The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture.

The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation.

On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange.In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition.

Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.

"The book approaches an often explored topic and consistently yields scintillating and original results, gaining its power from the richness and wide variety of its sources."–Eric Rentschler, author of West German Film in the Course of Time

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Thomas J. Saunders is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Introduction:

Before the First World War European observers prophesied that the twentieth century would be dominated by the United States. By virtue of population, resources and entrepreneurship the New World was predestined to eclipse the Old World. Although full realization of this prophecy came only after 1945, America’s participation in the Great War set the stage for what was to follow. The interwar period witnessed Europe’s first serious reckoning with American economic, diplomatic and cultural influence. Capital and merchandise were the visible accoutrements of American power. Behind them loomed management principles, advertising methods, labour relations, social values and moral standards. However isolationist its foreign policy, the United States exported its entrepreneurial, social and cultural norms. Europe experienced an unprecedented onslaught of what Germans dubbed Amerikanismus (Americanism) and Amerikanisierung (Americanization).

This onslaught was effected by a variety of means and media, from travellers’ reports and visits of American celebrities to American loans and symbols of prosperity like the Model T. But for the broad mass of Europeans the main agent of Americanization was the moving picture. Still a curiosity at the turn of the century, by 1918 the cinema was an ubiquitous and influential public medium. Parallel with America’s rise to global importance, it emerged as the dominant form of popular entertainment and enlightenment. As a vehicle for exporting the American way of life and stimulating demand for American products it proved unrivaled. Hollywood became the promotional guardian of the American dream and the primary instrument for domesticating American culture in Europe.

Hollywood’s monopolization of the international film market has never been a secret. Yet until very recently the profound ramifications of that monopoly have not been seriously investigated. Only with the waning of American power since the 1970s has the phenomenon of cinematic monopoly been treated as an historical “accident” which requires explaining. While film scholars are examining the consolidation of the studio system and narrative tradition which via Hollywood standardized much of global film production, cultural historians have begun to consider the meaning of Hollywood’s hegemony for both American and non-American viewers. In the study of European film cultures there is growing recognition that to treat Hollywood as extrinsic to national cinemas is simply inadmissable. Be it French, German, British, Italian or even Soviet, the culture of interwar cinema was first and foremost American.

Since the Great War the moving picture and Hollywood have become so rooted in Western culture and cultural mythology as to appear eternally synonymous. Three-quarters of a century later it requires considerable effort to imagine a world not yet frozen on celluloid and celluloid not dominated by the American model. Yet despite the historical simultaneity of cinema’s rise to public importance and American domination of the medium, this symbiosis was not always operable. The generation which survived the war, still intensely engaged in assimilating the cinema’s multifaceted import and just recently exposed to the full weight of American culture, only gradually conceded an inescapable tie between the moving picture and its American variant. What in retrospect appears to be the initial phase in a preordained process constituted then a cultural revolution.

The emergence of cinema to prominence in the public realm represented in itself a dramatic breakthrough. Technologically, film was born of the second industrial revolution in the last third of the nineteenth century. Socioeconomically, its appearance coincided with a massive wave of urbanization. For populations experiencing unprecedented geographic and in turn sociopsychological uprootedness, the motion picture provided community, moral guidance and education as well as entertainment, all at a moderate cost. It thereby took its place alongside the press, military service and universal education as an indispensable means of public indoctrination, vaulting within a generation of its development to the front rank of the mass media. Who was to control this public force, at whom and to what end it should be directed, and to what extent it could influence viewers, became unavoidable issues. Contemporaries debated the relationship between art, politics, technology, commerce and human progress in light of cinema’s pervasive impact. Caught between the drive to exploit and the urge to understand or control, they became embroiled in a contest to determine cinematic agendas.

After 1918 mapping these agendas became inconceivable without reference to Hollywood. In the postwar decade Europe experienced a massive invasion of American culture, spearheaded by the motion picture. Jazz bands, sports heroes, troupes of dancing girls, movie stars and tycoons were its personal representatives. American literature, fashions, mores and aspirations were its commercial and ethical counterparts. In the face of this onslaught Europe began to question its cultural resilience. Americanization became a buzzword. To some it promised excitement and revivication for cultures mired in the past and bankrupted by war. To others it portended the leveling of centuries of cultural development. For both, America became caught up in domestic debate about cultural values and direction in which the cinema was already enmeshed.

Two decades earlier neither the American nor cinematic challenge to European culture had provoked such intense debate. Nor had they been recognized as siamese twins. At the turn of the century the United States began to occupy the European mind primarily because of its burgeoning economic power. Thereafter, travel reports and early photojournalism began to present a mosaic of industrial advance, bustling cities, endless landscapes, the cult of technology and efficiency, and the triumph of mass culture. Youthful, wealthy, optimistic, and supremely self-confident, America became a prototype for future societies. Cinema increasingly breathed life into these visions and disseminated them to a mass public, but it did not create them. Indeed, if there was correspondence between European attitudes toward cinema and the United States it lay in the assumption that neither had a serious contribution to make to culture. To the extent that the motion picture did stir general debate, American film was not a primary concern. Before World War I French producers dominated international film markets, their closest rivals being Italian, American and Scandinavian companies. Controversy about the cinema assumed more generic than national characteristics, focusing on the threat of film to literature, theater and the social order. In sum, images of the United States began to haunt or enchant Europe independently of the growing preoccupation with film.

Only after the outbreak of European war did the fusion of American and motion picture challenges occur. Independently, both the cinema and its American variant entered new historical phases. A combination of unprecedented official respect for the power of the moving image and mass enthusiasm for motion picture entertainment made it an indispensable component of national self-awareness and self-projection. At precisely this moment there occurred a fundamental shift in the international film balance. French production suffered a calamitous decline, occasioned in part by failure to protect key personnel from enlisting. The Italian industry also experienced a setback and, like the French, did not regain its place on the international market. Economic and social pressures of European mobilization and the disruption of previous trade patterns permitted Hollywood to become the principal supplier for European movie theaters and win primacy on the world film market.

Before the war, Germany, though the foremost power in Europe, relied overwhelmingly on imported motion pictures to supply its cinemas. It now proved the primary European beneficiary of the market revolution. Cut off from previous sources of supply in enemy countries, it belatedly developed a production sector to match its national power. While the constellation of forces which has ever since encouraged equation of the motion picture and Hollywood took shape, Germany laid the foundation for an international cinema profile. The coincidence of Hollywood’s rise to global dominance and Germany’s emergence as the leading European producer determined the pattern of international competition in the subsequent decade. It meant as well that Germany’s postwar version of a common European experience—inundation by American motion picture entertainment—acquired unique accents.

The first of these was temporal. Whereas in western Europe the war brought an avalanche of American movies, Germany became increasingly isolated from international trends and witnessed dramatic expansion of domestic film output. While American exports established a firm position in Europe in the latter stages of the war and fortified it immediately thereafter, the German market belonged overwhelmingly to domestic producers.[9] Motion picture import remained illegal until 1921 and of limited profitability until 1924 because of the postwar inflationary spiral. Thus Weimar’s initiation into American movie entertainment came late and after a considerable hiatus. American movies had been shown in German theaters until the middle of the war, but the intervening break gave the Weimar encounter with Hollywood considerable novelty.

The second distinction concerns the volume and breadth of American impact. Not only did Hollywood’s inroads come late, but they never assumed the dimensions familiar elsewhere. American companies dumped large quantities of movies in Germany, established their own distribution companies and gained influence in German production. Nevertheless, Hollywood never won the control in Germany which it wielded almost everywhere else. At no time did American feature film imports constitute a clear majority of German market offerings. A significant indigenous alternative to Hollywood survived throughout the Republican era. Though overseas competition eliminated domestic production of short entertainment films, in the newsreel and documentary department native producers more than held their own. Despite extreme economic vicissitudes, German producers retained a position from which they recovered control of the domestic market with the advent of talking motion pictures.

The third peculiarity of the German situation is qualitative. Weimar’s reputation is not purely posthumous. Germany not only boasted the largest and healthiest film industry in Europe at the end of the war, but it won international recognition almost immediately with a series of outstanding motion pictures, beginning with Madame Dubarry and Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Notwithstanding American inroads and theft of talent, a tradition of excellence persisted through the remainder of the decade. In the latter half of the Weimar era the films of G. W. Pabst and Fritz Lang, not to mention the experiments of Leopold Jessner, Bertolt Brecht, Piel Jutzi and Robert Siodmak, testified to ongoing artistic ferment. German filmmakers continued to contribute substantially to the development of cinema as an art form and exercised considerable influence abroad. ...

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