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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
quarrel, which is seen to be a hopeless one, a torchlight parade of the Stahlhelm passes the magnate's house. The protagonists, overcome by emotion, rush to the balcony and stand in reverent silence, partisans united by the knowledge of their German-ness.
Preposterous as is this ending, it does not rob the picture of effect, even for non-Nazi minds, because what has gone before has been presented with skill and insight. And this became the characteristic method of the comparatively few Nazi films which dealt directly with political events. It is significant that the majority of these centred around World War I, that festering focus of nationalist consciousness. In this milieu the Nazis could say what they liked, and still remain confident of ready belief on the part of the vast majority of Germans. Stemming from this taproot of popular emotion and actual experience, some of these 1914-18 films achieved considerable cinematic eloquence and maturity, notably the ambitious trilogy Um Das Menschen Recht (of which the first part only has been seen in the United States). Another popular — and safe — theme was that of Germany's irredentist populations. Typical of these was Friesennot, about a colony of Frisian Germans buried in the forests of Russia to which come representatives of the Bolsheviki bent on taking over. Here a bastard version of the technique of the old ' instinct ' films was used to combine the irridentist theme with that of blut und boden : the climax is a folk-dance by male dancers which is the farthest the Nazi screen ever went in the direction of dramatizing primitive Teutonism.
For the most part, however, fiction films were far less direct. They contented themselves with routine stories, merely heightening those aspects of German life which fitted into the Nazi scheme.1 All-out propaganda was
1When I asked Gottfried Reinhardt why an innocuous romance included a long and totally irrelevant scene showing the entrance of a cavalry unit into a Prussian town, he replied : ' For the same reason that American films feature unmotivated scenes of jazz bands and tap dancing. Germans are ready to watch any amount of marching, whether or not it relates to the plot.'
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