Life Goes On: Surprisingly Subversive Late Nazi Film

The literature on German feature films of the Nazi era has generally stressed either those films’ propagandistic qualities (the antisemitic Jud Süss for instance), or their escapist avoidance of political or current themes (the main thesis of Eric Rentschler’s classic The Ministry of Illusion). This paper will draw on the methodological approach of Siegfried Kracauer to argue that there were more complicated elements at work in Nazi film. Certainly some films and some filmmakers strove to make propaganda, but others did not, and in any case, as Kracauer argued, the nature of film as an art form means that a film may reflect many different kinds of voices and perspectives, some of them strikingly subversive.

This paper will illustrate these points by looking at three films made late in the Nazi era by three of the most prominent directors: Veit Harlan’s Kolberg (1944), Helmut Käutner’s Unter den Brücken (1944) and Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Das Leben geht weiter (1945, but never completed). Harlan, maker of Jud Süss, was an unabashed Nazi, and Kolberg was made to inspire resistance to the allies, but even Harlan’s films always contained surprisingly contradictory elements. Liebeneiner was an opportunist who could make such notorious films as Ich klage an, justifying euthanasia, and yet his later films celebrated distinctly anti-Nazi values and ultimately a future without Nazis. Käutner was a convinced anti-Nazi whose films were always oppositional, if subtly so, and Unter den Brücken fits neatly into this pattern. That subversive themes could arise in Nazi films, sometimes even in the most seemingly regime-conforming productions, in turn tells us something about how incompletely dictatorial control worked in practice, especially in the context of Germany’s impending military defeat.