Harlan Veit - Veit Harlan: the life and work of a nazi filmmaker

Veit Harlan

VEIT HARLAN

THE LIFE AND WORK OF A NAZI FILMMAKER

FRANK NOACK

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Copyright 2016 by The University Press of Kentucky

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Noack, Frank, 1961- author.

Title: Veit Harlan / Frank Noack.

Other titles: Veit Harlan. English

Description: Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, [2016] | Series: Screen classics | Originally published as Veit Harlan: des Teufels Regisser by Bellevill (Mnchen) in 2000. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015044830 | ISBN 9780813167008 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813167022 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813167015 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Harlan, Veit, 1899-1964. | Motion picture producers and directorsGermanyBiography. | National socialism and motion pictures.

Classification: LCC PN1998.3.H368 N6313 2016 | DDC 791.4302/33092dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044830

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Contents

Authors Note

This book is not a translation of my German-language biography Veit Harlan: Des Teufels Regisseur, which was published in 2000. It is instead a rewrite. It was motivated by access to hitherto unpublished documents provided by Harlan family historian Ingrid Buchloh and to first-class copies of Harlan films on the big screen as opposed to the blurred videotape copies I had to satisfy myself with previously. It was also motivated by recent developments in film studies. The original book had been written in protest against German film scholars who relied on outdated sources, unaware of the New Film History movement or the exemplary work done by U.S. scholars. I decided back then to answer anti-Harlan polemics with pro-Harlan polemics, which I still think was justified in the national context but not in an international context.

Due to legal training at the Kammergericht Berlin, I had also found it unacceptable that Harlan was denied the right of defense, however tentative. It is one thing to call a defense unconvincing; it is something else to question its very existence. And defending Harlan was not even my aim; my attitude was and remains that of a curious investigator.

The ongoing program Wiederentdeckt (Rediscovered) at Berlins Zeughauskino has been a chief inspiration for my rewrite. These screenings of old German films are unusually well attended, and the audience is no longer dominated by elderly people reviving childhood memories, with due respect for their motives, but students who wonder why none of these intriguing films have received the scholarly attention they deserve. The chief aim of this book, then, is not to create a positive view of Veit Harlan as a Nazi film propagandist but to encourage a look beyond the existing German film canon in general and to call for analyses of lesser-known Harlan films in particular.

Introduction

Individualist in a Totalitarian State

Following a decree issued by Nazi authorities on April 29, 1942, all Jews living in the Netherlands had to wear the yellow star, and by July mass deportations to the extermination camps in the East had begun. It was around this time that the family of Anne Frank moved into a hiding place at Prinsengracht 163 in Amsterdam. Otto Frank was an ordinary businessman specializing in spices and pectin and therefore not particularly well connected, but even an internationally recognized film director such as Ludwig Berger, whose credits included Universum Film (UFA) and Paramount musicals, had to fear for his life. Just a year earlier, his Technicolor extravaganza The Thief of Bagdad had won three Academy Awards. Now his only protection against arrest and deportation was his forged papers identifying him as Aryan, which could be exposed at any time.

Another German refugee fighting for survival in the Netherlands was Camilla Spira, an earthy stage actress who shortly before Hitlers rise to power had costarred in Fritz Langs film Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933). The daughter of a Danish-born actress and her German Jewish colleague, she might have survived on her ownblond and full bosomed, she looked almost like the caricature of an Aryan woman, and by Nazi laws definition was only half-Jewish, but she had a Jewish husband and two children, and after the internment of the whole family in the Westerbork transition camp she could save them only if she passed as 100 percent Aryan. She succeeded with the help of lawyer Hans-Georg Calmeyer, later called the Oskar Schindler from Osnabrck. He was part of the Reichskommissariat (Reichs Commissars Office) installed in the Netherlands to deal with Jewish matters. Spira insisted to him that her biological father was not Fritz Spira, the Jewish actor, but her mothers lover, a Gentile from Hungary, and Calmeyer arranged for an interrogation of Lotte Spira-Andresen, then living in Berlin, to confirm these claims. As a result, the Spira family joined those 3,500 to 3,700 Dutch-based Jews whom Calmeyer managed to save from deportation to Auschwitz. It is likely that he knew both women were lying, and he may even have advised them to do so.

Spiras colleague Dora Gerson did not have the formers Nordic looks and with her harsh, stern appearance never approached the latters popularity. She had not sought it in the first place, being openly Jewish (she could have changed her surname) and leftist, and found her true vocation in political cabaret, though her possibilities were restricted first in her Swiss and then in her Dutch exile. More or less retired as an actress-singer, she had two children by her second husband, a Dutch Jew, at the time the Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands. Her first husband, a struggling actor when they married, had since then become a well-known filmmaker in Nazi Germany. His name was Veit Harlan, and she may have read his name on cinema billboards, for his latest film, Jud Sss (Jew Suss, 1940), had just been released in the Netherlands under the title Sss, de Jood. It was not particularly successful with Dutch audiences, but as a hate-inducing anti-Semitic propaganda picture costarring two of Weimar Germanys most celebrated actors, Werner Krauss and Heinrich George, it must have caught the attention of those whom it denounced.1 In the summer of 1942, Gersons situation was not desperate enough that she needed to ask her former husband for help. By autumn, however, after a failed escape attempt across France, she and her family were interned at Westerbork, and this time their situation