Customer Reviews

Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The primary purpose of the occupation of defeated Germany after World War II pursued by American political and military leaders was replacing that country's attachment to the militaristic, dictatorial form of government with democracy. More so than simple institution of democratic forms of government such as legislatures and political parties, democracy as regarded by the American leaders was "a type of behavior, a public attitude, and affective relationship to the state." Gestures, equality among all persons (replacing the Nazi concept of the Master Race), styles of clothing, individual identity, and even types of food were all entailed in this. American leaders aimed at nothing less than a thorough overhauling of German culture, including the German psyche. The media of popular democratic culture of magazines, newspapers, radio, and public talks were the favored agencies for the desired change in post-War Germany. Movies were foremost in this mix of media intended to inculcate the German public in American behavior down to gestures, relationships among citizens, imagery, and so on.

But as Fay--codirector of film studies at Michigan State U.--uncovers, the message American leaders presumed Germans would take from the movies which were supposed to have a major role in the transformation was not the one Germans got. Fay goes behind the celebrities, images, story lines, and ideals and mythologies believed by most Americans to be portrayed in the films to the "hard facts and slippery truths" communicated in them. Among the films Fay critiques for the different messages they sent to the different audiences is the John Wayne 1939 Western classic Stagecoach. To the large majority of American eyes, the movie depicts a band of diverse (white) men and women coming together despite their differences to fight off barbaric Apaches. To the majority of German eyes however, as Fay tenders, the whites were invaders of the Indian lands and had mores and engaged in activities that could be seen as racist; and 100 years following the time white Americans aggressively implanted themselves in New England, as seen in the movie Drums Along the Mohawk also shown to German audiences, Americans were continuing to invade Indian lands and slaughter or relocate the Indians. The ambivalences in such movies, let alone how they could be seen to reflect ideas of racial superiority, needless to say were lost on the American authorities.

Fay critiques not only other Westerns, but also comedies, mysteries, and films with domestic settings and occasionally individual stars such as Greta Garbo for how they cut against the very messages, values, and behavior American leaders thought they were evidencing. In many cases, the lesson German audiences would draw would be the very opposite of the ones the Americans thought they were putting forth. Although the book is essentially one of film criticism, Fay closes it with the unavoidable comparison of the miscalculations American authorities made in the occupation of Germany and similar miscalculations and effects in the occupation of Iraq.

For stronger scholarship, books such as Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood would have been necessary, and the related library. To see "Hollywood" as an expression of "Americanism" is odd, as they are not synonymous. For instance, the Ethnic-German-descent children in the U.S. ( the largest ethnicity in America, also, at the end of WWII, and who had families who fought their own ethnic relations, or were interred on America soil and so forth, during the war, along with Japanese, caused similar ambivalence in regards to the roughly 100-150 holocaust/WWII themed movies created in U.S. after 1965, or the '67 war. In those narratives, the "war," in which their families were involved, also, is experienced, not through their own, but through the Jewish paradigm (the memes central to Jewish identity). The larger picture ---how films of stories told from the Jewish-centered point-of-view affected German and German-descent Americans was not explored well enough here, to make it qualify as academic as it initially appeared.