Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund

Hence, it can be no surprise that barely two years after ‘The Palm Trees ...’ was published, Maria Hilchenbach published her doctoral thesis, Kino im Exil (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1982), which is also an attempt at a general overview of film exile and as such, quite obviously inspired by Horak. Seen in hindsight, it appears that with Horak’s article, the floodgates were opened, and the topic of exiled German-Jewish film artists moved to the centre of the attention of exile researchers. In 1984, for instance, film historians Hans-Michael Bock and Hans-Helmut Prinzler launched the Cinegraph Research Institute and, through the Munich-based publisher Edition Text und Kritik, they have since periodically published important reference works on exiled film artists such as Reinhold Schünzel, Joe May, or E.A Dupont.9 Two other significant early 1980s works on exile also both came out in the same year. They are not dissimilar to Horak’s ‘The Palm Trees ...’ in approach and subject matter, since they echo Horak’s concern with finding a more scholarly basis for exile research. However, they became more of a hybrid than Horak‘s article. John Russell Taylor’s Strangers in Paradise (New York/ NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), and Anthony Heilbut’s Exiled in Paradise (New York/ NY: Viking Press, 1983), both published in 1983, discuss the broader topic of German-Jewish exile while also making frequent mention of exiled Jewish film artists, including through references to the EFF. While due to its source material, which consists of interviews and empirical data, among other sources, Heilbut’s study has more scholarly value than Taylor’s, which relies on secondary sources only, both must nevertheless be regarded as hybrids between popular and scholarly publications. In contrast to Taylor’s book, Heilbut’s account goes beyond the anecdotal, and rather than being solely based on secondary sources, he also draws on oral histories and personal correspondence with former émigrés. Whereas Taylor is a film critic, Heilbut is an academic. As the American born son of German-Jewish émigrés, Heilbut can be considered a figure whose background provided the impetus for his preoccupation with exile, calling to mind the late Karsten Witte who, in a report on the publication of Berlino-Vienna-Hollywood at the 1981 Venice Biennale alluded to Thomas Elsaesser (UK), Bernard Eisenschitz (France), and Jan-Christopher Horak (USA) with the remark, ‘It was primarily the children of emigrants who first embarked on exile research’.10

Prior to Strangers in Paradise, Taylor, besides writing for Sight & Sound, served in 1969 as jury member at the Berlin Film Festival. He was also Hitchcock’s official biographer and had already published a number of bio-critical studies, all revolving around Hollywood figures from the 1930s/40s, from which it is only a small leap to the topic of exile.11 Taylor’s and Heilbut’s books share some striking similarities as well as some differences. Besides discussing the same subject matter and being published in the same year, they are both influenced by Salka Viertel‘s autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, from which they frequently quote. While Heilbut focuses solely on German-Jewish emigration, however, Taylor’s book, echoing Baxter‘s, includes émigrés from other European countries.

The scarcity of scholarly literature on exiled film artists at the time led to both books being at least consulted sometimes even cited by, scholars, and consequently both have their detractors as well as their supporters. Although his work is much more ambitious in scope, it is apt to introduce Jean-Michel Palmier’s Weimar en exile at this point. Published five years after Taylor’s and Heilbut’s publications, it resembles theirs inasmuch as it is also something of a hybrid between an scholarly study and a popular publication. Like Heilbut, Palmier draws on a number of sources, including archival data and oral histories. And it is no doubt these oral histories which sparked his preoccupation with exile in the first place, for they were all with well known figures connected to Weimar culture: Blandine Ebinger, Maria Ley Piscator, Lotte Eisner, etc. Nevertheless, Palmier also drew on secondary sources, since exile research at this point was yet in its embryonic stage, and archival sources were still relatively sparse.12

In another parallel to both Taylor and Heilbut, Weimar en exile also remained Palmier’s sole contribution to the field of exile research before his untimely death in 1998. Palmier’s concern with exile derives from the fact that he was a professor of Esthéthique et des sciences de l’art at Université Paris 1/ Panthéon-Sorbonne. Weimar culture was his area of expertise, with his publications on the topic being numerous.13 It is precisely this culture, referred to by Palmier as ‘one of the richest [such] that it strikes us as forming an almost unique example’ (Palmier 2006: 17) which was lost following the Nazi takeover, prompting Palmier to embark on a monumental effort of memorialisation, ‘to remember their story’ (Palmier 2006 18).

In Weimar en exile Palmier strives to cover the entire emigration, including film artists, writers, academics, and political refugees, as well as all the émigré hubs in such countries as France, Switzerland, the UK, the Netherlands, Turkey, and China. Palmier’s book is, in fact, a compendium of German-Jewish exile. This clearly sets it apart from most other studies on exile, and was in its time a far more ambitious undertaking than most previous efforts, including Taylor’s or Heilbut’s. Justifying his decision to take an all-inclusive approach to the topic of exile, Pamier explains that

the scope of the subject, and its complexity, suggest that it should either be tackled collectively or that its scope should be very closely delimited (Palmier 2006: 15).

Weimar en exile bears a faint resemblance to the Manns’ Escape to Life, and the frequency with which he refers to their book make it obvious that it served as an inspiration for his own work. Issues Palmier discusses - and which echo Escape to Life - include the events leading up to the Nazi takeover; Goebbels’ establishment of the Reich Chambers of Culture, what these various chambers entailed, how they functioned and, also, their well-known consequences for Jewish artists; anti-Nazi theatre in exile; émigré periodicals; the rise and fall of the Popular Front; the German Resistance; and the émigrés’ perspectives on post-war Germany.

Although Palmier’s mission - large-scale and ambitious as it is - is without precedent, some sections of the book crash under its enormous scope. Clearly, Palmier is much more at ease discussing writers, politicians and academics such as Willi Münzenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, or Carl von Ossietzky, as his knowledge on - and probably interest in - them is that much more profound than that concerning film artists. Consequently, while Weimar en exile is a valuable research tool in many respects, it is also a warning sign that by expanding the scope the risk of inaccuracy increases. Certainly, in a move inspired by Horak’s examination of the impact of refugee film artists on Hollywood, the focus of exile researchers slowly started to shift from the mid-1980s on from a general to a more detailed observation of the influence the exiles brought to bear on the US film industry. This is manifest, for instance, in an exhibition held at the Max Kade Institute of the University of Southern California in 1986. While the exhibition covered the German-speaking emigration to Hollywood, starting with Carl Lammle’s arrival in the US in 1884, it nevertheless homed in on the years after 1933. While the catalogue to the exhibition identifies several areas and genres where the impact of émigrés on American popular cinema is palpable (e.g. the horror film, the use of film scores, the social problem film) the fact that exile research was still in its early stages is evidenced by the curator’s comment that after 1933, they could only detect one single ‘genre influenced by the Germans’ (Angst-Norwik & Sloan 1986: 9). This, of course, was film noir, although Paul Schrader - one of the first to link the émigrés’ presence in Hollywood to film noir - himself said that ’there is a danger of overemphasizing the German influence on film noir’ (Schrader in Belton 156: 1996), while film historian Andrew Sarris, for instance, claims that ‘[film noir] is very difficult to define or even categorize as a self-enclosed genre simply because it is largely a critical afterthought in film history’ (Sarris 1998: 104).14

Besides the contentious issue of film noir, Horak and H.G. Asper would eventually identify other genres on which the émigrés brought their influence to bear (see below). Nevertheless, film noir - and the émigrés’ hand in it - has since become a major focal point for exile researchers and film historians. Two scholars to also highlight the refugees’ influence on this genre are Christian Cargnelli and Michael Omasta. In Schatten Exil - Europäische Emigranten im Film noir (Vienna: PVS Verleger, 1997), they contend that ‘one quarter, or based on other criteria one third of films noirs were made by directors from the Old World’ (Cargnelli & Omasta 1997: 9). However, their book does much more than underscoring the high émigré presence in film noir. Taken together, the contributing essays amount to a study of the lives and working conditions of the refugees in exile, using their impact on film noir as a basis. For instance, the chapter on cinematographer Franz Planer, who collaborated on a number of films noirs, tells of the ‘tricky undertaking [to attain membership in the American Society of Cinematographers]’ (Müller in Cargnelli & Omasta 1997: 156), thus drawing attention to one of the major obstacles the exiles faced: that of union membership. Another chapter examines the émigré contribution to films that are hybrids between film noir and anti-Nazi films. In essence, Schatten Exil underscores the degree to which American film history and exile research are invariably connected. Cargnelli and Omasta’s book is also a fine example of how exile research has evolved from the wide angle vision of its infancy to the narrow focus of today which allows for much more detailed scrutiny of, for instance, a particular genre or a particular group of émigrés.

Another example to underscore this point is Josef Garncarz’s contribution to Phillips’ and Vincendeau’s Journeys Of Desire (London: BFI, 2006). Unlike Horak in Anti-Nazi-Filme der deutschsprachigen Emigration von Hollywood 1939 - 1940 (see below), Josef Garncarz’s preoccupation in ‘The Ultimate Irony - Jews Playing Nazis in Hollywood’ is not so much with the émigrés’ influence on anti-Nazi films, but the question of the motivation for them to star in these. Hence, rather than just gauging the émigrés’ input in anti-Nazi films, Garncarz - whose essay appeared twenty years after Horak’s trailblazing study - takes his examination one step further. This aptly illustrates the development exile research has undergone.

While early publications on film exile like those by Heilbut, Taylor, but also those by Hilchenbach, Horak and Palmier suffered from a dearth of empirical data as well as a lack of reliable secondary literature, which often resulted in inaccuracy, their contributions were the fundament for what would become known as exile research. It is owing to those early contributions, which, as we have seen, were often overviews or compendiums on exile, that a more detailed and focussed examination of film exile has become possible.

Jan-Christopher Horak

Over the years, two towering figures have emerged in the field of research on exiled German-Jewish film artists, with both scholars having significantly contributed to our understanding of exile in Hollywood and its implications. The first of these is Jan-Christopher Horak. Taking into account Horak’s family history as the son of émigrés, and the political and cultural background of the 1970s, it is not surprising that he should have emerged as a leading figure in exile research. Horak stands as a scholar and pioneer to whom every subsequent exile researcher is indebted, inasmuch as he embarked on groundbreaking research at a time when no academic studies on the émigré film artists were available. Horak’s contribution to exile research is invaluable in several respects. First, he pioneered an oral history approach. Furthermore, by identifying genres specific to émigrés, he not only provided subcategories for future researchers, but also laid the foundation for similar investigations.

Horak’s preoccupation with exile research was triggered by his MA thesis on Lubitsch. This preoccupation with Lubitsch - who was, after all, an early émigré - resulted in his oral history project and the subsequent publication of ‘The Palm Trees ...’. This, in turn, sparked an more focused inquiry of how - or if - these exiled film artists had any influence on American culture, particularly its film industry, leading to the publication of Anti-Nazi-Filme der deutschsprachigen Emigration von Hollywood 1939 - 1940 (Münster: MAKS, 1984), his doctoral thesis. Put differently, quoting Horak himself, ‘once the biographical and filmographical facts of emigration are established, research can now move on to the next stage’ (Horak 1984: XV).

Anti-Nazi-Filme built on his previous research insofar as Horak drew on, first of all, the oral histories he previously conducted, as well other findings already used in ‘Palm Trees .

Anti-Nazi-Filme constitutes the first scholarly attempt to assess the mark the émigrés have left on the film industry of a host country, in this case the United States. His study, as Horak points out in the introduction ‘combines two areas of research which thus far have always been looked at separately - if at all: research on the German speaking emigration in Hollywood and research on American war propaganda’ (Horak 1984: XVii). He starts from the premise that the contribution of the émigrés to America’s film industry was more evident in the anti-Nazi films than in any other genre, maintaining that ‘the influence of the emigrant film-artists in Hollywood should not be underestimated, since as Europeans, they were in the position to fill certain gaps in Hollywood’s film industry’ (Horak 1984: XV). According to Horak, ‘of around 180 films, made between 1939 and 1945, which can be classified as anti-Nazi films, the émigrés contributed to sixty of them’ (Horak 1984: 80). Horak starts his examination by providing a detailed history of German-Jewish exile, including ties between the German and American film industries prior to 1933. He then looks at film propaganda in WWII, moving on to describe the changes in the official US position towards Nazi Germany and how this differed at times from that of Hollywood. Horak then gives an exhaustive account of the Office of War Information and its inception in June 1942, detailing its influence and the effect of its instructions on the US film industry. The body of Horak’s book, however, consists of a cross-section of 13 anti-Nazi films, selected for the significance of aspects of their production history and their reception. For each film, Horak starts by first recounting its production history, before moving on to its reception, followed by biographical sketches of émigré participants. He then gives a brief description of the film’s narrative followed by a textual analysis in terms of anti-Nazi propaganda. Horak surmises that even though the émigrés had a tendency to complain about the lack of realism in the antiNazi films, their input is nevertheless discernible. Not only did they manage to include in the narrative news from Nazi-occupied territory, gleaned from the exile press (e.g. Aufbau15), but in some cases they even had their own experience to draw on, as in the case of Mortal Storm (MGM, USA 1940), which owes its accurate depiction of Nazi barbarity to the émigré screenwriters George Froschel and Paul Hans Rameau, who had suffered at the hand of the Nazis.

Anti-Nazi-Filme ... was a landmark in film history inasmuch as it identifies a genre to which the émigrés measurably contributed. Horak shows how anti-Nazi films drew on other, preexisting genres such as, for instance, the gangster film, and how their narratives, symbols, and characters were modified to be recycled in the anti-Nazi films. Moreover, it is evident that Anti-Nazi-Filme ... is meant to inspire future researchers to follow up on the ground Horak has broken.

Fluchtpunkt Hollywood (Münster: MAKS, 1984) was published as an appendix to Anti-Nazi-Filme ..., Horak’s doctoral thesis. Fluchtpunkt can be regarded as an expansion of ‘The Palm Trees ...’ as the range of issues discussed is much broader. These issues include, for instance, emigration to Austria, Hungary, France and the UK, as these were the countries where most of the émigrés first sought refuge before finally settling in the US. Fluchtpunkt also makes it clear that it was political developments (e.g. the yielding to Nazism by Austria and Hungary; the invasion of France and the Blitzkrieg on the UK by Nazi Germany) that forced the émigrés to move on to the US. He also takes into account the film-business relations between Germany and the US prior to 1933, concluding that the subsequent integration of refugees arriving after the Nazi takeover was facilitated by the sizable German community that had already established itself in Hollywood by the time the majority of the exiles arrived. Other aspects he discusses in more detail than in ‘The Palm Trees .’ are the various waves of emigration (the first big wave arrived following the Anschluss, and the second after the outbreak of WWII), anti-Semitism and racism the émigrés faced in the US, and the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. However, certain topics receive more attention than others, such as the collaboration in both Europe and the US between Koster, Pasternak and Jackson. This anticipates a future preoccupation of Horak‘s, which culminated in an article he co-wrote with Asper (see below). Unsurprisingly, Fluchtpunkt also covers the anti-Nazi films which, of course, had become his chief preoccupation.

Besides being a compendium of film exile - in which regard it resembles a number of similar publications discussed above that came out at the same time - what sets Fluchtpunkt apart is that it was one of the first reference works on film exile. In fact, the better part of the book consists of a lexicon of biographical data pertaining to exiled film artists. Needless to say, in those pre-Internet days when Fluchtpunk was first published, and when scholars had limited access to reliable biographical data on former émigrés, Fluchtpunkt was an invaluable, if not unique, research tool, enabling the reader to gather information at a glance on a vast number of émigrés, including actors, directors, producers, and all kinds of below-the-line personnel.

Horak’s chapter on ‘Exilfilm’ in Geschichte des deutschen Films (Jacobsen, Kaes,

Prinzler (eds.). Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler: 1993) also draws on his previous publications, notably on Fluchtpunkt Hollywood and Anti-Nazi-Filme, to provide a comprehensive summary of what was by now the mature field of exile research. The article allowed Horak to raise important new questions, such as the definition of exile film as opposed to film exile. Horak explains that exile film and film exile are two different entities, the latter, according to him, denoting the actual duration of exile of the exiled film artist, while the former specifically defines a film ‘that was made outside Germany after 1933, produced, directed, and written by German emigrants’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 101).

Demarcating exile film is indeed crucial, as it allows us to identify the possible contributions and influences of the émigrés on the film industry in the host country, be it France, the Netherlands, or the United States. Hence Horak rightly claims that ‘exile film must be embedded in film history as a chapter that runs parallel to that of the Third Reich’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 102), for, as he makes clear, ‘for a lot of German film-makers of the 1960s, the real German film history was not defined by fathers tainted by the Third Reich, but by émigrés like Fritz Lang and Lotte Eisner’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 102). Examples in support of Horak might include Werner Herzog’s friendship with Lotte Eisner and his remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu (Prana-Film Gmbh, Germany 1921; Werner Herzog Filmproduktion/ ZDF/ Gaumont International S.A.,W-Germany 1979); Schlöndorffs acceptance speech at the Academy Awards in 1980, in which he thanked Fritz Lang in particular; or Douglas Sirk’s influence on R.W. Fassbinder. Horak himself mentions several similar examples, including genres in which the émigrés had already excelled during their Weimar period and which were imported into the host country, one of them being the Kostümfilm,16 or its subgenre, the biography film or biopic. Moreover, the fact that a number of American films were based on German plays by émigré authors, e.g. Carl Zuckmayer’s Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, which was released as I Was A Criminal (John Hall Productions, USA 1945) in the USA in 1945, and involved a host of émigré-contributors, among others, Alfred Bassermann (male lead), Richard Oswald, the director, remaking his own Berlin production from 1931, Albrecht Joseph (screenplay), also proves Horak’s claim that exile film and the film of Third Reich cannot be separated. Horak explains, ‘for the exiled film-artists, exile film, like exile literature and exile journalism, was a continuation of the democratic traditions of German culture, such as they were prior to Hitler’s rise to power’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 102): democratic traditions which also found their expression in charitable organisations such as the EFF, which granted support for émigré film artists from all walks of life.

In ‘Three Smart Guys’, written in collaboration with Helmut G. Asper (In: Film Criticism, Vol. XI, nr.2, 1999), Horak further develops his comments on genre in exile film, here in relation to musical comedy. The title of the article refers to the first of a string of films by émigré-director Henry Koster, starring Deanna Durbin, Three Smart Girls (Universal Pictures, USA 1936). Like all of the film’s sequels, it was produced by émigré Joe Pasternak. The financial success of Three Smart Girls gave Koster and Pasternak enough clout to get their studio, Universal, to send for their collaborator, the screenwriter Felix Jackson, who was still in need of a visa.

When Horak and Asper wrote their article, Horak was head of the archives at Universal Studios, and thus had unrestricted access to the studio’s archives and records. Horak and Asper convincingly show how ‘three refugees from Adolf Hitler’s Germany [Henry Koster, Joe Pasternak, Felix Jackson] adapted themselves to the working methods of the studio system, while at the same time bringing to bear their European heritage. In doing so, they not only influenced briefly the formation of a major American film genre, the musical comedy, through the discovery and nurturing of a young star [Deanna Durbin], but in the process also literally saved a major Hollywood studio, Universal, from certain bankruptcy’ (Asper & Horak 1999: 135). Asper and Horak draw interesting parallels between the light, musical comedies Koster, Pasternak and Jackson had made in Europe and their subsequent Deanna Durbin musicals at Universal, showing that the latter were a continuation of the former, the only significant difference being that their star had now changed as the primary stars of their European output, Dolly Haas and Francisca Gaal, were now replaced by Deanna Durbin. The article also illustrates compellingly how the blueprint of Koster, Pasternak, and Jackson, since it had proven so profitable, was emulated by studios such as MGM. For all we know, the MGM musicals of the 1940a and 50s would not have been the same without the influence those three émigrés had on Hollywood’s film industry.

As many émigrés were still alive when Horak first embarked on exile research, he was able to rely on first-hand accounts. These oral histories, as we have seen, were Horak’s initial contribution to the field. Also, by shifting the focus away from the émigrés themselves to their creative output, he opened our eyes to the mark they left on the film industries of their host countries. Horak was also the first to clearly define exile film, thus narrowing the area of investigation from a plethora of films to which a number of émigrés contributed in varying degrees, to those films in which the input of the émigrés is distinctly discernible. In addition, he redefined the concept of national cinema, concluding that in the light of the substantial émigré contribution, the boundaries and the definition of German national cinema become blurred and thus are open for debate. Lastly, by looking at the contribution of cinematographers to (exile) film, Horak opened the field of vision beyond directors, screenwriters and actors to below-the-line personnel.