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THE FILM SINCE THEN
Paul Wegener as a caricatured Communist leader ruled all Germany in the terroristic manner of Dr. Mabuse, with the Deutsche volk piteously impaled on his spear. The Nazis were saints. Their triumph occurred in a vacuum. This absurdity, far from being supported by the party, was hustled through the theatres under wraps. It made way the following autumn for Hitler junge Quex, written under the direct supervision of Goebbels and produced at Ufa, now completely State-controlled. To paraphrase Kracauer, this careful film gave the precipitate provincial producers at Munich to understand how such matters should be handled. Its first object was not to glorify Nazidom, except by indirection, but to destroy existing institutions and to use the energies thus released for party purposes. In particular it sought to drive deep wedges into an already disintegrating family life, and to exploit the sexual immaturity and general psychic infantilism of large sections of German youth. This exploitation was implicit as well as explicit : Gregory Bateson has suggested that, in the use of such motifs as the boy's desire for a knife and a key, the film may well have been unconscious of its own methods. In any case, it derived its major strength as propaganda from these buried appeals, rather than from such overt and childish scenes as that in which a Nazi leader weans a Communist from Moscow by telling him that the Germany in which they stand is ' unser Deutschland \ On the surface those two words alone reconvert the heretic, but the informed observer realises that his sudden conversion actually stems from antecedent events — events which have destroyed in his mind all basis for any political belief save a mystical one. So it was to be in all further Nazi political films. Their verbal arguments seemed childish to nonNazi audiences, and the films were therefore dismissed at that valuation. But to the Germans the emotional conflicts implicit in their situations were real and urgent, and it was these, and not the sloganising, which had effective propagandist impact.
Direct political arguments, however, were rare after
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