1938: 70 YEARS AFTER THE ANSCHLUSS
Film, Documentary, Lecture and Discussion Series
March 10 - 13 | 2007
Confronting the most painful aspects of Austria's history in the 20th century, the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Leo Baeck Institute New York, together with the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, is taking a fresh look at the Anschluss with a series of documentaries, films, lectures, and discussions. The film program and a lecture by prominent Austrian historian Oliver Rathkolb focus on the following questions: How did the Anschluss propaganda work in Austria back in 1938; how did the outside world view the ensuing events, particularly the American film industry; and how has the debate surrounding the Anschluss evolved during the past decades in postwar Austria?
The Austrian Film Museum has compiled two documentary programs - From Word to Deed and Micro Stories of the Anschluss - that include rare footage of original propaganda material dating before and after the Anschluss. The Nazis understood well how film serves as a powerful weapon for the manipulation of the masses and regularly used it as a tool in their relentless propaganda. In contrast, two Hollywood feature films - So Ends Our Night and The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler - shot relatively shortly after the events, show how the drama of the Anschluss was perceived and interpreted in the United States.
The hope is that the series will improve the historical understanding of historians, film critics, witnesses of the Anschluss, their children, grandchildren, and the general public. It is important to keep the memory of this tragic era alive as a warning for today and tomorrow.
DOCUMENTARIES
Two documentary film programs curated by Alexander Horwath and Michael Loebenstein from the Austrian Film Museum focus on Austria's Anschluss or annexation to the Third Reich from two different perspectives. Michael Loebenstein will give introductions. Every screening is followed by a discussion with the audience.
Monday | March 10 | 6:00 pm
Wednesday | March 12 | 8:00 pm
FROM WORD TO DEED
National Socialist rallies in Vienna (1932-34), 7 min
Ein Volk - ein Reich - ein Führer! (1938), 15 min
11. März 1938. Der große nationale Umbruch in Österreich [March 11, 1938: The day of the overthrow in Austria] (1938), 45 min
British Movietone News vol. 9, no. 463 (1938), one news item, 1 min
From Word to Deed spans the period from the Austrian National Socialist rallies at the beginning of the 1930s to reports covering the Anschluss by the British newsreel Movietone News in spring 1938. Two pieces of footage deliver entirely different perspectives of the event. The German newsreel report titled Ein Volk - ein Reich - ein Führer! propagandizes Hitler's arrival to the Heimat with elaborate imagery and angled off-screen narration, while the Vienna Police Department filmed far less monumental images of secondary locations: 11. März 1938 shows army barrack inspection rounds, the issue of batons, night scenes on Vienna's Ringstrasse, and everyday life in the administration.
Monday | March 10 | 8:00 pm
Wednesday| March 12 | 6:00 pm
MICRO STORIES OF THE ANSCHLUSS
Ostmark Wochenschau (1938), 3 news items, 18 min
Days of March 1938 (1938), 8 min
Everyday Life under the Anschluss: Amateur Movies (1938), 25 min
Wort und Tat [Word and deed] (1938, Gustav Ucicky), 11 min
Cultural and Architectural Monuments in Vienna/Reports from the German Gaus: Vienna (undated, Frank Rossak), 10 min
Perlen der Ostmark [Pearls of the Ostmark] (1938, Rudolf Mayer), 3 min
Micro Stories of the Anschluss oscillates between government-sanctioned film material and amateur movies. The items from the Ostmark Wochenschau newsreel convey normal, everyday life under National Socialism, and Gustav Ucicky's campaign propaganda movie Wort und Tat presents arguments in favor of voting for Hitler. The amateur film material in this collection was only recently discovered. This footage bears witness to the infiltration of politics in daily life: a summer day on a lake, Hitler's convoy in Hadersdorf-Weidlingau, and a proudly Aryanized Vienna bedecked in swastikas. Finally, two cultural films celebrate escapism to the beauty of culture and nature, presenting Vienna and the entire "Ostmark" as a jewel that shines in its new setting.
FEATURE FILMS
A number of anti-Nazi movies were produced in Hollywood in the period beginning in 1939, above all between 1941 and 1945. Each of the major studios participated in the cinematographic crusade against Nazi Germany - usually in the form of thrillers and crime films. Many of the Austrian and German émigré filmmakers who had fled from Europe to Hollywood were most likely to find work in this genre. The Viennese writer Alfred Polgar, another artist in exile, wrote "The actors displaced by the Nazis have plenty to do on the Pacific coast now. They find work in many of the war movies that are currently being produced - usually cast as Nazis. It's a strange twist of fate to find recognition and perhaps even stardom by impersonating the same bestiality that victimized one."
While shades of Viennese dialect often colored the dialog in anti-Nazi films, Austria and Vienna rarely appeared as an explicit setting. Vienna only plays a prominent role as a location in the two works shown as part of this series.
Tuesday | March 11 | 6:00 pm and 8:00 pm
SO ENDS OUR NIGHT
Directed by John Cromwell | 1941
Following the fate of a victim of political persecution and two Jewish citizens, the film (based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque) tracks German refugees on their way into exile. Vienna is the central station - shortly before and after the Anschluss, in the period from the end of 1937 to the beginning of 1938.
"Expressionist shadows, wet streets in the twilight: a darkened Vienna where the miserable life of exile forces those without passport to move only by night. The opening scene makes it clear that Austria is not only hostile to émigrés, but goes even further by giving the German Fascists plenty of leeway to persecute them" (Jan-Christopher Horak). For a while, the surreal funfair atmosphere of Vienna's Prater amusement park provides a place of refuge for the protagonists, but after March 12, 1938 the situation becomes entirely untenable. They have to continue their escape in the dark of the night.
In a 1941 issue of the exile newspaper Neuen Volks-Zeitung, critic Joe Gassner [= Karl Jakob Hirsch] wrote about So Ends Our Night: "A refugee film that doesn't sugarcoat or romanticize"
Thursday | March 13 | 8:00 pm
THE STRANGE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER
Directed by James P. Hogan | 1943
"Despite the fact that it is set in Vienna, this movie written by Viennese emigrants Joe May and Fritz Kortner is less about the specific historic events in Austria than an attempt to describe German Fascism in general. During the war years, there was a widespread rumor in the United States that Adolf Hitler used a double for public appearances. In the movie, Ludwig Donath plays a minor civil servant who is denounced and arrested on account of a joke, but is then made into Hitler's doppelganger through plastic surgery performed at the Gestapo headquarters" (Jan-Christopher Horak). The story becomes a metaphor for the two faces of the petite bourgeoisie: "demonic" and "normal." The good citizen Huber is just doing his duty. He recognizes his culpability far too late. Fritz Kortner plays the leader of the resistance, but he is a lone fighter, juxtaposed by the cheering masses with their swastika flags. "The image of Austria remains ambivalent: from the outside it is a destroyed country, but it acquiesces to Fascism and as a consequence shares responsibility for the war - just as the democratically minded Germans once did" (Horak).
LECTURE & DISCUSSION
Thursday | March 13 | 6:00 pm
The Anschluss in the Rear Mirror: 1938-2008
Historical Memories Between Debate and Transformation
By Oliver Rathkolb
Prominent historian Oliver Rathkolb analyzes how the debate on the Anschluss has evolved in Austria over the past decades. Rathkolb shows the most important changes in terms of political history that have taken place in relation to the causes and consequences of the Nazi takeover of power in 1938. Rathkolb also points out how the Anschluss has been perceived by international historians.
Rathkolb focuses on certain watershed years during which changes became apparent, a particularly crucial period being the years 1984-1988. He focuses special attention on the causes that turned Austrians into active collaborators of the Nazi regime and made them complicit in the Holocaust to an extent that exceeds their proportional share in the overall population of the Third Reich.
The presentation also provides an opportunity to address the topic of iconic images of the Anschluss and critically evaluates their sources. What is important in this context is an adjustment of the focus on inter-generational debates and on the differences in the reception of the Anschluss by Holocaust survivors, émigrés, and those "who never budged from home" - as well as an their descendants.
