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The Kaiser as the beast of Berlin: race and the animalizing of German-ness in early Hollywood's advertising imagery.

Article Excerpt
The 1910s were a pivotal period when movie studios and stars began to reside in Hollywood and when the circumstances of the First World War helped the United States film industry to achieve global market dominance. During the 1910s and early '20s Hollywood surpassed New York as the center of domestic film production and the industry established an integrated system of production, distribution, and exhibition that would spread American culture on an unprecedented scale. As a part of this system, film promotion became vital for expanding the industry as well as shaping peoples' perceptions of cultures and nations around the world.

This essay provides a case study of how racial, ethnic, and national identities were enlisted in early Hollywood promotion, namely how Germans were depicted as animalistic during World War I. Drawing from over 280 advertisements and publicity items depicting German-ness in the fan and trade press, this essay addresses the conundrum faced by the US government and film industry in their public relations campaign to deride Germany at a time when the American population was predominantly white and included a significant proportion of people of German descent. While ethnic stereotypes of German-ness often appeared in this wartime propaganda, criticism in specifically racial terms was rare and potentially more problematic, arguably due to both the composition of the dominant American public and its Eurocentric ideologies of whiteness as an ideal or norm. Whiteness was present in the promotional materials but rarely criticized per se; instead, German-ness tended to be constructed as less white, nonwhite, or nonhuman and then criticized in those terms.

Whiteness, German-ness, and Wartime Propaganda

For this essay, it is helpful to consider depictions of Germans during World War I in light of both "whiteness" and "German-ness" as culturally coded categories of being. As Richard Dyer writes, whiteness has been constructed paradoxically as idealized, normative, and diverse. (1) Eurocentric discourse has viewed white people as occupying the highest rung of humanity, as normative in relation to all other peoples, and as representing humankind in all its diversity. Whiteness has been idealized via associations with mind, virtue, beauty, cleanliness, and light. Yet it has been coded as normative in its seeming ordinariness, neutrality, raceless-ness, and invisibility. And it has been seen as diverse, with individuals displaying degrees of whiteness via attributes ranging from skin tone to morality and social class (good is considered whiter than evil, higher class is whiter than lower class--but all gradations may exist within whiteness). (2) The cultural status of white groups could shift widely over time, as with the Irish and later the Germans who were vilified and then rehabilitated when the conditions that gave rise to this treatment changed. Historically, "whiteness" has been constructed in stark opposition to "blackness," which itself has been marginalized and associated with the body, the primitive, and the animalistic--as with pseudo-Darwinian beliefs about black people being more akin to apes than to white people, beliefs that clearly informed the creation of some of the ads discussed below.

Germans began to form a significant presence in the U.S. when, from the 1830s to 1850s, the annual number of ethnic German immigrants rose from about 10,000 to 215,000 and peaked in 1882 at nearly 250,000. Thus, by 1900, over a quarter of the American population was of direct German descent. (3) While this influx may have engendered some anti-German backlash among more established white Americans,...

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