Full text of DOI:10.1111/1468-0483.00162

German Life and Letters 53:2 April 2000
0016–8777
NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND LITERARY ADAPTATION: GUSTAF
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GRUNDGENS’S DER SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND HELMUT
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KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE
Paul Coates
abstract
Eric Rentschler argues that ‘film production in the Third Reich offers a strikingly
concrete example’ of the theoretical construct of ‘the dominant cinema’
(‘Hollywood’) devised by film theorists. But is the era of ‘Germany’s Hollywood’
ideological in the same way as Hollywood, or in a different way? Consideration of
National Socialist adaptations of non-Nazi texts may help one determine the spe-
cific meaning of the ideological in the Nazi context. The admittedly small area
of National Socialist literary adaptation acquires a disproportionately revelatory
potential due to the clearly perceptible disparities between the original, pre-Nazi
texts and their Nazi-era reworkings. The adaptations considered here are Gustaf
Grundgens’s Der Schritt vom Wege (1939), based on Fontane’s Effi Briest – a parti-
¨
cularly problematic work for National Socialist ideology – and Helmut Kautner’s
¨
version of Gottfried Keller’s Kleider machen Leute (1940), whose admission of its own
approximate relationship with the original narrative seems to dismiss the probably
irresoluble problem of fidelity to the original, but which is also problematic.
NOTES ON NAZI CINEMA AND ADAPTATION
The cinema of National Socialism has a particular use-value for the film
theorist. Writing of it, Eric Rentschler argues that
film theorists have often speculated about the ideological effects of the
‘dominant cinema,’ proposing that classical narratives seek to mesmerize
and mystify viewers by means of imaginary seductions. Film production in
the Third Reich offers a strikingly concrete example of such a theoretical
construct put into practice.1
Rentschler’s pregnant remark nevertheless collapses the general formal
paradigms of classical narrative, which is reliant upon exposition, plot
rhymes and closure – paradigms both Hollywood and the Third Reich
share – into the particular stories delivered within the classical framework,
which differ between Hollywood and Hitler’s Germany. It thus confuses
ideological effects of form with those of theme and content.
It is well known that Goebbels preferred propaganda to mask itself as
entertainment (in his own words: ‘in dem Augenblick, in dem eine Propa-
1 Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, Cambridge, MA/London
1996, p. 16.
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232 GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE
ganda bewußt wird, ist sie unwirksam’2) and even valued non-propagan-
distic entertainment for the sense of business-as-usual it diffused. This
stated preference may well have resulted from the debacle of an early Nazi
´ ˆ
propaganda project like Hans Westmar (1933), a hagiographic fictionalis-
ation of the life of Horst Wessel many Nazis felt failed to paint the Commu-
nist opposition sufficiently darkly, and which – consequently – was banned.
The fact that Goebbels’s best-known statement of a preference for indirect
propaganda stems from 1937 may well indicate a switch in position, reco-
gnising that an industry running on propaganda films alone would soon
have run aground on intra-Party discord, to say nothing of rapidly running
out of subject-matter. Triumph des Willens (1936) may well have become
the Nazi propaganda film par excellence precisely because of its lack of the
voice-over commentary that could have invited Party critique. As propa-
ganda becomes emotional massage of the national ego, however, it also
becomes – and succumbs to – entertainment. Whatever the motives of
Goebbels’s preference, and irrespective of whether or not it constituted a
swerve from his original purpose, one has to ask whether any ideological
effects of potential value to National Socialism inhere in the political
unconscious of entertainment per se or whether they depend entirely upon
bodying forth ideas consciously held – as in, say, Jud Suss (1940). Is the
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era of ‘Germany’s Hollywood’, the period of its most self-conscious, would-
be autarkic rivalry with the American film industry, ideological in the same
way as that industry – through naturalisation of the cultural, for instance –
or is it ideological in a different sense? How, in this case, is the indubitable
connection between popular culture and ideology to be squared with their
non-identity?
I remarked at the outset on Rentschler’s confusion of ideologies of form
with ideologies of content. Readers may well enquire, however, how form
and content are to be detached from one another. Such an operation may
appear impossible, but consideration of National Socialist adaptations of
non-Nazi texts allows one to draw the outline of a separation. In other
cases the question truly is undecidable: the close welding of syjuzhet and
fabula obscures the extent to which ideology resides in content or in
modes of telling. Hence I would argue that the area of Nazi adaptation
is potentially of great interest to film theory.
The pervasive binary opposition between an ideological analysis that
demonises Nazi-era film and a ‘formalist’ one that savours its purely aes-
thetic, often camp pleasures has been described evocatively by Rentschler,
whose sympathies nevertheless clearly lie with the tradition of ideological
reading dominant within film studies.3 As Rentschler well knows, only
close and specific analysis of the layered audio-visual complexities, deter-
2 Joseph Goebbels, ‘Rede auf dem 1. Jahrestag der Reichsfilmkammer (1937)’, in Wilfried von
Bredow and Rolf Turek (eds), Film und Gesellschaft in Deutschland. Dokumente und Materialien, Ham-
burg 1975, p. 193.
3 Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, pp. 7–12.
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GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE 233
minations and overdeterminations of these texts can break the double
bind of these alternatives. But for all the suggestiveness of his own analyses,
Rentschler offers no justification for his choice of films, and production
details and cultural-historical contextualisation too often outweigh the
necessary thoroughgoing close analysis. Since the extant mass of 1,094 Nazi-
era features renders selection urgently necessary, the bases of one’s choice
also need to be made explicit. The decision here to focus on literary adap-
tation stems only in part from the quest for an area of manageable dimen-
sions. Karsten Witte has noted that ‘if one considers the substantial output
of the industry – almost one hundred films a year for the German-speaking
and European markets between 1939 and 1945 – the number of literary
adaptations seems minute.’4 Small though it may be, this area is parti-
cularly revealing due to the clearly perceptible disparities between the
original, pre-Nazi texts and their Nazi-era reworkings. The gradual shrink-
age in the number of adaptations may well mirror a growing Nazi will to
repress memories of any order other than their own – including that of
the historical past deemed to have reached its culmination in its own para-
doxical, utopian reconciliation of nationalism and socialism.
Analyses of Nazi-era films need to take account of the role played by
the self-censorship that has always indicated artistic opportunism. The
(accompanying) preference for the safe can be linked to the considerable
distance from contemporary German reality of so many of the era’s films:
both Goebbels and self-styled ‘oppositional’ directors tellingly shared the
same escapist preferences. Wille und Macht, a Nazi youth paper, concluded
with dismay that the world seen on screen had nothing in common with
the National Socialist one.5 When ideology speaks, of course, it does so as
much through absence as presence: absent realistic images of the present
(siphoned off into newsreels) speak as loudly of time-serving as does the
lack of any voice-over commentary in Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens, and
the perceptible excision of certain elements of an original text from the
filmic adaptation can be equally eloquent. Nevertheless one should
remember that filmic reworking of literary texts can be sorted into various
categories. Where the original text is a novel, omissions may or may not
be significant: they may reflect a need to compress, a desire to entertain,
or an ideological commitment. Should the novel be one generally deemed
classic, changes are more likely to be significant, for the ascription of
classic status can inhibit all but the boldest adapters. Rearrangements of
material, transfers of lines from one character to another, may be suspect,
or they may not. Both these forms of transformation, together with others,
are present in Gustaf Grundgens’s Der Schritt vom Wege (1939), the work
¨
considered first here, a version of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest. After con-
sidering Grundgens’s film I will move on to Helmut Kautner’s version of
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4 Karsten Witte, ‘How Nazi Cinema Mobilizes the Classics: Schweikart’s Das Fraulein von Barnhelm
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(1940)’, in German Literature and Film, p. 104.
5 Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, pp. 19–20.
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234 GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE
Gottfried Keller’s Kleider machen Leute (1940), which openly concedes its
own approximate relationship with the original narrative – an alternative
form of adaptation which dismisses the vexed and probably irresoluble
problem of fidelity in adaptation. Since Grundgens and Kautner are by all
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reckonings among the most gifted of the German film-makers to remain in
the country after 1933, their films embody the best of what National Social-
ist cinema has to offer; and, each being a man of the theatre who
remained in Germany primarily because he saw no possibility of working
outside it, in each case that ‘best’ is primarily an accomplished form of
theatricality. Meanwhile, the probably irresoluble clash of ideological and
‘formalist’ perspectives mentioned earlier may be overcome provisionally
by pointing out the shortcomings of the two films in both the ideological
and the aesthetic senses: after all, camp enjoyment of this cinema – as of
others – depends on defining its works as harmless failures.
SACRIFICING THE TEXT: EFFI BRIEST, IDEOLOGY AND ADAPTATION
Effi Briest may be deemed a particularly problematic text for National
Socialism. The novel’s saddened critique of absurd Prussian uprightness
could hardly be congenial to a regime assiduously tracing its blood-line
back to ‘der große Fritz’. The novel may also seem alarmingly ‘Frenchi-
fied’, both in its glancingness – Fontane as a Maupassant freed of cyni-
cism – and in its vocabulary, where such words as genant, dejeuner, charmant
ˆ
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or – that key word – apart, are the small change of everyday discourse, and
are not even distanced through italics. Equally disturbing from a National
Socialist point of view, Effi’s constant positioning in an intermediate
space – often described as somewhere between, or somehow combining,
opposites – frustrates the binarism that seeks to place consciousness on a
war footing. Even a priori, Fontane may be considered a problem. So does
this make Grundgens’s stance one of covert resistance ? Perhaps, but even
¨
if his decision to film it represented a nostalgic desire for freedom from
political constraints, they reimpose themselves in the script of Georg C.
Klaren and Eckhart von Naso, which seeks to make the novel ‘volkisch’.
¨
Both at the time of its release, and also more recently, Der Schritt vom
Wege earned plaudits that would seem to contradict the image of Grund-
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gens as the self-styled Mephisto whose bargain with the Nazis made him
really, sadly, Faustian. Werner Fiedler, writing in 1939 in the Deutsche
Allgemeine Zeitung,6 lauds the ‘Gewissenhaftigkeit’ of Grundgens’s efforts to
¨
match Fontane’s realism, while Gerhard Schoenberner, in 1981, describes
Grundgens’s ‘Inszenierung’ as one ‘die sich ihrem Gegenstand mit liebe-
¨
vollem Respekt nahert’ (though adding that ‘was Fontane mit Mut auf-
¨
6 Werner Fiedler, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 10.2.1939, Ausgabe Groß-Berlin, in Axel Marquardt
and Heinz Rathsack (eds), Preußen im Film, Reinbek 1981, p. 264.
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GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE 235
deckte, wird hier mit großer Kunst wieder zugedeckt’7). Clearly the work
is more than just a vehicle for Marianne Hoppe, Grundgens’s wife, as
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Effi. But the degree to which the original’s reworking goes far beyond the
selection and compression customary in film versions suggests its partial
motivation by other – more strictly ideological – concerns.
For instance, if Roswitha first appears as an old Briest family servant
and then is shown thoughtfully added to Innstetten’s household against
Effi’s arrival, our sense of Effi’s desperate loneliness in the uncanny house,
of whose possible ghost Geert almost boasts, is diminished. Roswitha is no
longer a belated solace found long after arrival in Kessin, while the ques-
tion of the possible dependence of her compassion upon a Catholicism
unlike Prussia’s dominant Protestantism – so crucial for Fontane – falls
into abeyance. Rollo is another Hohen Cremmen fixture whose transfer
to Kessin eases Effi’s passage. Her tardy rising on her first morning at
Kessin is not justified by sleepless worry about the Chinaman’s ghost. A
pattern of greater sympathy for Innstetten – and the patriarchal values he
represents – seems to be emerging, something confirmed by the film’s
early highlighting of his standing with the Bismarck who is a tutelary pres-
ence in many Nazi historical films – though this one omits Fontane’s
worldly gloss on the relation between Innstetten’s invitation to court and
the Princess’s pleasure in his elegance. The changes set the tone for shift-
ing the emphasis from tragic incompatibility to female transgression. In
the film Effi may simply follow the ‘carpe diem’ Gieshubler is made to
¨
pronounce, but she has far less excuse than Fontane’s heroine. Placing
such words in Gieshubler’s mouth, meanwhile, is a Gleichschaltung of Fon-
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tane’s tone with the increasing crassness of Nazi cinema, something one
can measure by contrasting Die Reise nach Tilsit (1939) with Murnau’s earl-
ier, American version of the same Sudermann story, Sunrise (1927); in the
later, Nazi version, the heroine’s father takes a whip to his daughter’s rival,
here identified as Polish, with shockingly casual brutality.
Effi’s first meeting with Crampas is prefaced by a scene that both evinces
this vulgarity and reduces sympathy for her. Having interrupted Innstet-
ten’s office routine and been reminded of the importance of his tasks –
a scene from which neither emerges well – she turns on her heel, pout-
ingly informs Rollo that neither of them is wanted and petulantly uproots
a plant while marching away. Rollo scares the horses and leads her to the
cowboy-like Crampas (Nazi cinema has no need of America, whose West-
ern romanticism it here absorbs). Crampas then proposes a barebacked
horse-ride. During Trippelli’s concert the film proceeds to attribute its
own vulgarity to Effi: old ladies may cringe at the French love song the
scriptwriters insert, but Effi perks up. Innstetten looks uncomfortable, and
Effi alone starts to clap, a reaction shot having earlier established a special
relationship between her and the singer. Culture is German and masculine
7 Gerhard Schoenberner, ‘Das Preußenbild im deutschen Film – Geschichte und Ideologie’,
ibid., p. 32.
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236 GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE
(a setting of an ode by Brahms precedes this); vulgarity is feminine,
French. Perhaps only the casting of the somewhat elderly Karl Ludwig
Diehl as Innstetten – who seems more fiftyish than the forty of the novel –
generates any sympathy for Effi: the film’s omission of the duel contributes
to his image as a pen-pusher of dubious sexual adequacy. But although
Effi suggests the ingredients of an aphrodisiac (thyme and cooking salt)
for herself and Innstetten, the immediate cut to her mother holding up
baby knitwear shows him not to be completely hopeless. (Such contradic-
tions in the film’s presentation of Innstetten surely indicate a wish both
to uphold Prussian patriarchy and to display fidelity to the novel.) Briest,
for example, comments that his wife is already working on a uniform for
Effi’s son and heir: uniforms are clearly important for this film. Parti-
cularly significant here is the moment when Crampas remarks that should
Bismarck call they will go soldiering again. We are surely meant to second
Innstetten’s pained response, which deems this too serious a matter for
jocularity. (After all, it is 1939 . . .) Alas, he lacks the puckishness of Fon-
tane’s Innstetten, whom Trippelli’s pretensions amuse.
Although these changes reduce sympathy for Effi, they may simply dem-
onstrate the impossibility in late thirties Germany of imagining her. It is
hardly surprising that her insertion into a coarsened public sphere renders
her virtually a barmaid: the new model of youthful vivacity is ‘Berliner
Schnauze’. Nevertheless, Fontane’s novel – and the sympathy it extends
to Effi – challenge the Prussian militarisation of society which National
Socialism eagerly reinstalled. Consequently, Effi’s story becomes that of ‘a
step from the path’ – the title foregrounding a transgression for which,
fortunately, she pays. The title may be justified in part by its derivation
from the amateur theatricals of the novel, but the film courts popularity
by replacing the staging of Wichert’s play with one more recognisable –
Das Kathchen von Heilbronn – which has the additional advantage of being
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by another Prussian author. Since Effi’s death ceases to be problematic,
Fontane’s imagery of female sacrifice vanishes. Opening with a shot of her
grave makes it inevitable, right, its sentimental fatalism chiming with the
circularity of so many ‘classical’ texts. Jahnke’s observation that sacrifice
was the work of Aryans from whom present-day Germans are all descended
is – like Jahnke himself – too close to the bone to be included. The presen-
tation of Briest’s relationship with his wife tellingly blunts Fontane’s chal-
lenge to patriarchy. Near the end, when the adultery has become public
knowledge, Briest and Luise sit together on a bench as the latter reflects
on the injustice of excluding Effi from Hohen Cremmen. Luise is given
words which belong to Briest in the novel. She wonders if it is right for a
child to grow up without her mother, and asks Briest if that matches his
notion of order. Conventionally, of course, males stand for order, females
for compassion. The ideological division of the sexes is restored by the
scriptwriters, who must have been dismayed by Fontane’s easygoing, sus-
piciously ‘feminine’ Briest.
Equally important in a Nazi culture that asserted its own sole proprietor-
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GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE 237
ship of the language of transcendence is the treatment of religion. Fon-
tane’s opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism vanishes,
together with any hint that the latter (associated with Roswitha) might be
an alternative to Prussian culture. Moreover, Gieshubler absorbs Pastor
¨
Niemeyer’s role near the end – an absorption surely more ideological than
his earlier fusion with Rummschuttel, which may have resulted from the
¨
need to trim the material and respond to the similarities between them
(both being avuncular partial stand-ins for Fontane himself). Only inas-
much as religion is not its best subject does the film resemble Effi. It is
one of the alternatives to the status quo Der Schritt vom Wege renders
unthinkable.
Although I have mentioned many of the disparities between film and
novel, the consequence of the latter’s mastication by the Nazi culture
industry, any viewer with a knowledge of Fontane’s work – and a large
proportion of the early viewers surely possessed one – may well watch
nevertheless with a sense of deja vu. Passage upon passage of the novel’s
´ `
dialogue recurs, particularly towards the end, which benefits from increas-
ingly close adherence to Fontane’s powerful, intricate words (particularly
Innstetten’s reflections on how much time must elapse before a duel
ceases to be imperative, remarks doubtless too classic to brook alteration).
Crass changes alternate with direct quotations that create an illusion of
conscientiousness. The switchback rhythm both demonstrates the incoher-
ence of the film’s project of combining aesthetic fidelity and ideological
revision, and arguably displays a persistence of the rebellion/submission
movement Siegfried Kracauer discerned in much Weimar cinema, mixing
cavalier rewrite and slavishness. The co-opted producers of culture in Nazi
Germany suffer memory flashes of what culture once was, though this
intermittent awareness is repressed by their identification with the
aggressor who desecrates it. Despite some dissenting opinions both then
and now, Der Schritt vom Wege really does bear Mephisto’s fingerprints.
No indication here of Fontane’s modernist sense of the unsaid, of the
problematic status of signs and language, of Innstetten’s jealous, Proustian
awareness ‘daß alle Zeichen trugen’. No sense of Effi as the representative
¨
of the poetic and balladesque, destroyed by the world of prose. None of
the similarities between Effi and Geert (the weak nerves, the mimic gift,
the ambition), those tantalising tragic hints of what might have been. No
sense of woman as the object of a sacrificial system that gives the lie to
modern pretensions to enlightenment, or of subjects that are ‘ein zu
weites Feld’ (to use Briest’s catchphrase), as the gaze fails to grasp their
extensions and sentences trail off in dots. After all, National Socialism
does not recognise limitations and yet yearn beyond them, but colonises
Otherness. In Der Schritt vom Wege the object of colonisation is Theodor
Fontane.
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238 GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE
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SACRIFICING ONE’S CLOTHES: KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE
At first sight, Helmut Kautner’s use of Gottfried Keller’s Kleider machen
¨
Leute has an innocent appearance. And yet it can be perceived with some
justification as ‘a difficult film to read, if only because the viewer can never
forget that it was made in 1940’.8 This version of Keller’s story of the
tailor’s apprentice whose clothes cause him to be mistaken for a Polish
nobleman announces at the outset that it is made ‘nach Motiven der
gleichnamigen Novelle’, making no claim to fidelity. Nevertheless, by con-
ceding difference Kautner invites questions about its causes and effects,
¨
which may be aesthetic and/or ideological. And since, as Karsten Witte
notes, ‘once the war broke out, the production of literary adaptations all
but came to a halt’, the few that were made assume particular signifi-
cance.9
Difference sets in at the beginning, which gives the prehistory in neigh-
bouring Seldwyla of Wenzel’s visit to Goldach, establishing him as a long-
standing dreamer of social rise. (Keller’s Wenzel, by contrast, is merely an
eccentric; it is not social aspiration but overwhelming animal hunger and
a readiness to be hung as much for a sheep as a lamb that make him fall
on mistakenly proferred dainties.) His elevation in Goldach is no simple
accident but realises long-cherished aspirations, some of them inherited
from German Romanticism and dear to Weimar cinema, as Thomas
Elsaesser has shown.10 The master mocks the dreaminess that prolongs his
apprentice’s working day, and Wenzel flings a pair of scissors at him with
the shockingly casual violence of quite a few Nazi-era films, the Nazi youth-
revolution having disinhibited expression of such urges. The scissors thud-
ding into the bannister surely compromise the image of the gentle dre-
amer, as does the substance of his dreams. On his master’s departure
Wenzel’s thoughts wander. In a sequence whose combination of the
uncanny and social climbing recalls Weimar cinema, several dummies
come to life and bow to the well-dressed apprentice. The carriage found
in such Weimar and pre-Weimar fantasies as Der Student von Prag (1913)
and Phantom (1922) then pulls up at an open door and a topless woman
descends. Although, like so many pre-modern images of women, this one
may be allegorical, dissolving into a demurely-dressed girl who personifies
Domesticity, the tailor reads the pornographic image realistically, his hat
levitating with crass lubricity. The ready violence entails an equally casual
vulgarity founded upon the simultaneous entertainment and confusion of
opposed female images first proposed in the Metropolis (1926) of Fritz
Lang and that Nazi-to-be, Thea von Harbou, where virgin and robot-whore
8 Jill Forbes, ‘Kleider machen Leute (Clothes Make the Man)’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 49 (June
1982), 116.
9 Witte, p. 105.
10 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Social Mobility and the Fantastic’, Wide Angle, 5/2 (1982), 14–25.
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GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE 239
share the same face.11 The mirror-imagery of Weimar fantasy also recurs
when, in the Goldach inn, Wenzel’s reflection ‘magically’ makes his tail-
or’s thimble vanish and executes a carefree flourish with his liberated right
hand. In what one might deem Kautner’s version of the Lacanian mirror-
¨
stage – a more explicit restaging of the events of the Seldwyla opening –
Wenzel will watch the transformation pensively, then imitate his own
false image.
No longer the victim of a firm’s ‘Falliment’ depicted by Keller, Wenzel
is dismissed for recutting the mayor’s frock-coat to his own measure,
appropriates it in lieu of docked wages, then takes to the road cheerily
singing ‘Ein Schneider, der muß wandern, es kann nicht anders sein’; off
and on the film will present itself as a musical. While sheltering from
wintry weather he meets a puppet master, Christoffel, another addition to
Keller’s story, who halts a coach sent to convey a Russian nobleman and
whispers to the coachman that Wenzel is the said count, whatever his prot-
estations to the contrary. As the coach trundles away Christoffel chortles
over his successful god-like intervention. The image of Wenzel on the road
begins Keller’s story, and so Kautner’s preamble ends here.
¨
On arrival in Goldach the innkeeper regales Wenzel with his finest victu-
als while fascinated local dignitaries misread his stammers and pale embar-
rassment as laudable aristocratic restraint. At this point, though, a new
plot-line is interwoven with Keller’s, introducing several traditional comic
motifs, particularly that of the parallel love affair. Shortly after Wenzel’s
arrival a lady steeped in Romantic pretensions peers down from an upper
inn-window. Seraphina, a firm believer in astrology and long-time corre-
spondent of the Russian count, has arranged to meet him at Goldach.
One glance at Wenzel confirms his supposed identity and her infatuation.
The real count’s subsequent arrival prompts expectations of Wenzel’s
unmasking, but the Russian surprisingly calls himself Stroganoff (the ste-
reotypical name being the sure signifier of populist entertainment, and his
servant’s name – unsurprisingly – is Ivan), identifying himself as Wenzel’s
manservant. Has the sight of Seraphina determined him against involve-
ment with her, making him seize the chance to palm her off on the tailor?
No clear motive is given, and one can only guess. Only much later, after
Wenzel’s rejection of Seraphina, will Stroganoff reveal that her ability to
mistake a tailor for himself had amused and wounded him, leading him
to support Wenzel’s imposture.
Despite the prologue’s establishing Wenzel’s vehement desires – for
love, and for social elevation – Kautner’s Kleider machen Leute consistently
¨
exonerates him, presenting him as trapped. The puppeteer sets up the
11 Richard J. Rundell (‘Keller’s “Kleider Machen Leute” as Novelle and Film’, Die Unterrichtspraxis,
13/2 (Fall 1980), 160) describes this fantasy sequence as ‘delightful’, seeing nothing problematic
in it. Although Rundell’s account of the film notes the imprint of historical circumstances in the
elimination of Wenzel’s Polishness, to my mind it underestimates the presence of ideology, which
does not simply determine one or two elements but dictates the entire structure of devices inserted
to minimise Wenzel’s responsibility.
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240 GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE
initial confusion with a Catch-22 that renders even his denials affirmations,
and another puppeteer – Stroganoff – later pulls the strings. On leaving
the coach Wenzel finds himself shepherded back in by the coachman; on
his arrival at the inn, serried onlookers prevent his escape; attempts to
slip away are intercepted by the innkeeper or a barking dog; no-one credits
his repeated protestations of non-aristocratic status; and Stroganoff posts
a servant outside his hotel door to ensure he stays. Whatever money comes
his way – be it won at cards, or bestowed by Stroganoff – he deposits in
a conspicuous place to cover his bills, cued in by the musical setting of
¨
Goethe’s ‘Ub immer Treu und Redlichkeit’ playing on the soundtrack.
Very little of this is in the Keller original. When Wenzel finally determines
to play the count to the hilt, it is only after entrapment in the role has
rendered him entirely other-directed, engendering expectations he feels
honour-bound to fulfil – particularly those of Nettchen, a simple Romantic
bourgeois girl whose dreams he embodies. Eventual success in escaping
the town is halted by a call from her sleigh, and Wenzel’s incipient con-
fession that he is running away is rapidly reworded into a conventional
reference to taking a walk. Thus when Wenzel is unmasked, Stroganoff
halts the irate crowd by pronouncing him not guilty, describes his own role
in the affair, and even offers the classic nineteenth-century melodramatic
solution by proposing to adopt the tailor. Stroganoff had told Seraphina
that he had controlled Wenzel’s life, ‘nur vergaß ich, daß der Schneider
ein Herz hatte, das er selber vergab’. Wenzel’s bride-to-be, Nettchen, seeks
him out in the snowy night but – unlike Keller’s – does not feel he has
any explaining to do. When he suggests flight to a place where neither of
them is known, she says ‘keine Romane mehr’. As in Sirk’s La Habanera
˜
(1937), the ability to ‘live a romance’ is the heroine’s key attribute (and
renders Seraphina her caricature, the double as scapegoat), but in the
end her simultaneous status as surrogate for the audience requires the
ability gracefully to return to earth. She had once remarked that like
belongs with like, ironically echoing the words of her other tailor-suitor,
the author of Wenzel’s exposure, Melchior Bohni. Unlike Keller’s couple,
the two will not seek protection in Seldwyla, that inveterately rival town.
When Wenzel worries lest the Goldachers mock her, Nettchen says ‘was
tuts wenn wir beisammen sind’. This ending is clearly steeped still in the
fantasy Nettchen says she has left behind, and which the film visually
embodies as a thing of the past – Wenzel’s frock-coat on a hanger whirling
in the wind.
Kautner’s film reworks Keller’s story – partly for aesthetic, partly for
¨
ideological reasons. The addition of a parallel comic plot is doubtless aes-
thetically motivated – Kautner the scriptwriter may well have felt the mis-
¨
guided need to flesh out the anecdote – but other changes suggest the
presence of ideological considerations, complicating the accepted image
of Kautner as aesthete and dandy. Keller’s story gives Wenzel a Polish
¨
identity appropriate to his presumed incognito, conspiracy having been a
major pursuit of the disenfranchised nineteenth-century leaders of par-
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GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE 241
titioned Poland. In suppressing that identity and having Wenzel mistaken
for a Russian count the German scriptwriter of 1940 re-enacts the Wehr-
macht’s recent vaporisation of ‘Poland’. It may well be that Kautner delib-
¨
erately chose a ‘free’ mode of adaptation precisely in order to be able to
remove the work’s Polish reference, thereby insulating his film against
topical reference and the fate of his earlier Kitty und die Weltkonferenz
(1939), banned because of its release just after the outbreak of war and
Ribbentrop’s objection to its Anglophilia. Topicality is present neverthe-
less. ‘Man hort in der letzten Zeit so viel von Rußland’, Nettchen’s father
¨
tells Wenzel. He surely speaks cannily for the common German spectator
after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and before the invasion of Russia itself.
His added ‘die einen sagen dies und die anderen sagen das’ could have
been the Propaganda Ministry’s own wary, roundabout acknowledgement
and intended defusing of possible divisions in a public opinion recently
exhorted to hate Bolshevism but now asked to approve of Stalin, and yet
it also seems to encompass Kautner’s own possible heavily coded irony
¨
about such voltes-face: it is thoroughly Janus-faced. Stroganoff may get
Wenzel into trouble, but a local puppeteer has already plotted his dis-
comfiture, and the Russian kindly disentangles the puppet’s strings in the
end. The friendliness to things Russian may even be read as extending to
appropriation of Eisenstein’s symbolic montage, as Wenzel’s decision to
become the count indeed is marked by the juxtaposition of an ordinary
field-bird with a peacock. During this particular, albeit brief era in Nazi
rule, ‘cultural Bolshevism’ is not entirely taboo.
The use of Soviet-style montage is nevertheless ambiguous. It may corre-
spond to the work’s partial incoherence (the dreamer’s murderous throw
of the scissors . . .), or may even constitute an example of artistic ‘resist-
ance’ – a refusal to forgo a device simply because it might be labelled
‘Bolshevik’. It is worth noting, though, that such devices can be found
elsewhere in Nazi cinema – for instance, in Das Fraulein von Barnhelm
¨
(1940). If the transparency of entertainment cinema is compromised by
reminiscences of silent-film tropes, this may imply nostalgia for twenties
cinema – something displayed also in Fritz Lang’s first American film, Fury
(1936), but persisting among those film-makers still left in Germany – or
it may indicate the minor artist’s epigonal fixation on the past. If the use
of montage is indeed resistance, however, it is symbolic and momentary,
buried all-but-invisibly in the middle of the film. It is worth remembering
that ‘Kautner claimed that he played safe in this film, distancing all polit-
¨
ical implications through humour and costume’.12 But although the aes-
thete avoided work with explicitly ideological connotations, declaring his
unfitness for it,13 his own screenplay here may be seen as incorporating
concessions to official sensibilities, perhaps to ensure both its filmability
12 Forbes, p. 116.
13 See ‘Kunst im Film ist Schmuggelware: Helmut Kautner im Gesprach mit Edmund Luft’, in
¨
¨
Wolfgang Jacobsen and Hans-Helmut Prinzler (eds), Kautner, Berlin 1992, p. 131.
¨
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242 GRUNDGEN’S SCHRITT VOM WEGE AND KAUTNER’S KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE
and continued protection by the Tobis and Terra production from more
explicitly propagandistic assignments. Kautner is indeed an aesthete, as
¨
may well be apparent in his friendliness towards the words of French deri-
vation Der Schritt vom Wege avoids, but if his film is nevertheless indeed
‘difficult to read’, as Forbes contends, it is because of the near-indis-
tinguishability of the propaganda he offers as tithe to the powers-that-be
from the propaganda they themselves purvey. The officially imposed scene
of the journalist’s happy conversion to propaganda-company man in Auf
Wiedersehen, Franziska! (1940–1) cannot be the sole culpable moment in
his Nazi-period oeuvre, for all its status as the only one Kautner himself
¨
recognises.14 The use of montage in Kleider machen Leute, meanwhile, sug-
gests either artistic opportunism or eclecticism, and the throwback to Sov-
iet montage matches the film’s general composite regurgitation of Weimar
cinema motifs. The double puppeteering, for instance, redoubles Weimar
cinema’s fatalism, defining the German as perennially guiltless. Kautner
¨
himself may resemble that frock-coat dancing in the wind, his marionettes
and papier-mache figures representing a half-awareness of his own
ˆ
´
inability fully to control his work in adverse circumstances, the need to
bend to the wind in order to survive. It may seem as if Kautner is the
¨
National Socialist period figure most closely akin to the Hollywood direc-
tor of the auteuristes, professionalism his sole relief from the weight of
enslavement. And yet he entered film-making precisely in order to pre-
serve his own screenplays from directorial alteration. Ironically, he treats
Keller’s story as cavalierly as other directors had his own screenplays. He
may feel some justification for so doing, for some of his additions are
quite successful (for instance, the card-playing circle’s charmed reaction
to Wenzel’s use of buttons as stakes, claiming not to possess the coin of
a foreign realm). But the preface in Seldwyla gives the game away: the
murderously-flung scissors (is it significant that at this moment the master
tailor, seen descending the stairs in profile, has a near-stereotypically ‘sem-
itic’ look?), the pornographic woman – these are not innocent dreams
but fascist ones of killing and taking. The innocence is shadowed by
experience, and the impatient hunger is of a piece with a desire that no
longer tolerates frustration but will lay the blame elsewhere should any-
thing – or everything – go wrong.
14 Ibid., pp. 129–30; see also Kautner’s own account of the making of this film, Auf Wiedersehen,
¨
Franziska!, ibid., pp. 115–16.
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000.