"ACHTUNG, ACHTUNG!" Despite the overbearing heat of the studio lights, the sprightly blond somehow remains spunky and proper. "We welcome all comrades of the Volk in the television viewing rooms of Greater Berlin with the German greeting, 'Heil Hitler!'" A quick flip of the right arm, a flash of palm, and the evening's programming begins. Welcome to "Grossdeutsche Fernsehen," the world's first regular television service.
It lasted a little over nine years, from March 1935 to September 1944. Most historians have assumed that just a few samples of Nazi-era television programming remain, but over 30 hours have recently been discovered on 285 rolls of TV footage stashed away in the official film archives of former East Germany. All but untouched and certainly never broadcast since the fall of the Third Reich, the recordings are in eerily excellent condition and feature a cast of sure-fire ratings-grabbers: Albert Speer, Benito Mussolini, and of course, Hitler himself.
There's a good reason this footage has been sequestered: while the Nazis were infamous masters of propaganda in just about any other medium, particularly film, they didn't know what to do with TV. The framing is awkward, the lighting falls flat, there's next to no editing, and no accompanying soundtrack -- much less the rousing orchestral crescendos or thumping marches of the Wochenschau newsreels shown to an audience of millions in movie theaters. In short, there is no drama here. There are, of course, chilling scenes of bare-faced propaganda in the newly discovered batch, political rallies, state visits, marching uniforms, swastikas galore and all the usual trappings of Nazi imagery -- but it feels like sloppy from-the-field reporting. None of it is delivered with the impeccable precision we associate with the most powerful PR campaign in history.
THE CANDID, REAL-TIME intimacy associated with TV was all wrong for the Nazis in the first place. Nazi propaganda was built on meticulous bombast, not from-the-field, and the cinema served it well. The fascist aesthetic calls for larger-than-life heroic figures gliding across the silver screen, but once presented with a small, hazy box, the Nazis were simply stumped. In an age of smart bombs like tiny bursts of light flowering on the other side of the world, one shudders to think what they could have done with television had they learned to harness its power.
But in the new medium's salad days, the Nazis clearly still hadn't got the hang of television. In one scene, Hitler is a runt of a man, viewed from a distance as he scampers across a field in lumpy pants to review his troops. The brim of his hat shades his face, putting out that infamous fire in his eyes. While Hitler nearly always towers over the audience from his podium centered in the cinematic frame in newsreels, here, because the bulky television cameras have been banished to the bleachers, viewers are treated to an extremely rare angle on the little dictator. We are looking down on him, not the other way around. In another scene, crowds line both sides of an empty street in Berlin. The announcer quietly intones, "We are waiting for the Fuhrer," and the sheer boredom of all that Nazi pomp is unwittingly unwound, minute after yawning minute.
Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, decided early on that television would only be available to those with permission to watch it in special viewing rooms, 28 of them in Berlin, and eventually a few in Munich and Hamburg as well. Only a handful of the highest ranking party members were allowed private sets in their own homes. As John Sandford explains in The Mass Media of the German-Speaking Countries, Goebbels didn't want a television in every home: "[T]he Nazis were anxious that resources be concentrated on providing every German family with a radio set, for it was clear that their leader came over much more effectively when his facial contortions and pantomimic gesticulations were either absent or, as was possible in the cinema, toned down by some judicious editing."
For Goebbels, the cinema was a far worthier investment, an immeasurably more powerful -- and ostensibly more manipulable -- instrument of propaganda, providing an "education" for das deutsche Volk "at least as influential as primary school." While the press and radio were already firmly in his grip, he took a deeply personal interest in film. When Hitler discovered the woman he was sure could shape the image of Germany, Goebbels jealously tried to ensure that he would maintain control over which films were made by whom and when. But ultimately Goebbels stuck to administration, and Leni Riefenstahl proceeded to give Hitler precisely what he wanted.
IF THERE IS AN ARGUMENT for the superior persuasive powers of German cinema over its television in the '30s, it is to be found in Riefenstahl's oeuvre. To this day, it is illegal to show Triumph of the Will from start to finish in the seductive darkness of the movie theater unless it is accompanied by some presentation of the horrors of the Holocaust. Last fall, the Film Museum in Potsdam opened an exhibition of Riefenstahl's works, and it was a rare opportunity to catch Triumph of the Will in its entirety in Germany -- albeit on a television monitor.
The most telling contrast between the power of cinema and television in Nazi Germany is the pairing of Riefenstahl's Olympiade and the live coverage of the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. Germany went all out to cover the games live. Special vans were built with film cameras mounted on top, feeding celluloid to the interior of the van below where it was immediately developed and projected onto the television camera and transmitted not more than a minute later out to the viewing rooms where an unprecedented audience of 162,000 caught the flimmering images of the world's athletes giving their all.
The vans, with their elaborate film-to-video apparatus, were hardly mobile. Once parked high in the stadium, they could do little but capture uninspiring total shots of the overall action, even as the film crews zipped through the frame with their far more lightweight and flexible equipment, grabbing all the better angles. For Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl had directed a crew of 120 manning 32 cameras, and the team on Olympiade, now working with the full support of Goebbels, was no less extravagant. Trenches were dug, tracks laid, and Riefenstahl, an athletic former dancer, was all over the shoot capturing the glean of muscular Aryan bodies.
In her classic study of German expressionist film, The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner argues that Riefenstahl had the long history of the development of German cinematic technique to lean on. Throughout the '20s, the UFA studios in Babelsberg near Berlin rivaled Hollywood in audience reach and critical acclaim. Describing Olympiade, Eisner notes that Riefenstahl "lingers at length over night views of torchlight slashing the darkness and flags becoming transparent next to the flames -- a high point of chiaroscuro," the defining look of German expressionism.
"In sunlight she seeks to catch figures against the light, the shadows cast by a marching column, or men enveloped in the halo of phosphorescence," Eisner observes, "and we perceive Hitler standing in his car with a kind of nimbus round his head." Further, "Olympiade" is cut so that the crowds seem to be waiting for Hitler's appearances as much as they are for the athletes.' When he does appear, he becomes a sort of benign super-spectator, as Susan Sontag has observed, blessing the Games with his mere presence. On film, Hitler was no runt.
As we look back on the 20th century, as we're wont to do quite a lot these days, we sometimes tend to write its highlights in shorthand on all too brief and handy timelines. Hitler pops into power, and whoops, it's off to Poland.
Not quite. The bulk of the recovered footage from Nazi television comes from the period of the Nazification of Germany itself, a long process between Hitler's power grab in January 1933, and the first tanks of the Blitzkrieg rolling across the eastern border in 1939. Precisely because these programs are also records of the various stages of this process, we don't want to see in them any bridges between Nazi Germany and the present in Germany or anywhere else.
Nazi television may have been clumsy, but it's precisely this lack of drama that reveals its surprises. Besides the unadulterated propaganda, there are also cooking programs, dance numbers, interviews and exercise hours, and these are the uncomfortable bits, the scenes that bring the Third Reich a little too close to home. There's the Hausfrau in the kitchen, lacing her recipes with helpful hints on how to make the most of the ingredients at hand. Viewers are told to save the leftovers, peelings and so forth in special containers to be picked up later so that the scraps can be tossed in the troughs at the pig farms. Not exactly ominously evil stuff.
How disconcerting it is to see Heinz Erhardt, for example, a relatively apolitical comedian who composed amusing little musical ditties, tickling the ivories for the Reich when he would go on to a lucrative post-war career in film and television and remain a favorite of the German public through the 1970s.
This is the truly disturbing effect of Nazi television. In barely edited interviews, in reports on farms or riding schools, the camera lingers long enough on faces for them to emerge from the stilted set-up and come to life. Not all of those faces are sympathetic, of course, but in general, before the Nazis or anyone else learned how to use or manipulate the new medium, its blankly staring eye was hardly fit for propagandizing, and as a viewer, like the proverbial soldiers who crawled out of the trenches to exchange cigarettes and songs with the enemy before shooting at him again the following day, you can't help but see a flash of humanity where you'd least want to.
David Hudson writes the English-language News Digest for Spiegel Online.
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