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Article Excerpt
The Weimar Republic, as many scholars have noted, suffered from a crisis of both national and masculine identity. (1) The Versailles Treaty mandated, among other things, the loss of German colonies, which were a point of pride, a way of acting out German sovereignty that had provided a way for all German citizens, especially the disenfranchised, to identify with their country. Men coming home from the war found women with a larger variety of jobs and roles, more self-confidence, and the vote. Under these circumstances, women became more threatening and more Other, and the misogyny prevalent in Weimar Germany supports this image of women, to the point where newspaper accounts of serial sex murders are able to sympathize, on occasion, with the murderer, rather than his victims. (2) In this context, Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel ceases to be a film about the tragic fall of Professor Rath, "an innocent creature who is corrupted by Lola," as Judith Mayne ironically paraphrases and summarizes traditional plot summaries of the film, suggesting that they imply a conservative reading of the film that surfaces even in more sophisticated interpretations. (3) More recent readings, including Mayne's, suggest that the film reflects a misogyny fueled by an anxiety associated with women's straying from the limited traditional roles portrayed in the film's opening montage-cleaning, serving, taking care of children--and emphasize the professor's abuse of authority or sense of inadequacy. (4) These contexts do not, however, exhaust the film's production of meaning. The film's clear references to colonialism, which the secondary literature has ignored, support and make more complex its representations of gender. Rath's infatuation with Lola Lola is, in part, a parodic displacement of Germany's frustrated desire for colonial mastery.
Although the film, Der blaue Engel (1930), is an adaptation of Heinrich Mann's novel, Professor Unrat (1905), the two works are not only produced, but also set, in different times. (5) The novel portrays Wilhelminian Germany, perhaps around the time of its publication, and the action of the film takes place between about 1925 and 1929, as shown by a scene depicting the destruction of a calendar whose pages are used to cool a curling iron. The novel refers often to Raat's sympathy for conservative power structures (which moves in the course of the narrative to anarchy) and cultural tendencies and contradictions are often made visible. Despite Kiepert's active support of the SPD, for example, he is patriotic, and he and his wife repeatedly sing a "Flottenlied" concerning "deutsche[n] Seehelden" to a "ganz von Patriotismus erschutterten Saal." (6) The lower-class audience in the bar is also patriotic, unified in support of the German Navy, and by extension, of the German colonies. The navy and the colonies produced a kind of secondary integration of the disenfranchised in Imperial Germany, displacing in part cultural icons such as Goethe and Schiller. In fact, Raat's development mirrors this move from a land of "Dichter und Denker" to a land of "Realpolitiker." His evening hours had been spent on the study of "Partikel bei Homer" (404), but by the end of the book he acts as a tempter to bring down...
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