through point-of-view-editing between Anna’s father and the wagon of cows, an ironic connection is suggested between the raucous animals and the royals. When at the first unlucky encounter the lieutenant insults the princess, he is ordered to appear in court in front of father and daughter. The first task they demand from him is to spell the word ‘Flausenthurm’ correctly—with an ‘h’. This accomplishment earns him the admiration of the ladies-in-waiting who admiringly sigh ‘What a speller!’ Once Anna comes to Vienna, the semantics of building up to a romantic couple formation start repeating themselves, but this time with an ironic twist. When the carriage passes by the palace, Niki is presenting the guards to the visitors. Across the street stands Franzi, who blows kisses to her new lover. Niki looks back at her in a medium close-up. The camera cuts back and forth between them a couple of times, showing her waving and him smiling. Finally, in a medium close-up of Niki, we see him winking in the same manner in which he successfully made eye contact with Franzi the day before in the beer garden. Unfortunately, this time his twinkle initiates a different chain of events, eventually leading to a political scandal. At the same moment when Niki winks, the carriage passes by and Anna believes that the officer winked at her. She accidentally ‘intrudes’ into the visual field constructed by the shot/ reverse shot structure built up between Niki and Franzi. Suddenly it is Anna, not the submissive Franzi, who returns the gaze. Through this instance, the male pleasure of looking and its associated power relations are ironically subverted. The male character is no longer in his dominant position as the holder of the gaze, and is no longer able to control the course of the narrative. Rather, he loses his enunciate power to look and to command the erotic scenario; instead, this power is appropriated by a female, superior to his own class. In addition, since the non-musical

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Anna—unlike the Viennese woman—is unable to ‘read’ the codes of seduction presented by her male counterpart, she insists that Niki spells out and explains his erotic gestures associated with casting the look. In Berger’s silent version of the operetta, it is the (silent) Viennese girl who unfastens the masquerade of gender performance by exposing the alleged unification of body and voice, that is, of the seductive, singing female, as a hallucinatory effect of cinema. Lubitsch resorts to the means of synch sound and the noisy Anna to achieve the same effect. In her chapter on the Romantic Comedy in classic Hollywood cinema and its relation to gender, Kathleen Rowe has pointed to the ‘tendency of sound to demystify the romantic heroine. Silence has long been considered a virtue in women […]. When a woman’s image is accompanied by the sound of her voice, that image is less readily reduced to a screen for the projection of male fantasy’ (Rowe 1995: 125–126). Rowe’s observations highlights the intimate connection between the fairy-tale operetta and the romantic comedy, a point also raised by Altman (Altman 1989: 141 ff). Lubitsch utilizes this affinity to a comical extreme: Anna with her persistent speech demystifies herself as a naïve blonde, and proves to be an annoyingly insistent young woman. Her nagging demands the articulation of the codes of seduction expressed by the (male) body, and exposes and ridicules these codes at the same time as they unravel the supposed naturalness of gendered behavior. Through her repetitive questions she forces Niki to state repeatedly how beautiful he thought she was, and, further, orders him to explain what he meant when he winked. His answer ‘When we smile, we like someone; when we wink, we want to do something about it,’ is promptly followed by her winking at him. In the reverse-shot, we see Niki perplexed by this wink in such a way that he is forced to sit down. Instead of triggering (sexual) fantasies, she instigates fear. Her capacity to speak—not only as a woman, but as a woman of superior status to the male—has an almost castrating effect. The first encounter between the male aristocrat and the female royal, then, plays off differences of gender, class, and nationality through various registers on the aural scale. Male self-understanding rests on the (assumed) authority to initiate and control a flirtatious scenario through the power of the look, and, closely linked to the looking power, to express sexual prowess through musicality. The woman, on the other hand, (accidentally) unmasks these strategies by being able to return the gaze due to her superior status in class, and through her ‘mercurial use of language’ (Rowe 1995: 151). The power of language enables the female to initiate and control a new movement of the plot. With this observation in mind, it is interesting to note

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27. ‘Learning how to wink’: Miriam Hopkins in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

Sabine Hake’s analysis of Lubitsch’s early musical Monte Carlo, where she states that music and songs ‘help to overcome difference. Thus when differences need to be emphasized, Lubitsch resorts to the less identifiable and, in a way, inferior features of a sound track: noise, or sound effects’ (Hake 1992: 169). The earlier association of Princess Anna and her father with mooing cows is a case in point, as is her piercing voice, and her repetitive questions. Ironically, it is precisely the association with these ‘inferior features’ on the aural level that empower the female protagonist vis-à-vis the ‘musical’ man. Lubitsch also resorts to the realm of song and dance to emphasize the difference between the two main protagonists. After the fateful encounter with the princess and her father, Niki returns to the beer garden where Franzi anxiously waits for him, and they celebrate their love in a passionately sung duet that leaves no doubt about the carnal nature of their relationship. Following the tradition of the Viennese operetta, in Lubitsch’s musicals the spectacle of singing and dancing is integrated into the narrative and expresses the inner feelings of the characters (Ibid.: 163). 21 After each

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strophe, the lovers embrace and then burst into feverish waltz movements, communicating sexual desire and love. Through cross cutting between the singing and dancing couple in the beer garden and Anna in her bedroom, who sings the same song to her ladies-in-waiting, the three people are aurally connected in a triangle. Spatially separated, music nevertheless yokes them together, stressing both their affinity to each other while drawing attention to their different value systems with regard to sexuality. The Viennese girl openly voices her erotic desires: when she sings to Niki, ‘I love you, and I hate you, you son of a gun,’ she expresses the passions and ambivalences of adult lovemaking. Anna, on the other hand, reveals her sexual innocence when she romantically confesses to the old ladies of the court, ‘I like him, oh, I like him!’ Also, her misreading of her new love interest as ‘modest, gentle, sentimental’ reveals her girlish and inexperienced understanding of love and romance and links her to the ‘Victorian notion of woman as child’ (Rowe 1995: 130). These seemingly insurmountable differences are emphasized spatially: the Viennese couple dances in the beer garden, a public place of mass culture and consumption, whereas the princess and her ladies sit in the private chambers of a royal bedroom. This opposition between the Victorian princess and the worldly Viennese girl with her uninhibited sexuality connects The Smiling Lieutenant to themes Lubitsch negotiated in his American-made sex comedies from the 1920s, such as The Marriage Circle (1924) and So This Is Paris (1926). At first sight, this statement seems like a stretch. Both The Marriage Circle and So This Is Paris are domestic, marital comedies, taking place in contemporaneous Vienna and Paris of the 1920s and negotiate popular topics of that decade, such as flirtation and jealousy (Mast 1973: 210). Both films are set in the carefree environment of an urban bourgeois upper middle class couple and solely focus on the ‘marital much ado about nothing’ (Ibid.: 211). But in tracing back these early Lubitsch-films to their literary source, Ben Brewster has shown that works like Das fidele Gefängnis, So This Is Paris, and The Marriage Circle are all rooted in the traditions of theatrical farce and operetta. Brewster extracts the generic similarities of these narratives in order to discuss the handling of the representation of prospective scandalous material such as a philandering husband, and, even more risqué, potential affairs on the part of the married woman. He closely analyzes the plot of the original source that was later used for adaptations, that is, of the French farce Le Réveillon by Henry Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy from 1872. Le Réveillon was later translated into German and adapted as the famous operetta Die Fledermaus with music from Johann Strauss (Brewster 2001: 373). Das fidele Gefängnis and So This Is

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Paris were directly inspired by Die Fledermaus, whereas The Marriage Circle and its later musical remake, One Hour With You (1932) were based on the comedy-drama Nur ein Traum by Lothar Goldschmidt from 1909. The Marriage Circle, in other words, ‘is not a direct descendant of Le Réveillon, though it does seem to take over and develop some incidents in Das fidele Gefängnis’ (Ibid.: 382). The incidents in question all have to do with variations of the seduction plot, that is with questions of adultery and extra-marital affairs involving a married woman. Brewster extensively discusses the plots of all the films mentioned and demonstrates how in each film version the straying husband is reprimanded by the possible infidelity of his wife. Her potential seduction, however, is very difficult to handle and, for the most part, completely to be avoided because it would have been unacceptable for a mass US audience in the 1920s. Nevertheless, in So This Is Paris, through narrative ellipses, Lubitsch leaves room for speculation that the husband’s adultery was matched by his wife’s infidelity. As Brewster concludes: ‘[T]he traditions of farce and operetta […] provided a narrative machinery that permitted dramatists and filmmakers to skirt the edge of what audiences would tolerate with regard to the representation of adultery, and particularly for the woman’ (Ibid.: 387). Lubitsch was able to use this ‘machinery of farce’ to adapt sensitive topics ‘for the specific national contexts in which he found himself’ (Ibid.).

Making Love on a Park Bench: Private Boredom and Public Bliss Whereas the marital comedies of the 1920s focus on the intricacies of keeping eroticism and desire alive within the boundaries of marriage, the musicals such as The Love Parade and The Merry Widow draw attention to the difficulties of forming a couple. However, both the sophisticated comedies and the musicals are direct or indirect descendants of the operetta and farce tradition, and, thus, share similarities in themes and motifs. The Smiling Lieutenant, for example, collapses the two themes into one by merging the difficult process of becoming a couple and the motif of the extra-marital affair within the same plot. Again, Lubitsch uses the ‘narrative machinery of the operetta’ and its plot device of mistaken identity—in this case, the wink at the wrong woman and the masquerade of Anna for her husband at the end of the narrative—to fuse the topics of infidelity—Niki’s affair with Franzi—and the process of ‘qualifying-for-marriage’—Niki getting ready to finally be married to Anna. The cynical balance of the quid pro quo of the sophisticated comedies of the 1920s, where all partners involved can hold

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something against their respective spouse, and, thus, keep power relations more or less symmetrical, is not found in The Smiling Lieutenant. It is interesting to note, however, that both in The Marriage Circle and Lubitsch’s sound remake, One Hour With You, the ‘other woman’ (from Vienna), who threatens the married couple, is portrayed in an unsympathetic manner. In that way, the films diverge from Lothar Goldschmidt’s original play Nur ein Traum (1909), the literary source for The Marriage Circle, which is set in the upper-class suburb of Grunewald near Berlin. The only Viennese character in the play is an unhappily married woman called Gisela, who has the sympathies of all her friends because her husband is generally regarded as a stiff and unpleasant character. Gisela sleeps with Eugen Sponholz, a married architect, who first walks her home after a dinner party against her own wishes and finally seduces her. When her husband finds out, he gladly divorces Gisela and sends her off to her mother in Vienna. In The Marriage Circle, Lubitsch transfers the story from Berlin to Vienna. The unhappily married woman, now called Mizzi (Marie Prevost), eagerly tries to seduce her best friend’s husband (Monte Blue). Being the confidant of the wife, and, at the same time, going after the husband, makes her a far less sympathetic figure than the original Gisela. Lubitsch’s Mizzi is ruthless and manipulative, a pain to her spouse (Adolphe Menjou) who melancholically endures her behavior until he finally gets rid of her. At the end of the film, the divorced Mizzi ends up with her best friend’s friend as a consolation prize. Similarly, in One Hour With You, Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin), the other woman, appears as the scheming, false friend of the happily married Colette (Jeanette MacDonald), who eagerly pursues André (Maurice Chevalier), Colette’s husband. Colette and André are introduced as a happy couple: they are so much in love that they even make out on a public park bench. At the arrival of Mitzi, however, André succumbs to temptation. The issue of his infidelity, finally, is equalized through the pseudo-flirt between Colette and an unsuccessful suitor of hers. The husband, of course, never really doubts his wife’s faithfulness, but to grant her the personal satisfaction of revenge, he pretends to believe that while he was having his affair, she was flirting with another man as well. The image of the married couple on the park bench is of great interest. A policeman patrols the park and reprimands them for their illicit behavior in public. When he confronts Chevalier/MacDonald, they claim that they are married, and, hence, have a legitimate relationship. The policeman does not believe them since married couples do not usually kiss on a public park bench, and sends them home.

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Lubitsch repeatedly uses the imagery of couples making out in a public park being harassed by the authorities. Shortly before shooting The Smiling Lieutenant, for example, Lubitsch worked on the all-star revue film Paramount on Parade (1930). During the transition to sound, the all-star revue functioned as vehicle for studios to promote their stars and their newly acquired capacity to speak, sing, and dance (Balio 1993: 211). Among a series of short comedy sketches and musical numbers made by eleven directors, Paramount on Parade featured three musical sequences shot by Lubitsch, all of them starring Maurice Chevalier. In the second episode, called A Park in Paris, Chevalier is dressed in the uniform of a turn-of-the-century officer and patrols a public park in Paris by night. On each park bench sits a couple engaged in an amorous situation. Chevalier approaches the f irst bench and asks the young woman, who sits with her lover, for her name. Both she and we, the spectators, are first led to believe that Chevalier is taking her name and telephone number in order to admonish her for her unruly behavior in a public space. It soon becomes clear that the gendarme himself is interested in the girl and is trying to pick her up. When he continues his stroll, an agitated woman approaches him and asks for his help. She points to an older man who is on a bench with a young woman. ‘This is my husband,’ the woman exclaims, visibly upset. In a two-shot, we see her—‘the frumpy matron’ (Bradley 1996: 270)—standing next to Chevalier, who also looks at the incriminated couple. The woman obviously expects the officer to intervene on her behalf, but instead of helping her, he takes his club and knocks down the wife, much to the relief of the grateful husband. She faints and Chevalier bursts into a song about love. The entire sequence is played out in a comical manner, but the hitting of the wife who has just caught her husband appears—at least today—less amusing than obviously intended by the director. Completing their male bonding, the husband nods to Chevalier in order to thank him for his assistance and then turns back to his love interest. For him, the off icer appears to be the patron saint of adultery. After this interlude, the Chevalier character sings ‘All I Want Is Just One Girl’ in which he conjures up the right of the individual to romantic lovemaking—regardless of whether he or she is married. At the same time, the flirtatious behavior of the off icer himself undermines Chevalier’s lyrically voiced wish for ‘just one girl’; rather, romantic love seems to be bound to risqué situations in public, strongly suggesting that there is no space for romance in the conf ines of the domestic realm, especially not with one’s own spouse.

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In his sophisticated comedies from the 1920s, Lubitsch explored the difficulties of modern marriages and the dangerous attractions for married men ‘provided’ by beautiful and attractive women. The park scene in Paramount on Parade epitomizes unhappily married people who prefer the excitement of the public sphere to the dreariness of their own four walls. The same visual motif of couples on park benches reappears in The Smiling Lieutenant. When Niki walks Franzi home for the first time, they cross a park where young lieutenants are making out with their girls. When Niki passes by, they jump up and salute their superior; at the same time, in the world of the army, love making is solely bound to affairs and illicit relationships with married women, and completely opposed to the ideal of (bourgeois) marriage.

28. ‘Domestic boredom, public bliss’: Making out on a park bench in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

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Apart from Niki’s apartment—the upgraded park bench for officers of higher rank—the count and the girl meet in public places such as the beer garden or even a police station. There, they conduct their exciting encounters and their secret meetings. The private realm of the domestic, on the other hand, the palace of his Victorian wife, the princess, is associated with dull family matters, stiff court routines, and deadening ceremonies. Only when the Viennese girl (unwillingly) invades the private chambers and introduces the virtues of conspicuous consumption and the allure of consumer goods to the naïve princess—in other words, as soon as the marketplace invades the privacy of the Victorian home—does marriage start to become an attractive commodity. The transformation of the homely princess into a breathtaking, sexy ‘New Woman’ with the help of her husband’s lover—and the shift in public/private boundary—serves as a major plot device in both The Waltz Dream and The Smiling Lieutenant. But the cinematic motif of self-enhancement on the part of a married person, to spark new interest in his or her spouse, 22 reaches back at least to the late teens. The reasons for dealing with marital diff iculties and sexual mores had much to do with altering discourses on that subject matter. Since the turn of the century, expectations involved in people’s attitude toward marriage and sexuality had decisively changed in the US: the image of the ‘New Woman’ was circulating in the media and the term ‘companionate marriage’ was becoming current. As Janet Staiger explains, in connection with the propagated ‘marriage of partnership’, passion is no longer tacitly presumed, but rather actively cultivated, in order to reinforce the marriage bonds with the partner (Staiger 1995: 179). Domestic marital comedies and melodramas dealing with topics such as jealousy and f lirtation became particularly popular at the time and were picked up by directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Lois Weber, 23 Erich von Stroheim, and Ernst Lubitsch. Questions of sexual mores and manners, and of potential, or actual adultery, turned into the main material in Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedies of the silent era, and reached well into the sound period (Mast 1973: 210–211). An early example of a popular film cycle dealing with the problems of modern marriages, sexuality, and divorce were DeMille’s sex comedies, such as Old Wives for New (1918), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). DeMille’s postwar f ilms all deal with the loss of attraction after years of marriage and negotiate subjects like inf idelity and divorce. In Don’t Change Your Husband, for example, a spinsterish wife (Gloria Swanson) has lost her husband’s

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attention due to her overly moralistic and stiff lifestyle. During the course of the narrative, she is advised to loosen her behavior, turn into a smart shopper and spice up her appearance by purchasing cosmetics and gowns, fashionable clothes, and expensive jewelry—in short, by turning herself into a ‘sexual playmate’. In analyzing DeMille’s f ilms, Sumiko Higashi describes their major plot devices as ‘updating the sentimental heroine of the Victorian era as a frivolous consumer’ (Higashi 2002: 302). For Higashi, this form of self-commodification, and self-theatricalization emphasizes the importance of artif ice in marital relations. Also, ‘the social construction of the female gender was now equivalent to a masquerade enhancing sex appeal’ (Ibid.: 303). The transformation of the Victorian heroine is triggered by conspicuous consumption and turns her into a sexual commodity. This, in return, increases her own ‘exchange value’ in the marriage market and points to ‘the reif ication of marital relations: husband and wife are interchangeable parts’ (Ibid.: 307). Higashi’s observations are helpful for discussing the ending of Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant. The public park bench (and the bachelor’s apartment) is (finally) left behind in exchange for domesticity and marital bliss when, thanks to Franzi, the transformation of the old fashioned Anna into an attractive woman turns her into a desirable sex object. Consumer goods come to play a decisive role: Anna changes her hair-do, puts on fashionable evening clothes, and starts smoking cigarettes seductively. The mise-en-scène surrounding the ‘New Woman’ enhances eroticism, charged with the batteries of commodity fetishism and fueled by spending power. Lubitsch positions her in a long shot in front of a mirror, where she takes on different positions like a mannequin, admiringly gazing at her new self in an elegant evening gown and a fur, thus, stressing the ‘increasing importance of style over substance’ (Ibid.: 308). The association with a fashion show enhances the impression of a ‘decreased privatization’ of the home at the cost of the ‘increased commodification’ of the woman (Higashi 1994: 89). Another illustrative example can be found in One Hour With You, Lubitsch’s follow-up film to The Smiling Lieutenant, where the association with marriage and conspicuous consumption is pushed even further. The happily married Colette shows her girlfriend her bedroom in order to prove her husband’s devotion to her: in a two-shot, the women admire Colette’s bedroom, her expensive perfume, her elegant lingerie. Mitzi is impressed: ‘Your boudoir is adorable, simply divine, and your bed is too gorgeous, I wish it was mine.’ The bedroom of the married couple, the most

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29. ‘Enhancing the sex appeal’: The princess as ‘New Woman’ in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

intimate space of the house, is turned into a showcase and highlights the intimate connection between marriage and consumption.

The Taste of Mandelbaum and Greenstein: The Masquerade of Otherness Anna’s self-theatricalization dismantles female gender as a masquerade that enhances sex appeal, as Higashi would have it. Also, the preoccupation with appearance, role-playing, and pretense touches upon the experience of marginalization more generally. A short dialogue between the two female rivals provides a clue: when Anna asks Franzi if she purchased her elegant clothes in Vienna, Franzi answers, ‘Yes’, pointing to her furs: ‘It’s from Mandelbaum and Greenstein. It’s the only place to buy. Of course, they rob you, but it’s worth it.’

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The names Mandelbaum and Greenstein clearly refer to the Jewish owners of a fashion store, apparently the leading enterprise in town for haute couture and good taste.24 Later, when the surprised Nicki finds his elegantly dressed wife Anna and asks her, ‘Is this you?,’ she answers, ‘No, this is Mandelbaum and Greenstein.’ She then kisses him repeatedly, crying ‘This is me! And this! And this!’ But the joke is all too obvious: The ‘new’ Anna owes her updated self to the exquisite and fashionable taste of Mandelbaum and Greenstein, and the same holds true for Franzi. There is no real correct answer to ‘Is this you?’ because identity is as much bound up with appearance and style as with notions of authenticity. Thus, the distinction between appearance and essence, authenticity and simulation is collapsed within the new femininity. Appearance and role-playing took on a very different meaning in Berger’s The Waltz Dream: there, the Viennese girl was oblivious to the superiority of style over substance and did not realize that by teaching ‘her’ style to someone else she canceled herself out. There is a genuine feeling of loss at the end of Berger’s version of the operetta; originality has lost out to replaceability and seriality. Lubitsch’s version, on the other hand, shows more irony and cynicism when it comes to questions of identity and authenticity. Franzi’s answer to Anna’s question about her outfit already bears the wisdom of style and role-play and the possibility of anyone being replaceable by anybody else. She is the role model for the transformed princess because she consciously teaches her how to adapt the masquerade of a desirable female identity. And she points to her dressmakers Mandelbaum and Greenstein as the accomplices of her performance as an elegant and stylish woman. Fashion, in that sense, works as disguise as much as self-expression and a means to enhance sex appeal. It is Jewish sophistication, no less, which contributes to the allure of the Viennese girl and adds to her know-how of self-fashioning and control of appearance.25 Jewish sophistication is rooted in the experience of assimilation and knows about the necessity to adapt to the norms of a dominant culture. On a biographical note, Lubitsch’s affinity for fashion and consumer goods most likely is rooted in his own Jewish family background in Berlin in the clothing trade milieu. His father owned a clothing store for women in the Jewish neighborhood of the Scheunenviertel. But the affinity to fashion also points to the need to put on a show, a strategy frequently associated with women—and those in need of playing with different identities. As Hake puts it: ‘Lubitsch’s closeness to his female characters […] reveals the identification of the Jewish male with the marginal position of women’

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(Hake 1992: 39). In the case of The Smiling Lieutenant, Lubitsch reveals a closeness to the Viennese girl despite the fact that she is marked as the ‘other woman’, associated with illicit affairs and adultery. To put this claim more clearly: in his contemporaneous scenarios, The Marriage Circle and One Hour With You, Lubitsch treats the ‘other woman’, threatening the married couple, much more unsympathetically. The seductive women, Mizzi (The Marriage Circle) and Mitzi (One Hour With You) from Vienna of the 1920s, are not very likeable characters. Franzi, the girl from fin-de-siècle Vienna, on the other hand, gains more positive recognition, i.e. the Viennese girl and her marginalized position offers a point of identification for the author/narrator of The Smiling Lieutenant. This, again, has precisely to do with her cultural background in finde-siècle Vienna. Usually, all fairy-tale musicals take place before the backdrop of the Habsburg Empire and thus, originate in the culture of the turn-of-the century, with The Merry Widow being the most prominent example. The typical historical setting comprises the splendor of royal bedchambers and ballrooms, waltzes and champagne, and endless flirtations between charming military men and frivolous girls. It is interesting to note, however, that the charm and coziness of the Habsburg ambience is severely disrupted by the appearance on screen of a character playing the Austrian emperor Kaiser Franz Joseph (actor Con MacSunday). In The Smiling Lieutenant, his entrance is accompanied on the non-diegetic soundtrack by the so-called Kaiser hymn, which was, most likely, recognized by audiences of the time. Thus, this particular piece of music functions as a historically ‘real’ referent to the emperor and the power of the ancien régime. It is with his appearance that the light tone of comedy changes into melodrama. The sound of the Kaiser hymn, together with the actual arrival of the Emperor, introduces the downside of the Habsburg myth with its stiffening qualities of patriarchal authority and harsh insistence on class difference. Once the Kaiser hymn sets in, the male protagonist Chevalier/Niki, framed with his future father-in-law, makes a truly alarmed face for the first time. In a plan américain we see the Emperor, together with Adolphe and Niki. The Kaiser moves over to Niki and kisses him on the cheek, thus confirming his engagement to the princess of Flausenthurm. The threatening overtones of the Habsburg monarch are heightened in the next scene in which Franzi, waiting for Niki in his apartment, witnesses his return. What follows is a variation of the theme ‘the Kaiser versus the Viennese girl’. Lubitsch resorts to the editing schema and camera movement typical of silent cinema, that is, of extensive point-of-view-cutting, to

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30. ‘Truly alarming’: A Kaiser’s kiss in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

enforce the dramatic realization of Franzi that her romantic relationship has been terminated. This remarkable sequence opens with a long shot of Niki’s living room: the mobile camera tracks in and pans around the room as if looking for someone. The room is filled with flowers that have been sent to congratulate the count on his engagement, while on the background wall, in the dark, looms the portrait of the Kaiser. The entire mise-en-scène is pervaded with the atmosphere of a funeral home and this notion is reinforced through the arrangement of the bouquets. Finally, on the right hand side of the frame, the camera ‘finds’ the crying Franzi, crouched on a couch, visually removed from the center of the frame, on its margins. Franzi withdraws to the room, hastily packs her suitcase and writes a short farewell note. She leaves the apartment in a hurry and, because Niki has already started ascending the stairs, hides on the next floor. In a reaction-shot, we see her now occupying the same high-angle position from which the

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camera observed the arrival of the tailor at the very beginning of the film. This position of a point-of-view that was repeated a couple of times during the narrative, draws attention to the presence of a narrator/author. It is now the marginalized woman who takes on this viewing position, suggesting the identification of the author/narrator with the position of the expelled woman. It is through her point-of-view that we observe the return of her lover, who now disappears into his apartment and leaves her outside closed doors. On her way out, Franzi leaves the key in front of the door, once more sealing her exclusion from the ongoing events. This decisive association of the position of the author with the Viennese girl through point-of-view editing takes on great significance if one considers Lubitsch’s obsession with the visual trope of closed doors. With respect to his f ilms, especially his German costume dramas like The Eyes of the Mummy (1918) or Passion (1919), Hake claims that doors and comparable objects can be counted as Lubitsch’s favorite metaphors of cinematic representation. Hence, his affinity to ‘scenarios of exclusion’ may well point to his own experience of marginalization and the ‘awareness of one’s otherness in view of the social and cultural norms’ (Hake 1992: 50). In her reading—as well as those of the German author Frieda Grafe (Grafe 2003: 72)—these scenarios of exclusion ultimately refer to the problem of anti-Semitism.

Jewish Sophistication and the Viennese Operetta It might seem like a stretch to connect Hake’s ‘scenario of exclusion’ and its political implications with the light, fairy-tale operetta The Smiling Lieutenant. Why should the exclusion of the Viennese girl from a love relationship with an Austrian count expose any linkage to the Jewish experience of otherness? After all, the core of the narrative conflict lies in insurmountable class differences and not in ethnic or religious tension. Lubitsch, however, mobilizes the opposition of appearance and reality, intricately bound up with the operetta world of the Habsburg myth, to articulate discourses of simulation and authenticity in relation to identity, hinged upon the figure of the Viennese girl. In Berger’s The Waltz Dream, the figure of the girl exposes ‘Viennese-ness’ as inherently constructed, thus, drawing attention to class and gender as a performative act and the Viennese myth as cinematic effect. In The Smiling Lieutenant, the Viennese girl represents difference in terms of gender and class, but on a more fundamental level.

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In elaborating the ‘inner world of Ernst Lubitsch,’ Barry Salt calls into question the common claim that the themes and topics of Lubitsch’s early German films were specifically shaped by the Jewish stage comedies of Berlin (and the theater of Max Reinhardt) of the time. For Salt, ethnic film comedies such as Meyer aus Berlin or Schuhpalast Pinkus reveal no more specific Jewish influences than other films from the time; apart from some Jewish names or the setting of the Jewish shop assistant milieu, he argues, these works might as well stem from comedies by Johann Nestroy, the famous nineteenth-century Viennese writer. In other words, according to Salt the Jewish influence on the plots of Ernst Lubitsch’s films remains marginal (Salt 1992: 65). A very different approach toward the representation of Jewishness in Lubitsch’s work has been taken by Joel Rosenberg. He argues that Lubitsch enjoyed ‘playing the Jewish vulgarian,’ an image he ‘himself, as actor, had introduced to silent film in the person of Meyer from Berlin, Sigi Lachmann from Rawicz, Sally Pinkus, and similar variations on a theme’ (Rosenberg 1996: 211). Having stated this, it appears even more surprising to Rosenberg, that ‘between the earliest silents and To Be or Not to Be, virtually no Jews appear explicitly as characters in Lubitsch’s films. They are there, I think, in metaphorical or implicit ways […]’ (Ibid.: 212). When Barry Salt points to the world of the operetta as a frame of reference which so greatly influenced Lubitsch, he indirectly confirms the ‘implicit ways’ that Lubitsch represents or addresses Jewishness on screen: for the world of the operetta was very much created by Jewish composers, librettists, producers, and performers. It is now common knowledge that modern Austrian high culture of the fin-de-siècle was decisively shaped by Jewish artists, writers, composers, and intellectuals. As Steven Beller has indicated, this part of high culture was created by the liberal and progressive Jewish bourgeoisie against the dominant culture of the Habsburgs. In that sense, due to the great Jewish presence in these modern cultural movements, non-Jews who participated in these intellectual endeavors perceived themselves as entering a ‘Jewish’ world, distant from the official realm of Austrian Catholicism (Beller 2001: 45). But Jewish contribution to the high culture of the belle époque is only one side of the argument. Beller’s other point refers to the production of mass popular culture at the time. The operetta, a quintessential marker of Austrian identity, was also largely created by Jewish personnel: [T]he most ‘Austrian’ form of mass popular culture in the twentieth century, operetta, was, in its ‘Silver Era’, one where Jews were a predominating

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presence. Some of the most prominent composers of operetta in the ‘Silver Era’ were, it is true, not Jewish, such as Franz Lehár and Robert Stolz. But many of them were, from Imre Kálmán, Edmund Eysler, Leo Fall, and Leo Ascher to Oscar Straus and Ralph Benatzky. […] Even more remarkable, however, was the Jewish presence in the production of libretti and song texts. From Victor Léon to Leo Stein to Brammer and Grünwald, the operetta text was largely written by Jews, and with it, any cultural or ideological message which the operetta might convey (Beller 2001: 48).26

In light of this argument, one might say that the world of the Viennese operetta was very much a ‘Jewish’ world, in the sense noted above, and that Lubitsch, by drawing on the operetta for his films, actively participated in this Jewish world and its sensibility. This is not to say, of course, that the Jewishness of the operetta composers and librettists necessarily had a direct impact on the product itself, which was very formulaic indeed. But at times, as Beller argues, the emancipatory background of Viennese Jewry could be felt in progressive plotlines or the fact that an operetta had a Jewish character as the main hero (Ibid.: 49). A case in point is the operetta Der Rastelbinder from 1902, composed by Franz Léhar with a libretto by Victor Léon. In it, the poor Jewish peddler Bär Pfefferkorn from Slovakia plays the main part and serves as the figure of identification for the audience; despite controversial reviews, the operetta became a great success. Moritz Csáky argues, in a similar vein, that even in times of increasing anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic political slogans in the early 1910s, operetta texts stayed clear of insulting or invective slurs. Again, this had to do with the great participation of Jewish intellectuals in the production of operettas; also, as Csáky speculates, this could well be a result of the great percentage of Jews within the operetta audience who would not have tolerated anti-Semitic insults (Csáky 1998: 219). Unfortunately, the latter claim holds only partly true. Especially from 1900 onward, due to city development and immigration, a new urban middle class developed into the audience of the silver era of the operetta and stood in opposition to the established liberal bourgeoisie. Increasingly, anti-liberalism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Semitism became significant political trademarks of this new petit bourgeoisie, who felt threatened by the old bourgeoisie and particularly its assimilated Jews (Ibid.: 65). When, in 1906, for example, Oscar Straus’ operetta Die lustigen Nibelungen (The Merry Nibelungs), a burlesque travesty of the German myth, was staged in Graz, a provincial town in Austria, anti-Semitic revolts were launched by Nationalists, claiming that a ‘Jewish pig’—meaning Oscar Straus—would ridicule ‘noble German people’. As

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a result, the operetta was taken off stage (Mailer 1985: 40). Also, as Franz Mailer, the biographer of Oscar Straus reports, the premiere of A Waltz Dream in 1907 instigated anti-Semitic reactions against Straus and his libretto writers, Dörmann and Jacobson (Ibid.: 46). For my argument, however, it is important to note that both Austrian fin-de-siècle high culture and popular mass culture like the operetta or the Wienerlied (‘Viennese song’), was very much the product of Jewish creativity. The Viennese songs were quintessential shapers of Austrian identity and self-understanding, which came to play a significant role in the representation of Vienna in cinema. Characteristics of the operetta world, such as role-playing, masquerade, and make-believe, inverting class boundaries—even if only for a night—probably reflected, or at least lent themselves to a Jewish experience of assimilation. To a certain degree, these narratives are narratives of ‘passing’, of blending in and adapting to the norms of a dominant (Catholic) culture. Points of entry to such readings include the reference to Mandelbaum and Greenstein in The Smiling Lieutenant, concerning the appearance of the Viennese girl as an elegant and urban woman. Jewish sophistication, then, shaped the myth of Old Vienna as much as the Catholic Baroque of the Habsburg tradition and its most prominent figure, the Austrian monarch. In that respect, it is interesting to take a closer look at both the representation of the Kaiser and the woman from the lower classes who falls prey to the scenario of exclusion. As suggested above, the girl is abandoned by her lover as a direct result of a personal intervention of the Emperor Franz Joseph. He is the pivotal figure of decadent, old, and static Vienna and provides the perfect visual spectacle of aristocratic splendor. At the same time, the fascination with the royal appearance and its spectacularity is held in check by the threatening qualities associated with the monarchy and its rigid class regime. In addition, by utilizing the operetta world and turn-of-the-century Viennese culture, Lubitsch is able to present ‘the other woman’ in a more sympathetic light than in his contemporaneous films set in urban Vienna or Paris of the 1920s. As I have argued, the presence of the narrator is made apparent through point-of-view-editing, which cues the spectator into the subjectivity of the Viennese girl by means of stylistic devices typical for silent cinema. Thus, identification on the part of the narrator with his female character is insinuated: she is the ‘victim’ of the Habsburg myth. By the end of the narrative, however, both Habsburg and the girl are done away with: once Franzi has transferred her knowledge of Jewish sophistication to the princess, she is expelled from the narrative for a second, and most

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likely, final time. Now the ‘importance of the Ruritanian insularity in the fairy tale musical’ (Altman 1989: 158) comes into play: the characteristics of old, decadent, and aristocratic Austria have to be merged with democratic virtues associated with America. Whereas the Viennese characters display the qualities of the former, the characters from Flausenthurm are more in connection with the latter. Anna/Hopkins, although of royal descent, displays American characteristics such as a healthy disdain for her own overly stiff background, once it is revealed to her, and a certain practicality when it comes to love matters. Also, when through editing she and her father are mockingly connected to a herd of cows, this association also bears some liberating effects: once compared to the cows, the Flausenthurmer King Adolphe takes liberties with his royal cousin. When he calls the Kaiser on the phone, he addresses him with typical American colloquialisms such as ‘Hello, Emp!,’ asking him to keep a secret ‘under your crown’. Further, he insists that a marriage between his royal daughter Anna and an Austrian count is not only good for Flausenthurm, but also for Austria. And once Anna has learned from Franzi her lesson in modern womanhood, the Habsburg myth is bid farewell entirely; not only on a narrative level, when Franzi leaves to return to Vienna, but also in the non-diegetic musical score. When Franzi encourages Anna to change her Victorian behavior and take on the sensuality of Imperial Vienna (and herself), she does not teach her how to play a waltz (as did the Viennese heroine in Berger’s The Waltz Dream). Rather, she improvises typical American ragtime tunes on the piano, accompanied with such lyrics as ‘Spice Up Your Lingerie!’ The transformation of Anna, finally, shows her as an elegant wife and modern consumer who knows what accessories she has to purchase in order to pass as a sexually attractive and updated woman. When she and her husband withdraw into their bedchambers at the end of the film, for the last time we hear waltz tunes on the score, once more suggesting sexual activities. But the Old World epitomized in Imperial Vienna is left behind; a new, more modern life, represented by Anna, has begun. Flausenthurm has turned into ‘Ruritania’, the utopia of the fairy tale world: ‘Ruritania is in a sense the American dream of democratic autocracy, of benevolent despotism. It is the land, free from material concerns, where charm can indeed replace money as society’s standard’ (Ibid.). At the end of The Smiling Lieutenant, Maurice Chevalier in his nightgown sings the same song he sang right at the beginning in Vienna, only with different lyrics, and in front of the bedroom door of his royal wife. Instead of ‘We give the girls a rat-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tah’, Chevalier declares: ‘I found at home my rat-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tah, no more field campaigning.’ Again, he addresses the camera directly, advertising to the spectator the newly found

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moral grounds of his wedding bed. The echo promptly follows from his wife inside, who answers her husband with the same ‘rat-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuhtah,’ suggesting sexual satisfaction in her marriage. But female unruliness is domesticated as well: this is the only time when Anna sings a duet with Niki, and her voice is heard from behind the bedroom door, responding to his song rather than insisting on her own part in it. In that sense, a moral lesson is taught in Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant: healthy sexuality between two partners, i.e. singing a duet, is very much dependent upon the ability of the female to adapt to the standards of modern womanhood in order to enhance her sex appeal and to please her man. Still, this rather conventional call for desirable femininity is undercut by making the very process of self-theatricalization on part of the female character transparent and by utilizing the narrative mechanisms of the operetta to connect it to the principle of make-believe. In addition, there is a complicity suggested, however oblique, between the masquerading of woman to successfully perform identity and the Jewish experience of otherness. At the same time, Lubitsch points to the impact of Jewish sophistication on the world of the operetta and its contribution to the fashioning of the Habsburg myth for (American) cinema. Mandelbaum and Greenstein may only be perceived as a passing reference in the film, but they loom large in the making of the narrative.

Coda In their assessments of Lubitsch’s work, film critics and scholars have shown little enthusiasm for The Smiling Lieutenant. In Andrew Sarris’ judgment, for example, the shortcomings of the operetta film serve as a prime example of the impact of censorship and of the turning of public taste in America at the time away from ‘continental sophistication’. Sarris writes, ‘The Smiling Lieutenant […] is gravely flawed by the contradiction between the director’s exquisitely flavorsome treatment of Claudette Colbert’s demi-mondaine and the puritanical resolution of the plot to allow Miriam Hopkins’ prissy princess to come out on top for the sake of the presumably sacred marriage contract’ (Sarris 1972: 20–21). As Sarris’ reading of the film aptly suggests, by the end of The Smiling Lieutenant, one cannot help the feeling that the Maurice Chevalier character Niki, who leaves his Viennese girlfriend for his royal wife, ends up with the wrong woman. William Paul shares this feeling and takes it even further, ‘The Smiling Lieutenant moves uncomfortably toward a

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resolution that all women are the same to men […]’ (Paul 1983: 37). Even Richard Traubner comes to the rather harsh judgment that The Smiling Lieutenant is a ‘desecration of […] Ein Walzertraum’ (Traubner 1984: 477). For Sabine Hake, in her profound study on the early films of Lubitsch, The Smiling Lieutenant serves as one of the key instances to demonstrate how Lubitsch’s work increasingly shifted toward conservatism once he had left Germany for his career in Hollywood. The unevenness of The Smiling Lieutenant and, especially, of the happy ending remarked on by a lot of critics, was a result of Lubitsch’s own reluctance to yield to unequivocal closure in The Smiling Lieutenant. Its finality defies Lubitsch’s interest in seductive playfulness and sexual innuendo, as Frieda Grafe has noted quite convincingly: ‘Sex does not interest Lubitsch, because it means the end of the game. […] Lubitsch toys with desire, but he does not care for its output’ (Grafe 2003: 84, my translation). Interestingly, Lubitsch’s contemporaries appreciated his dilemma in The Smiling Lieutenant. It was, for the most part, hailed by critics, who particularly respected the accomplishment of synchronous sound and music. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times supported the film wholeheartedly: ‘In this highly successful production, M. Chevalier delivers another of his beguiling portrayals [sic] as Niki, an Austrian Lieutenant, who, while in the throes of a love affair with Franzi, a dainty performer in a Viennese beer garden, is more or less forced into a marriage with the then frumpish Princess Anna of Flausenthurm. The wit and melody come mostly through M. Chevalier, whose smiling and singing are bound to appeal to all those who see this offering.’ In addition, Hall admires ‘Herr Lubitsch’ as a ‘cinematic artist’ and ‘a master of the microphone as well as of the camera’ (New York Times, 23 May 1931). William Boehnel of The New York Telegram compared Lubitsch to French director René Clair and praised his work as an ‘excellent example of the use of silent-picture technique and talking and sound-picture method’ (New York Telegram, 24 May 1931. Quoted in Bradley 1996: 283). The New York Herald Tribune congratulated the film as a ‘piece of artistry’ (New York Herald Tribune, 24 May 1931. Quoted in ibid.: 283), and Photoplay admired it as a ‘one of the breeziest and most tuneful pieces of entertainment that we have seen in a long time,’ concluding, ‘If we must have man-and-woman and triangle stories in films, please let Mr. Lubitsch do them’ (Photoplay, July 1931. Quoted in ibid.). The Smiling Lieutenant was nominated—as was Lubitsch’s sound remake of The Marriage Circle, One Hour with You—for the 1931–32 Academy Award for Best Picture. Variety’s reviewer, however, was less enthusiastic than his colleagues and judged The Smiling Lieutenant as ‘[A] good but not a smash talker’

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(Variety, 27 May 1931). Apart from dismissing the ‘disappointing Oscar Straus score of four numbers, amongst which there isn’t a tune that will or can click,’ the reviewer presents an interesting judgment of Claudette Colbert and her character. While praising Miriam Hopkins’ performance as matching that of the star, Maurice Chevalier, Colbert is treated less favorably: ‘Miss Colbert also plays well but lacks the opportunity and sympathy here to make the foremost impression’ (Ibid.). Clearly, in the author’s evaluation the character of Franzi is not particularly likeable, and, even less, someone who begs our pity. Hall in the New York Times was not as judgmental, but also conveyed no particular sympathy for the exclusion of Franzi from the love relationship. On the contrary, for him, her participation in the transformation of her rival appears as part of light comedy: ‘Thanks, however, to the imaginative Franzi, the Princess learns a great deal about dress and hair arrangements’ (New York Times, 25 May 1931). Even though Lubitsch tried to avoid judging Franzi morally, and furthered the identification with the female protagonist through editing, the above remarks suggest that for contemporary viewers Franzi was marked as the ‘other woman’ who threatened the sacred marriage. Neither was she particularly liked, as the reviewer of Variety suggested, nor was her fate viewed as remarkably dramatic; only decades later, after the moral strength of the institution of marriage had weakened, for critics such as Sarris or Paul, the somewhat moralistic ending was worth commenting upon. Even though both The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You were box office successes, on the whole, by 1932, the cycle of the fairy-tale operetta failed to hold audience interest beyond large cities and the studios searched for new formulas to invigorate the genre. Variety’s review of The Smiling Lieutenant already indicated the general problematic of the fairy-tale operetta. It is commonly believed that the tightening of the Hays Code—especially after 1934—was responsible for the decline of the fairy tale operetta and its risqué contents, but the changing taste of the public also contributed to the demise of this sub-genre. As Balio points out, the review in Variety voices the concern that the producers of The Smiling Lieutenant were somewhat out of touch with the contemporary audiences: Their trouble is gauging the fan mentality which they consistently outdistance by that foreign flair for matters classing as politely risqué comedy and which are not so polite as broad […] This threesome’s motto almost seems to be that old vaude adage of ‘Anything for a laugh’. And what they do is funny at the Criterion, for $2, but may not register so solidly out of town’ (Variety, 27 May 1931).

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The same argument was launched against Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932), when Variety predicted that this Ruritanian operetta would probably ‘miss slightly for general release,’ because its source material appeared to be ‘alien to American ideas’ (Balio 1995: 214). William Paul also notes that in the America of the 1930s Lubitsch increasingly came under attack for his value system by a new conservatism. He quotes Jacob Lewis, who noted of Lubitsch in 1939: ‘Specializing, however, in the sophistication and realism of promiscuous sex relationships, a theme in keeping with the old postwar days, his most recent films do not show that he is keeping abreast with the swiftly changing times’ (quoted in Paul 1981: 93). However, Lubitsch’s One Hour With You turned out to be one of his greatest commercial successes; nevertheless, he abandoned the musical film until Warner Brothers in 1933 discovered a new formula to revitalize the genre with the Busby Berkeley back stage musicals, taking place in the contemporary America of the Depression milieu: 42nd Street (1933), followed by Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade. As Paul suggests, the Warner cycle together with the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical series produced by RKO and starting with Flying Down to Rio (1933), initiated profound changes in the genre which greatly differed from the musical style of Ernst Lubitsch. The new musicals, particularly those coming out of Warner Brothers, focused more on working-class people ‘who put on a show’ as well as ‘drawing more on Tin Pan Alley and jazz than the conventions of European operetta […]’; these new formulas moved the musical in a ‘direction that might be termed Americanized and democratized’ (Paul 1983: 95). Almost as if to prove this point, in 1934, Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow opened and, although praised by the critics, turned out to be a commercial disaster. Only a month later, The Gay Divorcée with Astaire and Rogers celebrated a triumph with the audience and ‘took the musical in a new direction that marked Lubitsch’s work as a thing of the past’ (Ibid.: 96). After the commercial debacle of The Merry Widow, Ernst Lubitsch was never again to direct a film based on a (Viennese) operetta, except for his very last film, That Lady in Ermine (1948). Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to conclude this project, dying in 1948. It was Otto Preminger, another German-speaking émigré, this time directly from Vienna, who took over the work and finished it.

6. Conclusion This study has explored the various ways in which films produced internationally have represented cinematic Vienna. In particular, it has focused on the use of Vienna as an imaginary mise-en-scène and the ways the city was conjured up by native Austro-Hungarian and non-native directors alike. As a result of migration, the cinematic image of the city started to travel and was reinvented, remembered, and (re)constructed in different geographical locations and time periods. In concentrating on the 1920s and 1930s, it investigated how the changing circumstances of different geographical and cultural contexts contributed to a dispersal and differentiation of this specific city’s image. The experience of modern urban life in turn-of-the-century Vienna greatly influenced the visual representation of the cinematic city. In the new layout of the historical Vienna, the Ringstraße enclosed the inner city like a circle. The inner city was the center of political and religious power, held by an aristocratic elite who were at pains to ensure a strict separation between themselves and the lower classes inhabiting the outskirts. Within this concentric city model, power relations were primarily organized horizontally. The center/periphery distinction of the city as built, spatializing a rigorous class system, became particularly viable to illustrate the city’s multifaceted and contradictory life in cinema. By filtering the analysis of ‘Vienna films’ through the ‘spatial lens’ of the city, a variety of themes and motifs came into focus. All the films discussed here and set in fin-de-siècle Vienna construct a topography of the cinematic city, in which gender and class relations are inscribed in the spatial, i.e. the horizontal layout of urban space. They establish a hierarchy between the inner city and the outer districts within the film’s narrative, which corresponds to the protagonists’ class and gender positions, and thus spatializes central dichotomies of modernity, such as center versus periphery, high versus mass culture, and tradition versus progress. This overall spatial layout that is represented in cinema makes use of certain tropes, such as, for example, the figure of the Viennese girl, a trope of femininity, who is routinely associated with the periphery of the city, the suburbs, and sites of mass culture. Generated in the literature of Arthur Schnitzler, the Viennese girl was conceived as a male fantasy that guaranteed the upper-class male moments of self-forgetfulness and authenticity in his relationship with a lower-class woman. As such, she is metaphorically inscribed into the spatial organization of the city by being herself situated

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at the margin, but nevertheless instigating a movement (of desire, fantasy, the male protagonist) from the center toward the periphery and back again. The love relationship across class difference is a recurrent narrative pattern in films set in Vienna at the turn of the century. Typically, the male protagonist at first seeks only diversion with a woman below his own status, but then really falls in love with the Viennese girl and so crosses a crucial boundary. With reference to a variety of ‘Vienna films’, the locus where the first meeting between the sexes from different social backgrounds occurred was the Prater as a popular site of mass culture. The Ferris wheel and the merry-go-round, two attractions located in the Prater, came to epitomize the amusement park as a place of seduction, because they introduce the motif of the circle and associated themes, such as circularity, repetition, and exchangeability. These themes, metaphorically based on the spatial figure of the closed form of the circle, highlight the precarious position of the Viennese girl who is closely connected to places of consumption and (erotic) distraction. The motif of circularity marks the Prater as a place of seduction, but also as a place of potential exchange of women within a commercialized landscape. The Viennese girl, in particular, oscillates in her social positioning between lover and prostitute and runs the risk of eventually being exchanged for another woman from a higher class. On a more general level, the trope of circularity highlights the inherent market quality of modernity and its threat to female subjectivity by pointing toward the constant exchangeability and renewability of all commodities, women included. In Erich von Stroheim’s first Vienna film Merry-Go-Round, the image of the circle finds its vicious expression in the recurring image of a revolving carousel with a maliciously laughing male torso in the center. Stroheim, in his Viennese films, displayed a relentless pessimism when it came to social hierarchies and their inherent class prejudice. His Viennese films, in other words, lacked a positive trust in romantic love as the means to overcome difference, or, to put it in spatial terms, to close the gap between the city center and its periphery. For him, the motif of the circle, the ‘dialectical synthesis of the moving and the fixed’ (White 1995: 23), signified a movement of deception, which eventually confirmed the status quo of power relations. By contrast, in Rupert Julian’s optimistic ending to Merry-Go-Round—after the film was taken away from Stroheim—the figure of the circle symbolized a great homogenizing energy, leveling out class differences and bringing together the ‘high’ and the ‘low’. Circular movements and their ambivalent meanings also characterize quintessential markers of ‘Viennese-ness’ in ‘Vienna films’, i.e. waltz music and dance. The waltz, an integral part of almost all musical films inspired by

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the operetta, typically carries the message of (forbidden) desire. In Ludwig Berger’s silent operetta film The Waltz Dream (1925), the Viennese girl— again, associated with a site of mass culture, the beer garden—expresses her love for the upper-class man in waltz movements. While dancing a waltz, when time seems to stand still, insurmountable differences are temporarily suspended. However, the waltz also carries the motif of circularity, that is, of interchangeability and seriality. In the case of The Waltz Dream, the waltz signifies the circular movements of desire. Eventually, the waltz carries away the upper-class man’s affection, away from the Viennese girl, and toward his upper-class wife: the tunes of waltz music easily transmit the male’s love from one woman to the next, and, ultimately, cause him to replace the Viennese girl with a woman who shares his status. Waltz music and dance simultaneously celebrate romantic love, carnal desires, and plenitude, but waltz tunes also carry with them the modern wisdom of the transitory and the fleeting. Once the waltz comes to an end, absence and loss remain, and f ixed class positions fall back into place. Berger’s film exemplifies the modernity of the waltz by exposing its multi-layered meanings, thereby proving its durable fascination for cinema. Further, he reflects upon cinema itself by laying bare the construction of the legendary myth of musical Vienna as a hallucinatory effect of realism, created by the modern technologies of the cinematic apparatus. The horizontal organization of power relations, inherent in the center/ periphery distinction and inscribed in all the films set in fin-de-siècle Vienna discussed here, also affected the spatial representation of urban space. In Ophüls’ Liebelei, for example, public urban space, i.e. the street, is discerned as a space of surveillance, controlled by the gaze of a male authority. It is the privilege of the upper classes to hire a private carriage, whereas people from the lower classes walk home by foot and remain subject to detection and control. This privilege of creating privacy in the realm of the public is a recurrent theme in the cinematic city from the 1900s, where the typical mode of transportation is the private carriage and the horse, and not the public electric tramway. To meet the need for concealment within the realm of the visible, Ophüls introduces the motif of masquerade as a strategy of self-defense against the penetrating power of the male gaze. It has been argued that the theme of the masquerade and the need for camouflage was another recurrent motif throughout this study of Viennese films. The theme of the masquerade became most explicit in Max Ophüls’ Liebelei. Ophüls used the mise-enscène of fin-de-siècle Vienna and its affinity to theatricality and the façade in order to investigate his own interests in the notions of role-play and

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the masquerade. In his Viennese film Liebelei, he suspended the notion of ‘realism’ by introducing various forms of theatricality as variations of reality. Furthermore, Ophüls kept the topographical model of center versus periphery, as mapped out by Stroheim, to convey the power relations of the city’s social geography. In addition—and in keeping with his preoccupation with notions of theatricality—he recast the center/periphery distinction in theatrical terms, by differentiating between the arena of the stage and the backstage. As has been argued, the relegation of the Viennese girl to lower-class spaces corresponded to her demotion to the ‘back stage’ of Vienna, the backstreets, and the backyards. The refusal of the Viennese girl to comply with the general practice of role-play and masquerading in order to fit into prescribed social roles, highlights the deadly undercurrents of fin-de-siècle Vienna’s celebrated theatricality. Her refusal to accept her social relegation, expressed through her spatial segregation, draws attention to procedures of exclusion and marginalization. These very mechanisms of exclusion ultimately affected Ophüls himself, who was driven out of Nazi Germany in 1933, at the same time as Liebelei was released in cinemas. In almost all the films discussed here, rooted in Habsburg Vienna, the Viennese girls took on a radically modern stance. Their ‘Viennese-ness’ denoted various concepts of womanhood, exhibiting the contradictions of femininity, caught between traditionalism and the demands of the modern world. As a response to her spatial relegation to lower-class spaces, the Viennese girl developed techniques of self-defense, which threw into question conventions of gender performances and privileges of class positions. The Viennese girls in Berger’s The Waltz Dream and in Ernst Lubitsch’s sound remake, The Smiling Lieutenant, both draw attention to the false ‘naturalness’ of their femininity, by teaching their rivals how to adapt to the desirable standard of ‘successful’ womanhood—i.e. becoming erotically attractive for their male spouse. They deconstruct femininity as a disposable masquerade. The masquerade is a typical strategy performed by women in order to respond to the demands of a patriarchal society. On a more general level, the masquerade also points to the significance of appearance and the need for camouflage. As the close reading of The Smiling Lieutenant has suggested, the theme of the masquerade also introduced the narrative motif of ‘passing’, of blending in and adapting to social and cultural norms. Lubitsch, through camera work, editing, and mise-en-scène, insinuates a particular empathy for the sojourn of the Viennese girl by making his presence as author/narrator felt in a crucial scene, when the lower-class woman is expelled from the center of the narrative, thereby revealing his ‘closeness’ to this particular character. My interpretation of The Smiling

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Lieutenant gestured toward the affinity between female masquerade and the experience of Jewish assimilation, shared by the common necessity for role-play and masquerade within a prescriptive culture. In Stroheim’s The Wedding March, the Viennese girl envisioned her victimization by the Iron Man, a deadly force of intolerance and hate located in the inner city. By mapping out historical and political discourses surrounding this particular monument, I have demonstrated that the allegorical vision of the Iron Man pointed to the specter of anti-Semitism, haunting the ‘biographical city’ of Stroheim, when he was still living in Vienna. Hence, if the Viennese girl signified a figure of difference, the Iron Man became readable as a figure of discrimination. By and large, this study has argued that the Viennese girl functioned as a figure of difference that experienced prototypical scenarios of exclusion. The mechanisms of exclusion as a result of gender and class difference are hinged upon the Viennese girl and point to other repressive mechanisms, such as the mechanisms of discrimination. In the f ilms of Stroheim, Lubitsch, and Ophüls, the f igure of the Viennese girl, firmly rooted in Vienna’s fin-de-siècle culture, served as a point of entry into the experience of otherness. In that sense, the strong affinity between directors such as Stroheim, Lubitsch, and Ophüls, and the character of the Viennese girl in their narratives, gains new significance. After the collapse of the Austrian monarchy in 1918, the reconstruction of the cinematic city needed a different spatial model of representation in order to express the changing power relations. In The Joyless Street, whose narrative takes place right after World War I, in crisis-ridden postwar Vienna, G.W. Pabst articulates class stratification along a vertical axis. The concentric center-periphery model of the city has collapsed and the social strata appear much more spatially condensed. Thus, the vertical differentiation signaled a threatening proximity between the bourgeoisie and the workers. Different classes find themselves literally living on top of each other, making power relations among them more obscure. As has been shown, Pabst consistently uses architectural categories in order to visualize the trajectories of his protagonists. The social rise and the moral downfall of his characters correspond to their spatial movements upwards and downwards, along a vertical axis. As has also been demonstrated, Pabst’s mise-en-scène recalls the radical ideas of the Viennese modernist architect Adolf Loos, who sought a new definition of space consonant with the modern split between the private and the public. Loos’ interiors followed a concept of theatricality that turned those who lived there into both actors and spectators in their own domestic realm. It is precisely this notion of

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theatricality that reverberates in Pabst’s construction of cinematic space and produces, in the field of vision, a convolution between interiors and exteriors, private and public, subject and object, rendering class difference, gender, and the power of the gaze in theatrical terms. At the heart of this theatrical spectacle lies the transformation of the female body into a commodity, or, to rephrase this assertion in cinematic terms, the transformation of woman into image. In G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street, the blurring of boundaries between the private and the public, the inside and the outside, finds its spatial expression in the model of the theater box. As has been outlined, the theater box redraws the lines between the inside and the outside within the public realm; yet this functions exactly the other way around when the theater box is inserted into the privacy of a room. As has been demonstrated with regard to Pabst and his interest in the theatricality of space, his use of the theater box within the mise-en-scène weakens the demarcation between the private and the public, between the interior and the exterior, the street and the home, and, ultimately, threatens the integrity of the female subject. The theme of shifting boundaries of privacy and public life and the reformulation of private and public space, resulting from processes of commodification within a modern urban landscape, lies at the core of almost all films examined throughout this book. The theater box, which redefines private space within the realm of the public, recalls the function of the horse-drawn carriage, the privileged mode of transportation for the upper classes in cinematic Vienna from the 1900s. Ernst Lubitsch, in his marital comedy The Marriage Circle from 1924, adopts the motif of the carriage as a space of privacy in the realm of the public. In The Marriage Circle, set in Vienna of the 1920s, the old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage is replaced by a modern cab, hired by the male bourgeois protagonist as his favored means of transportation. When, all of a sudden, a woman ‘intrudes’ into the privacy of his vehicle, she ‘threatens’ the intimacy of his marriage. In other words, in his sophisticated comedies and musical films, Lubitsch mobilized the mise-en-scène of Vienna and the operetta plot to negotiate processes of commodification with a comic twist. But whereas Pabst, in the context of postwar misery, dramatized the menacing transformation of woman into a commodity, i.e. into a prostitute, Lubitsch investigated the impact of commodification on eroticism and marital mores within the context of American consumerism. The recurring image of a male authority figure, reprimanding a couple for excessive demonstrations of affection on a public park bench, points to the problematic of keeping desire within the boundaries of marriage and in

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the realm of the domestic. Lubitsch negotiates sensitive issues of marriage, fidelity, and adultery within the framework of the farce and the operetta tradition, thereby being able to present potentially scandalous material in a manner acceptable to American audiences of the 1920s and 1930s. Overall, the aim of this book has been to outline particular spatial relations underpinning the specific make-up of Vienna’s cinematic image. The historical variation (and sometimes continuation) of these spatial power relations ranges from fin-de-siècle films to works from the period between the wars, while at the same time being crucially articulated with other critical categories. Thus, the association of the spatial model with a certain trope of femininity, but also with aspects of commodification, entertainment culture and changing gender relations, forms the theoretical backdrop against which the particular imageries of Vienna are played out. Reworked extraterritorially, these imageries of the city continually articulate the exigencies of the modern experience and address issues of anti-Semitism, anti-feminism, and class prejudice through spatial segregation—sometimes in a very subtle and almost implicit way. In the process, they lay bare mechanisms of exclusion and point to spaces of extraterritoriality, forced upon marginalized subjects, outside the gates of official culture. In the end, the ‘Vienna films’ do not fit smoothly into structures of circularity as the dominant motif of the waltz might suggest, but continue to transgress and open up such closures in sometimes progressive, sometimes anachronistic, but always imaginative ways.

Acknowledgements This project came to life at New York University, where many people had a decisive influence on its formation and its structure. I want to thank Antonia Lant, who generously guided me through the process of writing, never failing to support me with her vast expertise and her enthusiasm for all things Viennese. Thomas Elsaesser and his research on Weimar Cinema greatly inspired my work. His interest in this book and his kind supervision was of immense value. I would also like to thank Bob Stam, Anna McCarthy, and Zhang Zhen for their intellectual inspiration. For carefully reading the manuscript and sharing their insights, many thanks go to Richard Allen, Bill Simon, and Dana Polan. Thank you, too, to my peers at NYU, Karen Williams, Raz Yosef, and Sergei Kapterev for fruitful discussions on many occasions. Alexander Horwath from the Austrian Film Museum shared his huge knowledge on (Viennese) film with me, and kindly provided beautiful images from the archive. I am also indebted to Christian Dewald from the Austrian Film Archive for granting me access to rare documents. I am very grateful to Rob Mackey for proof reading the manuscript with admirable meticulousness and patience. Many thanks also to the people at Amsterdam University Press, in particular to Jeroen Sondervan. Finally, my special thanks go to Christian Höller for his unconditional long-term support of this project and the sometimes tedious process of writing this book – and for never using the word ‘divorce’. This book is dedicated to him and our daughter Sofia.

Notes Chapter 1 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

David Midgley analyzes the image of ‘mythical Vienna’ in comparison to ‘mythical Berlin’ in the German and Austrian feuilletons of the 1920s and 1930s: Whereas Vienna was perceived as a ‘place of luxury and sensuality’, Berlin, by contrast, was compared to a ‘frontier town, on the edge of the steppe’ (Midgley 2005: 171). Christian Jäger argues in a similar vein, when he claims that the intellectuals of that time period typically associated Berlin with the North, industrialization, dynamization, and technology, whereas Vienna was recognized as Southern, feminine, warm and cozy, as a city of consumption and leisure (Jäger 2005: 125). Two Austrian anthologies deal with Austrian film history in relation to fascism and emigration, and explicitly address questions of emigration and issues of an extraterritorial cinema: See Cargnelli/Omasta 1993 and Beckermann/Blümlinger 1996. For a complex discussion of the terms modernism/modernization/modernity and their impact on the discourse of the cinematic city, see Elsaesser 2008. The French scholar Jacques Le Rider, in another famous and canonized account on Viennese modernity, describes the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and its socio-cultural position as ‘simultaneously behind and in advance of the rest of Europe’ (Le Rider 1993: 11). In his reading, Vienna signifies a moment of crisis in modernity, one that anticipated the later debates of postmodernity—a postmodern condition avant la lettre (Ibid.: 26). For a comprehensive overview of Vienna as a film location in international filmmaking, see Dassanowsky 2012. Wien im Film. Stadtbilder aus 100 Jahren, a catalogue published in German on the occasion of an exhibition with the same title in Vienna, traces the changing image of Vienna in (inter-)national filmmaking. A variety of essays seek to illuminate the different perspectives on Vienna, depending on an ‘inner’ (i.e. German speaking) or ‘outer’ (i.e. international) view of the city. See Dewald/Loebenstein/Schwarz 2010.

Chapter 2 1. 2.

For a detailed account on the history and reconstruction of Sternberg’s lost film, see Horwath 2007. I am referring here to the ‘Wurstelprater’ or ‘Volksprater’ (‘People’s Prater’), the actual amusement park. As we shall see later, the Prater as a whole consisted of different ‘zones’.

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4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

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Especially since the turn of the century, in bourgeois literature, the Prater was imagined as an area where social and sexual transgressions (between the classes) could take place. In Stefan Zweig’s novella Phantastische Nacht (Fantastic night) from 1929, for example, the encounter of an aristocrat with a prostitute from the lower classes in the Prater invigorates the former’s lost vitality and brings back his lust for life. In Schnitzler’s novella Therese, (1928) the impoverished heroine, originally from an upper-middle-class family, spends an excessive night at the Prater, gets seduced by a (lowerclass) man she has just met and bears his child. In Sternberg’s less known musical film The King Steps Out, from 1936, the Prater again comes to play a significant role: The Austrian Emperor (Franchot Tone) falls in love with his future wife Elisabeth (Grace Moore) during a trip to the Prater. Similarly, in Anatole Litvak’s French film Mayerling from the same year, the heritor to the Austrian throne, prince Rudolf (Charles Boyer), pays a visit to the Prater incognito, because ‘I must have some relief from the boredom of my days,’ as he tells his servant. At the fairground, he meets a young woman, daughter of baroness Vetsera (Danielle Darrieux), who mingles with the folk, as well. They are immediately attracted to each other, and their chance meeting at the Prater culminates in their forbidden love relationship and, finally, in their suicide. For more examples featuring the Prater in international filmmaking up to the 1970s, see Buchschwendter 2004. For the history of the Prater and its attraction for (early) cinema see Dewald/Schwarz 2005. With ‘Black and Yellow’, the author refers to the colors of the Austro-Hungarian flag. The Prater was not only a topos in Stroheim’s Merry-Go-Round, but also in a cut scene from the incomplete film Queen Kelly (1929), and in his lost film Walking Down Broadway (1932). The German writer Frieda Grafe contends that Sternberg shot parts of his The Case of Lena Smith in the sets of Stroheim’s The Wedding March (Grafe 1993: 231). Koszarski lists the key differences between Stroheim’s original screenplay and Julian’s adaptation and comes to the following conclusion: ‘In fact, the Julian film [...] was a simple revision of von Stroheim’s script. All of Stroheim’s characters were retained, and few significant plot changes were introduced. [...] There is no dwelling on the horrors of the war or on the wreck of Vienna and the postwar world. The Count announces he is free to marry, as his wife has conveniently died. Agnes says that she has promised to marry Bartholomew, but the hunchback selflessly gives her up to the Count. What is really lacking is the sense of loss von Stroheim had built into his script, as well as the authority of performance one comes to expect from his films’ (Koszarski 2000: 127). See also Lennig 2000, 156–185. Lennig compares the original screenplay with the existing film material scene for scene, points out every altered detail and is more polemic than Koszarski in his tone and the

Notes

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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conclusion he reaches: ‘Throughout the film, Julian either omitted or shortcircuited almost every reference to the social, political, and moral world that Stroheim was creating. He softened everything: no collapse of society, no privation, no loss of leg, no suicide, and a pretty concluding shot of a happy couple. [...] Unhappiness, helplessness, and disillusionment haunt Stroheim’s scenario, unlike Julian’s version. Entirely missing from the released film is Stroheim’s depiction of the tensions of prewar Austria, the cries of the rabble for justice and fairness against the nobility’ (Lennig 2000: 181). The New York Times, for example, praised the film and highlighted in particular Rupert Julian’s achievement as director, without once mentioning Stroheim’s name: The New York Times Film Reviews, 2 July 1923, 155. ‘Studio records show that the picture returned a profit of $336,181, very substantial for those days [...]’ (Koszarski 2001: 128). As we shall see later, G.W. Pabst employs similar strategies in his film The Joyless Street to differentiate through mise-en-scène and lighting between bourgeois and proletarian settings and protagonists. Peiss is pursuing an argument here that was initiated by John F. Kasson: Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. New York: Hill & Wang, 1978, 8. The Jewish writer and journalist Felix Salten, who also collaborated on Max Ophüls’ script for Liebelei, became most famous with his novel Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (Bambi. A life story from the woods, Vienna 1923). In the 1930s, Disney bought the rights to ‘Bambi’ for a mere song, turning it into the world famous children’s film. In Nazi Germany, the book was banned (Rabinovici 2006: 13). The critic in The New York Times of 2 July 1923 as well points out the thematic reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s detective story. The circular movement of the carousel, synthesizing the high and the low, recalls the circular movement of the waltz, on which I will elaborate on Chapter 5. Erich von Stroheim died on 12 May 1957, in France. This notion, of course, recalls Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attraction’, but Grafe specifically refers to the peculiar cultural sensibilities of turn-of-thecentury Vienna. The topos of ‘social masquerade’ is an extremely important feature e.g. of the operetta. See Chapter 5 in this book. For a detailled discussion of Joseph Urban’s festival procession and the criticism it instigated, see Sabrina Karim Rahman’s dissertation ‘Designing Empire: Austria and the Applied Arts, 1865–1918. University of California, Berkeley, 2010. For the impact of Habsburg Vienna on the (haptic) aesthetics of Joseph Urban, Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg, see Seibel 2017.

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20. Schnitzler, for example, demonstrated the break down of traditional narrative structures and syntax in the inner monologues of his two famous protagonists Lieutenant Gustl (1900) and Fräulein Else (1924). 21. An in-depth-study of the culture of turn-of-the-century Vienna with a particular focus on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fritz Mauthner, and Ernst Mach is provided by Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin: 1973. 22. The Danube forms a kind of periphery on its own, flowing from a Northwestern direction toward the Southeast of the city. 23. For a detailed discussion about the national significance of the figure of the knight in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, see Nierhaus 1999: 162 ff. 24. On the politics of Karl Lueger and its impact on the city development, see Mattl 2000: 23 ff. 25. With ‘German’, he solely refers to the usage of the German (rather than a slavic) language, not to an annexation to Germany (Hamann 2002: 396). 26. In Chapter four, I discuss the impact of anti-Semitism in postwar Vienna of the 1920s. 27. The postcard stems from the Collection Schlaff and is held by the Austrian Jewish Museum.

Chapter 3 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

The Paramount Press Sheets for The Wedding March are held by the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. Written by Harry Carr, Stroheim’s co-writer for The Wedding March, the essay titled ‘Hollywood’s One Real Genius – “Von”’ (Photoplay 1928: 39, 138 and 139) praises Stroheim as a genius and true artist whose image as a difficult and eccentric director only tells half of the story. Rather, this article contends, Stroheim’s dedication to his artistic work justified his reportedly exhaustive methods of spending money and challenging his co-workers. On Schnitzler’s attitude toward film and his contributions to adaptations of his work for cinema, see Fritz 1982. In a new translation by William L. Cunningham and David Palmer from 2007, Schnitzler’s notion of the ‘süße Mädel’, a distinct character in his play Roundelay, is translated as ‘Sweet Young Thing’ (Schnitzler 2007: 242). When referring to this character in international cinema, I will use the term Viennese girl. The Austrian scholar of German literature, Konstanze Fliedl, provides an extensive discussion of Schnitzler’s work with regard to memory, forgetting, and gender (Fliedl 1997). The character Anatol was introduced to American audiences through Cecil B. DeMille’s completely altered Schnitzler adaptation, The Affairs of Anatol (1921).

Notes

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In his autobiography, Schnitzler recalls how his father, a doctor, showed him medical books with graphic illustrations of syphilis and other sexuallytransmitted diseases as a warning (Schnitzler 1992: 86). 8. For a detailed biographical account of Schnitzler’s numerous affairs with ‘süße Mädel’, see Sachslehner 2015. 9. Schnitzler remembers in his autobiography, how his erotic conduct with a lower-class woman was tolerated by the mother of the girl who, he speculates, was bored with her modest life as a housewife. As Schnitzler puts it, the mother seemed to nostalgically remember her own youth, where she probably was a ‘sweet young thing’ herself (Schnitzler 1992: 148). 10. In his essay ‘Die “kulturelle” Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität’ (‘The “cultural” morality of sexuality and modern nervousness’) from 1908, Freud particularly points to the development of neurosis with young women who are deliberately kept ignorant with regard to sexual matters until they get married (Freud 2004: 111–132). 11. For a discussion of the ‘femme fatale’ and the ‘süße Mädel’ in fin-de-siècle Vienna painting, see Wiltschnigg 1999: 22–25. 12. According to Alfred Doppler, Schnitzler also made use of the stereotypes of the femme fatale and the femme fragile, as for examples in his plays Der einsame Weg and Das weite Land. See Doppler 2003: 92–104. 13. For a detailed discussion of Wedekind’s Lulu and the adaptation of his plays in theater and cinema productions, see Elsaesser 2000: 264 ff. 14. For an extensive analysis of male ‘monsters’ in Schnitzler’s literature and his sociology of gender, see Pfoser 2000: 234ff. 15. Janz/Laermann argue that Christine is mistaken to believe that Fritz died out of love for another woman. In their view, Fritz is incapable of true love, period (Janz/Laermann 1977: 39). 16. Especially in Austrian cinema after 1945, the ‘sweet young thing’ turns into the image of the timeless Viennese woman, a nostalgic character endowed with the ‘typical’ attributes of romantic Viennese charm (Büttner/Dewald 1997: 293). 17. Max Ophüls was born Max Oppenheimer on 6 May 1902 in Saarbrücken, Germany, and died on 26 March 1957 in Hamburg. His ashes are buried in the cementary Père-Lachaise in Paris. 18. G.W. Pabst based his film The Joyless Street on Bettauer’s novel. For an in-depth-discussion of the work of Bettauer and his impact on cinema, see Chapter 4. 19. The cinematographer Franz ‘Frank’ Planer, who also collaborated with Ophüls’ on Letter from an Unknown Woman, was an Austro-Hungarian émigré who left Vienna for Berlin and eventually made his career in Hollywood. Planer also shot Forst’s Maskerade (1934). 20. See for example Asper 1998, 265 ff. 21. For an extensive discussion on Weimar culture between the wars, see my chapter on Pabst.

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

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I take this cue from Frieda Grafe who stresses this point by arguing that the position of the girls in the film equals the position of the spectators of the film (Grafe 2003: 91–92). On Franz Planer’s mobile camera style see Bacher 1996: 92 ff. In my chapter on Pabst, I will further elaborate on the differentiation between private and public places, especially with regard to commercial sites and the objectification of women. Once in a while other figures cross the shot as well, but the notion of uncannyness and loneliness still prevails. For a discussion of the aesthetic of modernism in the early works of Max Ophüls, especially with regard to the use of sound, see Sierek 2004. In Ophüls’ cinema, leaving from a train station is always pivotal. Just to name two examples, in The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) the unfaithful husband sends away his lover to Istanbul, and, moved by her grief, gives her the earrings of his wife as a farewell gift. As very well known, the latter come to play a decisive role in the course of the narrative. In Letter from an Unknown Woman, Lisa brings her little son to the train station for his vacation and fails to realize that the train is infected with the deadly virus of typhus. The editing patterns do not follow the 180° rule in this particular scene: in the shots of the audience, for example, people look off-screen left, whereas the next shot shows what they are supposed to see on the right. Alan Williams calls this ‘bad directional matches’ (Williams 1986: 83). In any case, this confusion of screen direction actually heightens the impression that the audience in the orchestra seats actually turns around to look at the girls, and not the Kaiser. In Chapter 5, on Ernst Lubitsch’s operetta The Smiling Lieutenant, the opposition between the Kaiser and the girl is also part of the discussion. Crown Prince Rudolf died in a suicide pact with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera in the Mayerling hunting lodge in 1889. According to official reports their deaths was a result of Kaiser Franz Joseph’s demand that the couple end their relationship. Ernest Vajda worked on the script for Reunion in Vienna. He also, with Samson Raphaelson, wrote the script for Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant (1931). As Ruth Vasey has pointed out, by the mid-1930s, Hollywood movies often disclaimed any references to the geopolitical sphere as a response to foreign protests (Vasey 1997: 210). In Schnitzler’s original play, the seduced Viennese girl becomes a rich and influential woman and ends up dominating the men around her. In that way, she turns into a femme fatale that avenges all the other Viennese girls who were ever humiliated and abandoned by men superior to their status. In the end, however, she is willing to save her former lover from his debts of honor, but when she arrives, it is too late: the officer has already shot himself to death.

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34. For a comprehensive discussion of (feminist) film theory on music and the feminine, see Flinn 1986. 35. In Austria, official film censorship had fallen after World War I and was officially re-installed on 9 March 1934 (Dassanowsky 2005: 54). 36. The film’s success even instigated a Hollywood remake, called Escapade (1935), featuring the Austrian actress Luise Rainer. 37. Walter Reisch, who left Vienna in 1936 for London prior to Hollywood, worked with famous directors such as Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder and was a key figure in the émigré-community in Hollywood of the 1940s. See Elsaesser 2000, chapter 3. 38. After his emigration to London, Wohlbrück renamed himself Anton Walbrook and worked for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, among others. Walbrook also appears as the narrator in Ophüls’ La Ronde (1950) (Cargnelli/Omasta 1993: 158). 39. Vienna provided the actual setting for most of the films made in Austria, particularly from 1938 on, when the country was annexed to Germany. After 1938, Vienna became the primary locus of the ‘Wiener Film’, which comprised mostly melodramas couched in operetta-settings and named after the production company ‘Wien-Film’. After World War II, Willi Forst, one of the most prolific directors of the ‘Wiener Film’ attempted to reinterpret these films as a site of ‘cultural’ resistance in that they secretly had propagated Viennese values such as waltz, charm, and Gemütlichkeit. Not surprisingly, this claim sparked a lot of controversial discussion within film historiography (Cf. Tillner 1996). 40. In this scene, again, Ophüls uses the technology of sound quite remarkably. Mitzi and Theo are not eyewitnesses to the duel, but listen from afar. After they hear the first shot, fired by the baron, they wait (and hope) for the second shot, fired by Fritz. But of course, the second shot never comes because Fritz is already dead. Ophüls ‘repeats’ this use of sound in the duel scene in Madame de.

Chapter 4 1.

2.

3.

In his From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer erroneously reports that Bettauer first printed his serialized novel in ‘Vienna’s leading newspaper, Neue Freie Presse’ (Kracauer 1974: 167). This false information was passed on in various pieces of writing on Bettauer. Murray Hall has corrected this mistake in his book on Bettauer (Hall 1978). As Gruber points out, for the socialist ‘Bildungszentrale’, an institution concerned with the uplifting of the educational standards of the workers, Bettauer belonged to the ‘undesirable writers’ because his work was not considered to reach a sufficiently high intellectual standard (Ibid.). Bettauer himself explained that when he once read the slogan ‘Jews get out!’ written on a wall (apparently in a public toilet) in Vienna, he got inspired to write an ‘entertaining book’ that shows by means of a ‘harmless

222 

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5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

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narrative’ what Vienna would look like without her Jewish population (Hall 2000: 106, my translation). The book was turned into the Austrian film Stadt ohne Juden (City without Jews) in 1924, directed by Hans Karl Breslauer. According to Michael Pabst, Rohstock wanted to take revenge because his wife had consulted Bettauer in intimate marital matters (Pabst 1997: 139). The trial of Rohstock, however, was a juridical scandal in itself: the 21-yearold man was declared ‘not responsible for his actions’ and committed to psychiatric care. Twenty months later, he went free and was never put to trial again. After his release, the German Nazi-party generously supported him, and Rohstock was able to open his own dental practice in Vienna. During the war he became a member of the SS. He later settled in Hannover. In an interview he gave as recently as 1988, Rohstock still showed no remorse for his deed and claimed that politicians who allowed pornography should be drowned in mud with a stone around their necks. If he had to kill someone today, though, he would refrain from shooting and use ‘a ton of dynamite instead’ (In: profil. Das unabhängige Nachrichtenmagazin. 14 November 1988, 66–67. Quoted in Gletthofer 1992: 28). Pabst invited Bettauer to visit the set in Berlin but Bettauer declined in a letter to Pabst, claiming that he was too busy at the moment with his newly opened consulting center for ‘marital problems’ (Michael Pabst quoted in Jacobsen 1997: 139). See also Helmut Lethen: Neue Sachlichkeit. 1924–1932. Studien zur Literatur des ‘Weißen Sozialismus’. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970. In Lethen’s in-depth study of this time period, the term ‘Dollarsonne’ is used to illustrate the impact of the American loans in postwar Germany: ‘The dollar sun rises on the Republic’ (Ibid.: 19). For a detailed discussion of the definition of Neue Sachlichkeit and its impact on the works of Pabst and Walter Ruttmann, see William Charles Urrichio: Ruttmann’s “Berlin” and the City Film to 1930. Diss., Department of Cinema Studies. New York University, 1981, chapter 4. For a detailed account of the socioeconomic changes produced by ‘mature capitalism’ see Singer, 2001, particularly chapter one: ‘Meanings of Modernity’, 17–35. My film analysis is based on the version of The Joyless Street, which was restored between 1996 and 1998 in the Filmmuseum Munich, by a reconstruction team consisting of Jan-Christopher Horak, Gerhard Ullmann, and Klaus Volkmer. As Horak points out, The Joylesss Street was one of the ‘most spectacular censorship cases of the era’: ‘In point of fact, the film was chopped up, mutilated and censored, like no other film in the Weimar Republic’ (Horak 1998). I will return to the aspect of censorship and its impact of the status of The Joyless Street later in this chapter. See Kracauer 1974: 157. For a detailed exploration of the city film between 1900 and 1930, and the subgenre ‘street film’, see for example Weihsmann 1997.

Notes

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

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It has been suggested by critics like Kracauer that in The Joyless Street the trajectory of the bourgeois heroine reflects the influences of Hollywood filmmaking, whereas the depiction of world of the poor reveals the concerns of German Expressionism (Petro 1990: 32). I am borrowing this phrase from Elizabeth Wilson who in her essay ‘The Invisible Flaneur’ discusses changes and transformations of urban space in the outgoing nineteenth century with particular attention to the position of women. In assessing the work of Charles Baudelaire and his view of the metropolis as the ‘site of the commodity and commodification’, she poses: ‘Baudelaire anticipated Kracauer and Benjamin in interpreting the society in which he lived in terms of an overwhelming process of commodification. The whole society was engaged in a sort of gigantic prostitution; everything was for sale […]’ (Wilson 2004: 78). In an interview with the British film magazine Close Up in 1927, Pabst described his editing methods as follows: ‘Every shot is made on some movement. At the end of one cut somebody is moving, at the beginning of the next the movement is continued. The eye is thus so occupied in following these movements that it misses the cuts’ (Close Up, no. 6, 1927: 26). All translations from the German intertitles are mine. It is interesting to note that in the original script by Haas, the encounter between Lia Leid and Regina Rosenow is described as a conflict between two women who are in love with (or at least have desire for) the same man and, thus, hate each other but pretend to be friends. In Pabst’s direction, however, this aspect of jealousy and competition is played down; instead, Pabst chooses to foreground the ironic tone and the potential complicity between the two women and the notion of interchangeability and detachment from their romantic love object. See for example Mica Nava, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’ (Nava 1997: 56–87) Anne Friedberg emphatically pleads for a ‘flaneuse’ who emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in the department stores: ‘The female flâneur, the flaneuse, was not possible until she was free to roam the city on her own. And this was equated with the privilege of shopping on her own’ (Friedberg 1993: 36). Anke Kleber takes on a very critical position vis à vis attempts to theorize a female flaneuse who emerges in the commodified space of the department stores. For Kleber, the act of shopping/consuming as a means to move around freely in the semi public sphere of a store is incomparable to ‘the art of talking a walk’ in the open space of the city, as it is usually a privilege ascribed to men, and hence bound up with male subjectivity and authorship in Weimar Germany. (See Kleber 1999, particularly chapter 9: 174). Kracauer states: ‘The many prostitutes among the passers-by also indicate that society has lost its balance’ (Kracauer 1974: 186). As Antonia Lant has pointed out accurately in a private comment, there remains the question as

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19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

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to who would recognize the signs better, however—an observer of the time, or someone in 1999. It is interesting to note that in Stroheim’s film Merry-Go-Round a similar image occurs in the opening of the film. It seems that the scenario of a woman throwing herself from a bridge in despair can be counted as the quintessential image of misery within an urban setting. A critique of Elsaesser’s reading is provided by Mary Ann Doane in her essay ‘The Erotic Barter: Pandora’s Box (1929)’ (Doane 1990: 62–79). Doane does acknowledge the qualities of the derealized image of Lulu as disruptive and frightening; at the same time, however, Lulu’s image comes to arouse male anxiety and thus, needs to be systematically eradicated. Hence, modernity and modernism, according to Doane, ‘do not necessarily promise anything to the woman; or, if they do, that promise is always already broken’ (Ibid.: 79). See also Tracy Myers who argues that the ‘questions of gender construction and sexual politics elicited by The Joyless Street are equally relevant to German and Austrian experience’ (Myers 1993: 55). As is well known, the metaphor of the masquerade was already proposed by Joan Rivière who theorized femininity as performance of sexual difference in an attempt to explicate the excessive, parodistic or fetishistic manner of female representation. See Joan Rivière: ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, in The International Journal of Psychoanalyses 10, 1929. Kristin Thompson has pointed to a variety of expressive techniques explored in international cinema of the 1910s and particularly mentioned the use of mirrors as a conspicuous way to enhance the emotional impact of the mise-en-scène (Thompson 1995: 73). Typescript of the handwritten filmscript by Willy Haas: Die freudlose Gasse. Tragödie einer Stadt nach Hugo Bettauer. Typed by Marc Sorkin. Berlin, ca. 1924. Film Study Center, MOMA, New York, 280. All translations are mine. Apart from the deletion of the Demel character, it is also interesting to note that the original film script had a scene where the rich bank director Rosenow, Regina’s father, introduces the ‘famous observer of the Viennese misery, Hugo Bettauer’ to his guests (Haas ca. 1924: 33). Hugo Ignotus (Béla Balázs), ‘Bettauer—Eine Wiener Erscheinung.’ In: Die Bühne, Jg. 1925, no. 20., 20ff. In Haas’s script, only the family Rosenow is characterized as a good-hearted Jewish family from the East who made a fortune in Vienna. All the other characters remain without mention of their confession. Marie Lechner’s final confession in front of the judge bears no traces of Bettauer’s original and highly questionable text. The murder victim, Lia Leid, is described in Haas’s script as very beautiful, very elegant, and very stupid. In the credits of The Joyless Street, there are two actresses listed with the name Tolstoi: Tamara Tolstoi as Lia Leid, and Gräfin Tolstoi in the minor part of Frl. Henriette, the maid of Frau Greifer, who, toward the end of the

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film, forces Greta Garbo into her revealing outfit. Presumably, the Austrian reviewer confused these two names, when he referred to Gräfin Tolstoi as the ‘interesting newcomer’, meaning Tamara Tolstoi as Lia Leid, and not Gräfin Tolstoi as Frl. Henriette. Thank you to Jan-Christopher Horak, for helping me establishing this fact. 29. For a discussion of Pabst’s cinema as an extraterritorial cinema, see Rentschler 1990.

Chapter 5 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

In 1921, a law to curtail European immigration to America was passed, culminating in the even stricter policy of the Immigration Act of 1924 (Petrie 2002: 3). Pabst’s The Joyless Street, for that matter, released in the US in 1927, was also very poorly reviewed. Whereas contemporary German reviews generally praised the film, Variety (on 6 July 1927) and the New York Times (on 6 July 1927) completely dismissed it. Mordant Hall of the New York Times even went so far as to call the film ‘as too pathetic for words and let it go at that’ (Ibid.). From here on, I will refer to Berger’s film by the English release title, The Waltz Dream. Michael Wedel has shown that it is necessary to differentiate between the operetta film and the film operetta in German cinema. The former more or less directly uses the narratives and the music from its source operetta; the musical orchestration is added later, but with non-synchronous sound. The film operetta, on the other hand, uses advanced technology in the attempt to synchronize image and sound (Wedel 1998: 89–90) Berger’s The Waltz Dream is an operetta film, and the musical orchestration was arranged by the Hungarian Ernö Rapée. Typically, during the period of silent cinema, the score was sent along with a film, and, depending on the cinema, large orchestras with their own prestigious directors, small ensembles of musicians, or just a traveling piano player provided for the music (King 1984: 2). The travelogue is held by the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles. As stated on the cover sheet, the script was sent to branches of MGM and designated for the restricted use in the Film Repair Room and for local censorship boards. Moritz Csáky argues that the operetta functioned as a ‘mémoire culturelle’, i.e. as a genre in which the cultural memory of the different regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and their social and cultural codes were preserved and communicated. Hence, the operetta was important for constructing a notion of identity within the multi-cultural nation state (Csáky 1998: 101). In his history of the waltz, Remi Hess points out that in the Austrian monarchy, a lot of cloisters owned vineyards and made money by selling wine

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9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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to the people. He speculates that this circumstance probably explains why religion, i.e. Catholicism never conflicted as strongly with a wine drinking culture in Vienna as it did in other places (Hess 1996: 136). Sonia and Danilo are the romantic couple in The Merry Widow and dance together the famous Merry Widow waltz. In Hitchcock’s British musical comedy Waltzes from Vienna (1934), different meanings of the waltz are negotiated through a generational conflict between Johann Strauss the father and Johann Strauss the son. Whereas the conservative and traditionalist father plays his waltzes preferably within stiff, aristocratic and official settings, the modern and progressive son is linked to the every day life of commoners, due to his relationship with the daughter of a baker: ‘Every art must march forward,’ he claims, ‘it can’t afford to stand still!’ Notably, he invents the famous tunes of the ‘Blue Danube’ waltz while observing the bakers performing their daily working routines—baking bread (Cf. Horwath 1999). As is well known, Kracauer devoted a whole study to the work of Jacques Offenbach (Kracauer 1976). The Austrian journalist and scriptwriter Willy Haas, who also wrote the script for The Joyless Street with G.W. Pabst, comments upon the GermanAustrian relationship with regard to the filming of The Waltz Dream. In a rave review of the film, Haas speculates that it was probably precisely because Berger, being German (and not Austrian), had enough distance and delicacy to transform this ‘stupid operetta libretto’ into a true work of art (Haas 1991: 140). Elsaesser argues that the Austrians—particularly after World War II—furnished their self-image as charming and ‘innocent’ folks, only interested in wine drinking and love-making and, thus, not to be held responsible for their political part before and during World War II. Kracauer’s argument takes up the issue from the point-of-view of German film history: especially the so-called Federicus-Films, Kracauer claims, promoted Austrian officers as ‘easy going, music-loving fellows,’ suggesting that ‘such effeminate enemies would be a pushover’ (Kracauer 1974: 141). I borrow this phrase from John Caughie who in his research on the reception of American television in foreign countries coined the somewhat ironically inflected term ‘playing at being American’ when he describes the identification patterns of non-American viewers with characters in American soap operas (Caughie 1990). For an in-depth study of early Hollywood musicals, see Edwin M. Bradley 1996, particularly on the operetta see chapter 7. As James Harvey points out, Jeannette MacDonald can be counted as an ‘official Lubitsch discovery’ (Harvey 1998: 16). For a detailed analysis of The Love Parade see Altman 1987: 141–151. Berger’s film also ends with the leaving (and weeping) Franzi, but since Franzi did not know that she was conducting an affair with a married man, she is never marked as the morally questionable ‘other’ woman.

Notes

19.

227

The libretto of Oscar Straus’s stage operetta suggests that the Austrian count agrees to get married to the German princess, not least because he is in monetary trouble. Also, Franzi’s band performs in Germany due to the lack of engagements in Vienna. In short, both Austrian protagonists act upon financial hardships. For the privation of members of the Austrian military and the aristocracy after World War I and their portrayal in the operettas produced between the Wars, see Lichtfuss 1989. 20. Hake praises the use of music in Lubitsch’s earliest films, where, she claims, music always poses a challenge to the existing order. Since the early films are silent, the visualization of music is achieved by the camera work (shots of ecstatic faces and bodies), (rhythmic) editing, and lighting: ‘Music appears on the scene as an extension of the body, an excess of pleasure, a supplement of reality that is capable of defying the laws of filmic realism.’ (Hake 1992: 170). 21. Here, Lubitsch’s musical following the tradition of the Viennese operetta is different from the backstage musical, for example, where the singing and dancing is motivated by the putting on of a show. 22. The motif of self-enhancement is also part of the original operetta: the German princess learns how to waltz and how to kiss from a female Viennese musician. 23. For a discussion of the films of Lois Weber and the negotiation of the changing discourse on female sexuality and modern marriage, see Rudman 1987. 24. In his novel City without Jews from 1922, Hugo Bettauer highlights the close connection between Jewish sophistication and haute couture. He devotes a chapter to the loss of good taste in high fashion once the Jewish part of the Viennese population has left the city. The former elegant Jewish department store, now owned by a Christian, is almost bankrupt. The Christian shoppers dress old fashioned and provincial (Bettauer 1926: 75–79). On a more empirical level, see Steven Beller about the occupations of Jewish immigrants in Vienna between 1867 and 1938. Beller reports that even before 1848, ‘a large unofficial Jewish population engaged in the textile trade’ (Beller 1989: 166). 25. The motif of the generous and tasteful male Jew is again brought up by Bettauer in The Joyless Street (1924), where a couple of non-Jewish girls and women discuss the advantages of having a Jewish husband/lover who typically spends more money on the elegant dress of his wife/girlfriend than the average non-Jewish man (Bettauer 1924: 66). Bettauer picks up the same subject matter in even more detail in City without Jews (Bettauer 1926: 117–121). 26. Richard Traubner stresses the same point in adding lists of Jewish directors, composers, writers, performers, etc. at the end of his dissertation (Traubner 1996: 328–333).

1. 2. 3. 4.

Illustration Credits

Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien Film Still from Merry-Go-Round (Erich von Stroheim, Rupert Julian; USA 1923) 5. Film Still from Merry-Go-Round (Erich von Stroheim, Rupert Julian; USA 1923) 6. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 7. Source: Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien. Jugendjahre eines Diktators. Piper: Munich, Zurich 2002, p. 492 8. Collection Schlaff, Jewish Museum Vienna 9. Film Still from The Wedding March (Erich von Stroheim, USA 1928) 10. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 11. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 12. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 13. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 14. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 15. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 16. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 17. Source: G.W. Pabst: Die freudlose Gasse, DVD, Filmarchiv Austria 2008 18. Source: G.W. Pabst: Die freudlose Gasse, DVD, Filmarchiv Austria 2008 19. Source: G.W. Pabst: Die freudlose Gasse, DVD, Filmarchiv Austria 2008 20. Source: G.W. Pabst: Die freudlose Gasse, DVD, Filmarchiv Austria 2008 21. Source: G.W. Pabst: Die freudlose Gasse, DVD, Filmarchiv Austria 2008 22. Source: G.W. Pabst: Die freudlose Gasse“, DVD, Filmarchiv Austria 2008 23. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 24. Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien 25. Film Stilll from The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, USA 1931) 26. Film Stilll from The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, USA 1931) 27. Film Stilll from The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, USA 1931) 28. Film Stilll from The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, USA 1931) 29. Film Stilll from The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, USA 1931) 30. Film Stilll from The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, USA 1931)

Filmography Anonymous. Der Faschingszug in Ober St. Veit (The Carnival Parade in Ober St. Veit, Austria 1910) Der Trauerzug Sr. Exzellenz des Bürgermeisters Dr. Karl Lueger (The Funeral Procession of His Excellency the Major Dr. Karl Lueger, Austria 1910) Der Besuch Kaiser Franz Josef I. am Wr. Neustädter Flugfelde (Emperor Franz Joseph I.’s Visit to the Wr. Neuststädter Airport, Austria 1910) Aus den letzten Lebensjahren weiland Sr. Majestät des Kaiser Franz Josef I. (Austria 1917) Lloyd Bacon. 42nd Street (USA 1933) Footlight Parade (USA 1933) Ludwig Berger. Ein Walzertraum (The Waltz Dream, Germany 1925) Géza von Bolváry. Das Lied ist aus (The Song is Ended, Germany 1930) Eric Charell. Der Kongress tanzt (The Congress Dances, Germany 1931) Cecil B. DeMille. Old Wives for New (USA 1918) Don’t Change Your Husband (USA 1919) Why Change Your Wife? (USA 1920) The Affairs of Anatol (USA 1921) E. A. Dupont. Love Me And The World Is Mine (USA 1928) Julien Duvivier. The Great Waltz (USA 1938) Jacques Feyder. Daybreak (USA 1931) Willi Forst. Maskerade (Masquerade in Vienna, Austria 1934) Sidney Franklin. Reunion in Vienna (USA 1933) Thornton Freeland. Flying Down to Rio (USA 1933)

232 

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Karl Grune. Die Strasse (The Street, Germany 1923) Alfred Hitchcock. Waltzes from Vienna (UK 1934) Shadow of a Doubt (USA 1943) Werner Hochbaum. Vorstadtvarieté (Suburban Cabaret, Austria 1935) Fritz Lang. Metropolis (Germany 1927) Liliom (France 1934) Robert Z. Leonard. Escapade (USA 1935) Mervyn LeRoy. Gold Diggers of 1933 (USA 1933) Anatole Litvak. Mayerling (France 1936) Ernst Lubitsch. Schuhpalast Pinkus (Shoe Salon Pinkus, Germany 1916) Das fidele Gefängnis (The Merry Jail, Germany 1917) Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy, Germany 1918) Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess, Germany 1919) Madame DuBarry (Passion, Germany 1919) Meyer aus Berlin (Meyer from Berlin, Germany 1919) Die Puppe (The Doll, Germany 1919) The Marriage Circle (USA 1924) So This Is Paris (USA 1926) The Love Parade (USA 1929) Paramount on Parade (USA 1930) Monte Carlo (USA 1930) The Smiling Lieutenant (USA 1931) One Hour With You (USA 1932) The Merry Widow (USA 1934) That Lady in Ermine (USA 1948) Max Ophüls. Liebelei (Flirtation, Germany 1933) De Mayerling à Sarajevo (Mayerling to Sarajevo, France 1938) Letter from an Unknown Woman (USA 1948) La Ronde (Roundabout, France 1950) Madame de… (The Earrings of Madame de…, France 1953)

Filmogr aphy

233

G.W. Pabst. Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, Germany 1925) Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, Germany 1929) Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, Germany 1931) Carol Reed. The Third Man (UK 1949) Walter Ruttmann. Berlin: Die Symphonie der Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Germany 1927) Mark Sandrich. The Gay Divorcee (USA 1934) Josef von Sternberg. The Case of Lena Smith (USA 1929) The King Steps Out (USA 1936) Erich von Stroheim. Merry-Go-Round (directed by Rupert Julian, USA 1923) The Wedding March (USA 1928) The Honeymoon (USA 1928) Queen Kelly (USA 1929) Walking Down Broadway (USA 1932, lost) A. Edward Sutherland. Champagne Waltz (USA 1937) Gustav Ucicky. Das Flötenkonzert von Sans-souci (The Flute Concert of Sans Souci, Germany 1930) Orson Welles. Orson Welles’ Vienna (USA 1968)

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Index of Film Titles

42nd Street (1933) 204 Affairs of Anatol, The (1921) 218n Augen der Mumie Ma, Die (The Eyes of the Mummy, 1918) 196 Aus den letzten Lebensjahren weiland Sr. Majestät des Kaiser Franz Josef I. (1917) 47 Austernprinzessin, Die (The Oyster Princess, 1919) 175, 180 Berlin: Die Symphonie der Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927) 15, 128 Besuch Kaiser Franz Josef I. am Wr. Neu­ städter Flugfelde, Der (Emperor Franz Joseph I.’s Visit to the Wr. Neuststädter Airport, 1910) 47 Büchse der Pandora, Die (Pandora’s Box, 1929) 129–30 Case of Lena Smith, The (1929) 25, 216n Champagne Waltz (1937) 163 Daybreak (1931) 22, 75, 89, 91–94, 103 De Mayerling à Sarajevo (Mayerling to Sarajevo, 1938) 86, 88 Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) 190 Dreigroschenoper, Die (The Threepenny Opera, 1931) 119 Escapade (1935) 221n Faschingszug in Ober St. Veit, Der (The Carnival Parade in Ober St. Veit, 1910) 47 fidele Gefängnis, Das (The Merry Jail, 1917) 175, 185–86 Flötenkonzert von Sans-souci, Das (The Flute Concert of Sans Souci, 1930) 14 Flying Down to Rio (1933) 204 Footlight Parade (1933) 204 Freudlose Gasse, Die (The Joyless Street, 1925) 21, 23, 109, 111–14, 116–44, 150–53, 209–10, 217n, 219n, 222n, 224–26n Gay Divorcee, The (1934) 204 Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) 204 Great Waltz, The (1938) 169 Honeymoon, The (1928) 44 King Steps Out, The (1936) 216n Kongress tanzt, Der (The Congress Dances, 1931) 67, 74

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) 12, 76, 219n, 220n Liebelei (Flirtation, 1933) 19, 20, 22, 57, 72, 75, 76–89, 93–96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105–07, 207–08, 217n Lied ist aus, Das (The Song is Ended, 1930) 14 Liliom (1934) 27 Love Me And The World Is Mine (1928) 67, 158 Love Parade, The (1929) 174–76, 186, 226n Madame de… (The Earrings of Madame de…, 1953) 220–21n Madame DuBarry (Passion, 1919) 175 Marriage Circle, The (1924) 185–87, 194, 202, 210 Maskerade (Masquerade in Vienna, 1934) 23, 101–05, 219n Mayerling (1936) 86, 88, 216n Merry-Go-Round (1923) 20, 22, 27–33, 35–43, 46, 56, 67, 89, 92, 94, 109, 206, 216n, 224n Merry Widow, The (1934) 163, 175–76, 186, 204 Metropolis (1927) 48–49 Meyer aus Berlin (Meyer from Berlin, 1919) 197 Monte Carlo (1930) 175, 184 Old Wives for New (1918) 190 One Hour With You (1932) 180, 186–187, 191, 194, 202–04 Orson Welles’ Vienna (1968) 9 Paramount on Parade (1930) 188–89 Puppe, Die (The Doll, 1919) 175 Queen Kelly (1929) 216n Reunion in Vienna (1933) 75, 89–91, 220n Ronde, La (Roundabout, 1950) 70, 76, 221n Schuhpalast Pinkus (Shoe Salon Pinkus, 1916) 197 Shadow of a Doubt (1943) 12, 164 Smiling Lieutenant, The (1931) 21, 23, 89, 91, 157, 175–96, 199–203, 208, 220n So This Is Paris (1926) 175, 185–86 Strasse, Die (The Street, 1923) 117–18, 124 That Lady in Ermine (1948) 204 Third Man, The (UK 1949) 9–11 Trauerzug Sr. Exzellenz Des Bürgermei­ sters Dr. Karl Lueger, Der (The Funeral Procession of His Excellency the Mayor Dr. Karl Lueger, 1910) 47

248  Vorstadtvarieté (Suburban Cabaret, 1935) 22, 76, 97–101 Walking Down Broadway (1932, lost) 216n Waltzes from Vienna (1934) 226n

Visions of Vienna

Walzertraum, Ein (The Waltz Dream, 1925) 21, 23, 67, 75, 155–57, 166–74, 175, 190, 193, 196, 200, 202, 207–08, 225–26n Wedding March, The (1928) 20–22, 27–28, 32, 43–45, 47–65, 67–68, 76, 87, 92–93, 95, 99, 209, 216n, 218n Why Change Your Wife? (1920) 190



Index of Names and Subjects

Achberger, Friedrich 111 Altenberg, Peter 72 Altman, Rick 160–62, 169, 179, 183, 200, 226n and fairy-tale musical 176–77 Ankum, Katharina, von 123, 130–31, 134 Ascher, Leo 198 Asper, Helmut G. 77, 219n Astaire, Fred 204 Atget, Eugène 84 Audrans, Edmond 175 Bacher, Lutz 219n Bahr, Hermann 72 Bakhtin, Mikhail 11 Balázs, Béla 149–50, 224n Balio, Tino 174, 188, 203, 204 Barrymore, John 90–91 Bataille, George 52 Baudelaire, Charles 223n Bauer, Otto 144 Bazin, André 54–55 Bebel, August 70 Beckermann, Ruth 215n Belach, Wolfgang 29 belle juive (beautiful Jewess) 148 Beller, Steven 17, 51, 117, 227n and Viennese operetta 197–98 Benatzky, Ralph 198 Benjamin, Walter 34–35, 84–85, 223n and flâneur 123 and modernity 15 Berger, Alfred von 74 Berger, Ludwig 21, 23, 67, 75, 155–57, 166–67, 169, 171, 173–75, 179, 183, 193, 196, 200, 207–08, 225–26n Berger, Senta 10 Berkeley, Busby 204 Bettauer, Hugo 23, 77, 111–13, 142–43, 152–53, 219n, 221–22n, 224n, 227n and anti-Semitism 144–45, 146–50 Betz, Matthew 54 Blue, Monte 187 Blümlinger, Christa 215n Boehnel, William 202 Bolkosky, Sidney 73 Bondy, Johanna 45 Bono, Francesco 166 Botstein, Leon 48 Boyer, Charles 216n Boyer, John W. 60 Bradley, Edwin M. 174, 188, 202, 226n Brammer, Julius 198 Breslauer, Hans Karl 221n Brewster, Ben 185–86 Broch, Hermann 165–66

Brockmann, Stephen 114 Brooks, Louise 129 Brooks, Peter 36 Brunsdon, Charlotte 11 Buchschwendter, Robert 216n Buck-Morss, Susan 123 Büttner, Elisabeth 74, 98, 100–01, 105, 219n Calaitzis, Elke 74 Calhoun, Dorothy 33, 47, 50, 59, 109 Calinescu, Matei 52 Caneppele, Paolo 30 Cargnelli, Christian 215n, 221n Carr, Harry 218n Caughie, John 226n Chamblee, Robert 76, 78 Chandler, Helen 92 Charell, Eric 67 Chevalier, Maurice 174–75, 177–79, 187–88, 194, 200–03 Chotek, Sophie (Countess) 88 Christians, Mady 167, 171 Clair, René 202 Colbert, Claudette 175, 181, 201, 203 cold persona 115–16, 120, 140–41 Colomina, Beatriz 125–26, 136 Commodifiaction 119 of female body 123–24, 127–29, 191–92 Cotton, Joseph 164 Crafton, Donald 174 Croner, Else 148–49 Csáky, Moritz 198, 225n Cunningham, William L. 218n Curtiz, Michael (Kertész, Mihály) 12 Czerny, Kathrin 162 Darrieux, Danielle 216n Dassanowsky, Robert, von 100, 215n, 220n Day, Richard 28, 43 DeMille, Cecil 190–91, 218n Desni, Xenia 67, 168, 170–71 Dewald, Christian1 74, 105, 215–16n, 219n Doane, Mary Ann 107, 224n and masquerade 135–36 Dollfuss, Engelbert 100 Donald, James 14, 84, 125 Doolittle, Hilda alias H.D. 150, 152 Doppler, Alfred 219n Dörmann, Felix 175, 199 Dupont, E.A. 67, 158 Duse, Eleonora 72 Duvivier, Julien 169 Earle 3rd, George H. 91 Eichberger, Willy 77, 80

250  Eisner, Lotte 66 Elsaesser, Thomas 14, 67, 76–77, 101, 119–20, 129–30, 158, 166, 169, 173, 215n, 219n, 221n, 224n, 226n and extraterritorial cinema 12–13 and irony 14, 104, 115 Esmond, Carl see Eichberger, Willy Esterhazy, Agnes (Gräfin) 23, 121 Etlinger, Karl 121 extraterritorial cinema 12–13, 152–53, 215n Eyman, Scott 157 Eysler, Edmund 198 Fall, Leo 161, 175, 198 femme fatale 71–73 and Eastern Jewish 148–49, 151–52 Ferris wheel 25, 206 Feyder, Jacques 22, 76, 91, 92–93, 94 Fitzpatrick, James A. 158–59 Fleck, Jakob 166 Fleck, Luise 166 Fliedl, Konstanze 218n Flinn, Carol 96, 98, 220n Fontanne, Lynne 90 Forst, Willi 23, 101, 219n, 221n Franklin, Sidney 75–76, 90 Franz Ferdinand 88 Franz Joseph 16, 29, 34, 47–48, 68, 88–89, 109, 167, 176, 194, 199, 220n Freud, Sigmund 15, 17, 46, 84, 219n Friedberg, Anne 223n Friedrich August von Sachsen 89 Frisby, David 19 Fritsch, Willy 167 Fritz, Walter 218n Fuller, Dale 56 Fürth, Jaro 116 Garbo, Greta 116, 135, 224n Garrison, Robert 139 Gass, Lars Henrik 77 George, Maude 54 Gert, Valeska 134 Gibbons, Cedric 90–91 Gilman, Sander 148–49 Gletthofer, Heidemarie 144, 222n Goldschmidt, Lothar 186–87 Grafe, Frieda 46, 82, 196, 202, 216–17n, 219n Gravina, Cesare 37 Griffith, D.W. 66 Grob, Norbert 29 Gruber, Helmut 110–12, 221n Grun, Bernard 175 Grune, Karl 12, 117–18, 124 Gründgens, Gustav 81 Grünwald, Alfred 198 Guerin, Frances 124, 138 Gunning, Tom 35, 42, 48–49, 217n

Visions of Vienna

Haas, Willy 113–14, 142–43, 153, 223–24n, 226n Habsburg myth 48, 88–89, 109–10 Hackathorne, George 29 Haenni, Sabine 36 Hake, Sabine 11, 97, 101, 180–81, 184, 193–94, 196, 202, 227n Halévy, Ludovic 175, 185 Hall, James 26 Hall, Mordaunt 64–65, 202–03, 225n Hall, Murray 112–13, 143, 221n Hamann, Brigitte 60–61, 70, 89, 218n Hánák, Péter 160 Hansen, Miriam 30–32, 35 Hanson, Einar 137 Harvey, James 180, 226n Harvey, Lilian 67, 74 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène (Baron Haussmann) 18 Hay, James 11 Heger, Jeanette 70 Heiss, Gernot 59 Henreid, Paul 13 Hersholt, Jean 93 Hervé 165 Hess, Remy 225–26n Heuriger (vinyard) 58–59 Higashi, Sumiko 191–92 Hitchcock, Alfred 12, 164, 226n Hitler, Adolf 60, 78, 117 Hoch, Winton C. 158 Hochbaum, Werner 22, 76, 97–101 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 55, 72, 110 Hope, Anthony 160 Hopkins, Miriam 175, 184, 200–01, 203 Horak, Jan-Christopher 141, 152, 222n, 226n Horak, Roman 17, 19, 49, 58 Horwath, Alexander 215n, 226n Hörbiger, Paul 77, 84 Huyssen, Andreas 55 Iron Man (Rathausmann) 50 and anti-Semitism 59–61 Jacobsen, Wolfgang 29, 222n Jacobson, Leopold 175, 199 James, Henry 160 Janik, Allan 218n Jannings, Emil 175 Janz, Ralf-Peter 38, 71, 219n Jäger, Christian 215n John, Michael 28 Julian, Rupert 109, 206, 216–17n Kaes, Anton 136 and street film 117–18 Kálmán, Imre 198 Kappelhoff, Hermann 119 Kasson, John F. 217n

251

Index of Names and Subjec ts

Keiser, Brenda 70 Kerry, Norman 29 Keun, Irmgard 134 King, Norman 225n Kleber, Anke 128, 223n Klotz, Volker 161 Koch, Gertrud 77–78 Kohlbauer-Fritz, Gabriele 148 Kohlhase, Max 117 Kolm Company 47 Komatsu, Hiroshi 25 Korda, Alexander (Korda, Sandór) 12 Kortner, Fritz 12 Koszarski, Richard 29, 44–45, 216n, 217n Kracauer, Siegfried 30–31, 117, 128, 140–41, 165, 221–23n and anti-modern (Old) Vienna 16, 30, 35, 173 and modernity 15 and Neue Sachlichkeit 114 and operetta 157–58, 165–66, 226n Kraus, Karl 51, 55, 72, 110, 165 Krauss, Werner 117, 143 Kräly, Hans 175 Kreimeier, Klaus 116 Laemmle, Carl 28 Laermann, Klaus 38, 71, 219n Lamarr, Hedi 13 Landay, Lori 65 Lang, Fritz 13, 26–27, 48, 221n Langlois, Henri 45 Lant, Antonia 223n Le Corbusier 126 Léhar, Franz 160–61, 164, 176, 198 Lennig, Arthur 29, 45–46, 216–27n Léon, Victor 198 Leopold of Austria (Archduke) 67–68, 89 Le Rider, Jacques 215n Leser, Norbert 110 Lethen, Helmut 222n and cold persona 115–16 Lewis, Jacob 204 Lichtfuss, Martin 227n Liebeneiner, Wolfgang 80 Litvak, Anatole 19, 216n Loebenstein, Michael 215n London, Jack 112 Loos, Adolf 51, 125–26, 136, 209 and Ringstraße 18 Lubitsch, Ernst 9, 13, 21, 23–24, 67, 75, 89, 91, 155–57, 160, 163, 166, 174–77, 180–91, 193–94, 196–99, 201–04, 208–11, 220-21n, 226-27n Lueger, Karl and anti-Semitism 16–17, 60–61 and modernization 17, 60, 218n Luise von Österreich-Toskana 89 Lunt, Alfred 90 Lütgens, Annelie 130–31

MacDonald, Jeanette 174–75, 187, 226n Mach, Ernst 55, 218n Mack, Hughie 56 MacMurray, Fred 163 MacSunday, Con 194 Maderthaner, Wolfgang 19, 40, 60 Magris, Claudio 109–10 Mahler, Gustav 51 Mailer, Franz 199 Mamoulian, Ruben 204 marital comedy 185–86 masquerade 130, 192–93 and cold persona 120, 140–41 and female spectatorship 135–36 Mast, Gerald 185, 190 Mattl, Siegfried 34, 89, 218n Mauthner, Fritz 55, 218n May, Jo 12 May, Mia 12 McArthur, Colin 10–11, 22 McGilligan, Patrick 26–27 Meilhac, Henry 175, 185 Menjou, Adolphe 187 Midgley, David 215n Millöcker, Carl 161, 175 modernity 15 and gender 141 and waltz 162, 164–65 Molnár, Ferenc 27 Moore, Grace 216n Morgan, Frank 91 Moser, Hans 97 Musil, Robert 55, 110 Musner, Lutz 19, 40, 60 Müller, Hans 175 Myers, Tracy 224n Nava, Mica 223n Nepf, Markus 47 Nestroy, Johann 197 New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) 114–16, 222n New Woman 172, 190–92, see also Viennese girl and New Woman Nichols, George 54 Nielsen, Asta 23, 116, 139–40 Nierhaus, Irene 218n Novarro, Ramon 92, 94 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 21 Nussbaumer, Martina 159, 169 Offenbach, Jacques 165, 226n Olsen, Donald 133–34 Omasta, Michael 215n, 221n Operetta 159–61, 165–66, 174–75, 185–86 and fairy tale musical 176–77 and Jews 197–99

252  and Merry Widow 161 and operetta film 174, 225n and Viennese operetta 160–62 Ophüls, Max 12–13, 19–20, 22, 57, 70, 72, 75–78, 80–83, 86, 88–89, 93–94, 98, 105–07, 207–09, 217n, 219–21n and sound cinema 85 Otto, Paul 86 Pabst, G.W. 12, 21, 23–24, 111–16, 118–20, 124, 128–29, 131–32, 134–37, 140–44, 146, 150–53, 209–10, 217n, 219–20n, 222–23n, 225–26n Pabst, Michael 113, 222n Palmer, David 218n Patalas, Enno 156 Paul, William 201–02, 203–04 Paumgartten, Karl 111 Peiss, Kathy 40–41, 217n Petrie, Graham 155, 225n Petro, Patrice 36, 114, 116, 119, 136, 141, 223n Pfoser, Alfred 60, 71, 219n Philbin, Mary 29, 67 Pickford, Mary 156 Pitts, ZaSu 48 Planer, Franz 12, 77, 81, 101, 219n play-acting see theatricality Poe, Edgar Allan 42, 217n Pommer, Erich 166 Powell, Michael 221n Powers, Pat 44 Prater 25–27, 32–35, 39–43, 206 and mass culture 34, 37, 39–41, 43 and melodrama 36–37 Preminger, Otto 13, 204 Pressburger, Emmeric 221n Prevost, Marie 187 Prinzler, Hans Helmut 156 public/private space (sphere) 83–84, 125–26, 130–31, 136–138, 187–90, 210 and consumerism 122–24 Rabinovici, Doron 217n Rahman, Sabrina Karim 217n Rainer, Luise 221n Rapée, Ernö 167, 225n Raphaelson, Samson 220n Rapp, Christian 34 Raskatoff, M. 131 Rauh, Reinhold 85 Reed, Carol 10–11 Reinhardt, Max 197 Reisch, Liesl 13 Reisch, Walter 13–14, 101, 104, 169, 221n Remarque, Erich Maria 112 Rentschler, Eric 12, 118, 225n Rifkin, Adrian 58 Rilke, Rainer Maria 72 Rivière, Joan 224n Rogers, Ginger 204

Visions of Vienna

Rohstock, Otto 112, 222n Rosenberg, Alfred 112 Rosenberg, Joel 197 Rosenfeld, Fritz 35 Roth, Joseph 110 Rotha, Paul 114 Rother, Rainer 67 Rowe, Kathleen 130, 183, 185 Rudman, Lisa 227n Rudolf von Österreich-Ungarn (Crown Prince) 88, 220n Ruggles, Charles 179–80 Ruttmann, Walter 15, 128, 222n Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 72 Sachslehner, Johannes 219n Saffle, Michael 26, 159–61 Salt, Barry 174–75, 197 Salten, Felix 41, 78, 89, 97, 217n Sarris, Andrew 201, 203 Schiele, Egon 15 Schlauer, Rudolf 60 Schlemmer, Gottfried 105 Schmidt, Friedrich 60 Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin 110–11 Schneider, Magda 79–80, 93 Schnitzler, Arthur 11, 15, 17, 20, 22, 55–56, 66, 68–78, 83–84, 91, 93–94, 110, 145, 205, 216–20n Schönberg, Arnold 15, 17 Schorske, Carl 16–17, 49 Schuchnig, Josef 142–43 Schwartz, Nancy 163 Schwarz, Werner Michael 34, 89, 215–16n Sebald, W.G 70 Severit, Frauke 72 Sherwood, Robert E. 42, 90 Sierek, Karl 84, 220n Sima, Oskar 97 Simmel, Georg 15, 120–21, 129 and blasé attitude 115–16 Singer, Ben 15, 222n Sloterdijk, Peter 114 Sorkin, Marc 224n Spiel, Hilde 48, 110 Staiger, Janet 190 Stein, Leo 198 Steinberg, Michael 51 Steiner, Max 13 Sternberg, Josef, von 19, 25–28, 44, 46, 48, 215n, 216n Stoker, Bram 160 Stolz, Robert 13, 198 Straus, Oscar 74, 157, 161, 166–67, 175, 198–99, 203, 227n Strauss, Johann 9, 11, 16, 22, 157–61, 168–69, 185 Strindberg, August 72 Strobl, Hans Karl 111 Stroheim, Benno 45

253

Index of Names and Subjec ts

Stroheim, Erich, von 13, 19–22, 27–29, 32–34, 41–56, 59–60, 64–68, 87, 89, 92–93, 99, 105–06, 109, 132, 190, 206, 208–09, 216–18n, 224n Stuart, Henry 119 Suppé, Franz von 161 Sutherland, A. Edward 163 Swales, Martin 69 Swanson, Gloria 190 Swarthout, Gladys 163 Sweet girl see Viennese girl Tauber, Richard 12 Thalberg, Irving 28–29 theatricality 51, 85, 134–35, 138, 191 and military 80–82 and Ringstraße 18 and space 105–07, 125–27 and theater box 125–27, 131–32, 210 Thompson, Bruce 71 Thompson, Kristin 224n Tiedtke, Jakob 167 Tillner, Georg 100, 221n Timms, Edward 18 Tobin, Genevieve 187 Tolstoi, Gräfin 137, 151, 224–25n Tolstoi, Tamara 23, 121, 151, 224–25n Toulmin, Stephen 218n Traubner, Richard 160–61, 167, 202, 227n Tschechowa, Olga 81, 101, 103–04 Ullmann, Gerhard 222n Ullrich, Luise 77, 79–80, 97, 99 Ulmer, Edgar 13 Urban, Joseph 46, 51, 217n Urrichio, William Charles 222n Ustinov, Peter 76 Vajda, Ernest 220n Vasey, Ruth 220n Vetsera, Mary 220n Vienna and anti-modern 31, 35 and classical music 159 and fin-de-siècle 15–17 and postwar 110–11 and Ringstraße 18 and suburbs 19 and topography 49–50, 132–33, 205 and urban development 17, 133–34

Viennese girl 66–75 and New Woman 172 and performativity (masquerade) 172–73, 183 and suburbs 19–20 and urban modernity 20–21 Viennese Prater see Prater Viertel, Bertolt 13 Volkmer, Klaus 222n Wagner, Nike 72, 165 Wagner, Richard 171 Wall, Hilde 77 Walther, Hertha von 119 Waltz and desire 169–71 and modernity 162, 164–65 Wassermann, Jakob 112 Wawerka, Anton 56 Weber, Lois 190, 227n Wedekind, Frank 72, 219n Wedel, Michael 166, 225n Weigel, Hans 162 Weihsmann, Helmut 15, 222n Weininger, Otto 72, 149 Welles, Orson 9–10 Werderitsch, Nina 145 Werfel, Franz 48 Wessely, Paula 101–02 Wharton, Edith 160 White, Susan 79–82, 87–88, 206 Wieman, Mathias 97 Wiene, Robert 12 Wilder, Billy 13, 163, 221n Wilhelm, Hans 78 Williams, Alan 79, 220n Wilson, Elizabeth 120, 223n Wiltschnigg, Elfriede 219n Wittgenstein, Ludwig 15, 17, 55, 218n Wohlbrück, Adolf (Adolf Walbrook) 101–02, 221n Wollen, Peter 52, 54 Wood, Robin 80, 82 Wray, Fay 48, 53, 65–67, 93 Wright, Teresa 164 Wynyard, Diana 90 Zinnemann, Fred 13 Zola, Emilie 112 Zweig, Stefan 11, 12, 48, 110, 112, 216n



Film Culture in Transition General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser

Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Kievit and Jan Simons (eds.) Double Trouble: Chiem van Houweninge on Writing and Filming, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 025 9 Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lucette Bronk (eds.) Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 054 9 Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.) Film and the First World War, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 064 8 Warren Buckland (ed.) The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, 1995 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 131 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 170 6 Egil Törnqvist Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 137 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 171 3 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 172 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 183 6 Thomas Elsaesser Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 059 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 184 3 Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.) Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, 1998 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 282 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 312 0 Siegfried Zielinski Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’Actes in History, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 313 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 303 8

Kees Bakker (ed.) Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 389 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 425 7 Egil Törnqvist Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 350 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 371 7 Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds.) The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000, 2000 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 455 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 456 1 Patricia Pisters and Catherine M. Lord (eds.) Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, 2001 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 472 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 473 8 William van der Heide Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures, 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 519 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 580 3 Bernadette Kester Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Films of the Weimar Period (1919-1933), 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 597 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 598 8 Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.) Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 494 3 Ivo Blom Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 463 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 570 4 Alastair Phillips City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 634 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 633 6

Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.) The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 631 2; isbn hardcover 978 905356 493 6 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 635 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 636 7 Kristin Thompson Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 708 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 709 8 Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds.) Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 768 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 769 2 Thomas Elsaesser European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 594 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 602 2 Michael Walker Hitchcock’s Motifs, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 772 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 773 9 Nanna Verhoeff The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 831 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 832 3 Anat Zanger Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 784 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 785 2 Wanda Strauven The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 944 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 945 0

Malte Hagener Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 960 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 961 0 Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 984 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 980 1 Jan Simons Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 991 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 979 5 Marijke de Valck Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 192 8; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 216 1 Asbjørn Grønstad Transfigurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American Cinema, 2008 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 010 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 030 7 Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.) Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, 2009 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 013 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 012 3 François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cinema beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 083 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 084 0 Pasi Väliaho Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 140 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 141 0 Pietsie Feenstra New Mythological Figures in Spanish Cinema: Dissident Bodies under Franco, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 304 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 303 2

Eivind Røssaak (ed.) Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 212 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 213 4 Tara Forrest Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 272 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 273 8 Belén Vidal Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 282 0 Bo Florin Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood 1923-1930, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 504 3 Erika Balsom Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 471 8 Gilles Mouëllic Improvising Cinema, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 4551 7 Christian Jungen Hollywood in Canne$: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 566 1 Michael Cowan Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film ‒ Advertising ‒ Modernity, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 585 2 Temenuga Trifonova Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 632 3 Christine N. Brinckmann Color and Empathy: Essays on Two Aspects of Film, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 656 9

François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 666 8 Volker Pantenburg Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 891 4 Paul Cuff A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s Napoléon, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 734 4 Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann (eds.) Melodrama After the Tears: New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 673 6 Steve Choe Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 638 5 Melis Behlil Hollywood is Everywhere: Global Directors in the Blockbuster Era, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 739 9 Thomas Elsaesser Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema, 2016 isbn 978 94 6298 057 0 Michael Walker Modern Ghost Melodramas: ‘What Lies Beneath’, 2017 isbn 978 94 6298 016 7 Steffen Hven Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula, 2017 isbn 978 94 6298 077 8