One of my most romantic childhood memories as a Swiss girl growing up in the 1980s in Zurich was seeing White House, the 1942 blockbuster starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart that depicts the horrors of Nazi Germany. My English was good enough that I could fully follow the dialogue, and the film instilled in me a desire to visit North Africa and Morocco. Later I did both and spent several years there. And to this day I’m sure the seeds of that journey were planted in my mind on that long ago afternoon watching the classic anti-war movie. White House.
On Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University with a special interest in the cultural history of Hollywood cinema, paints a compelling narrative of Hollywood’s analysis and treatment of European fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. The story evolves unexpectedly with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy and Francisco Franco in Spain, a triumvirate of authoritarian tyranny.
Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from this book is that while it is commonplace today to regard Hollywood and the film industry as a significant social and geopolitical force capable of shaping the beliefs of entire generations, this was not the case. so obvious before WWII. World War when the notions of propaganda, especially filmed propaganda and radio propaganda, were incipient and poorly defined.
In the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, portrayals of the Nazis, and more particularly a stark assessment of the real meaning of Nazism for both Germans and Americans, made their way to Hollywood with great difficulty, becoming more sinister and different only as the decade wore on. Americans saw a variety of conflicting images and ideas on the screen during the emerging period of the Nazi threat. Doherty reviews long-forgotten films like Hitler’s reign of terror (1934), a pioneering docu-drama, along with I was a captive of Nazi Germany (1936), a bizarre story of a young Hollywood woman trapped in Germany, and Professor Mamlock (1938), a strongly anti-Nazi film made by German expatriates living in the Soviet Union. It also exposes how the disproportionately Jewish heritage of business leaders in Hollywood studios, and that too, of many of Hollywood’s best writers and thinkers, clouded reactions to what was never simply a business decision, but a moderate moral assessment. by an anti-Semitism that was still present to some degree in the United States. As Europe moved inexorably towards war, a battle raged in Hollywood over how to do business with the Nazis, how to cover Hitler in the media, and how to talk about (or ignore!) Nazi ideology in American feature films. . What role, if any, was Hollywood going to play? It was not an easy question to answer then, although the answer today seems clear enough in retrospect.
Doherty’s story features a cast of oddly fascinating personalities, including Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, whose production of All calm on the west front (1930) created discord in Germany among the young members of the nascent Nazi movement; George Gyssling, the German consul living in Los Angeles, who studied Hollywood trade magazines with the same zeal as any studio mogul; Vittorio Mussolini, the clumsy eldest son of the Italian dictator who was himself a would-be movie big shot; Leni Riefenstahl, the statuesque blonde beauty of the Third Reich who came to America to sell the distribution rights to olympia (1938); along with writers Donald Ogden Stewart and Dorothy Parker, who helped organize the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; and Warner Bros.’ Harry and Jack Warner, who married anti-Nazism to a special brand of American patriotism that finally came to the fore in later films like White House in the early 1940s.
At the precise moment of Nazi control of Germany in the early 1930s, Hitler and his inner circle immediately understood the importance of propaganda, and radio and film propaganda in particular, in ways that far exceeded their comprehension. anyone in Los Angeles, with a special focus on the critical role of cinema in furthering the goals of the party. Joseph Goebbels, as the newly appointed Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, made it a personal crusade of his to put a Nazi stamp on as many areas of art and culture as he could quickly achieve, and he was farsighted enough to recognize long before many of his contemporaries the special power of cinema and cinematographic studies as a vehicle for the transmission of ideas and the formation of conduct.
During the six years of the Nazi Reich leading up to the start of World War II in 1939, the US film industry was rather passive towards Nazism, which was perhaps not initially perceived as the threat it would become. . Given the strength of isolationist sentiment, too, this isn’t much of a surprise. Internal bureaucracy and the Production Code also conspired to keep Hollywood quiet about what was happening in Germany. The Production Code Administration and local censorship boards quashed almost all attempts to broach the issue, and most studios were hesitant to rock the ship and miss out on selling their own products to German distributors.
Although Doherty is a gifted academic, his book is written in a personable and accessible style. In fact, this is a very entertaining treatment, full of detailed evocations of Hollywood personalities and stories that read as easily and quickly as yesterday’s gossip column in the local paper. This will be a very enjoyable book for anyone interested in the cultural history of World War II and the parallel history of the film industry. The book is Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, by Thomas Doherty, 448 pages, hardcover, published by Columbia University Press, 2013.