| Film History | From the Giftschrank |

WIEN-FILM’S TOXIC LEGACY
by Brigitte Mayr

Paula Wessely during the filming of Heimkehr by Gustav Ucicky © Filmarchiv Austria

When people talk about the Wien-Film production company, they associate it mainly with operetta bliss, nostalgic melodramas, and lively comedies starring well-known audience favorites. Ignored in this is the toxic cinematic legacy shot mainly in the studios on Rosenhügel from the time of Austria’s Anschluss until the end of the war under the direct control of the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Joseph Goebbels’s calculated use of film as one of the most important “means of mass manipulation” worked like a charm as what people saw in the cinemas, and what continued to be broadcast after visiting the “picture palaces” was much better suited to controlling value judgements and behavioral norms than open agitation.

Propaganda disguised as petty bourgeois Heurigen kitsch
Of the more than 1,200 feature films produced during the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945, around forty, including Jud Süß, Kolberg, Hitlerjunge Quex, Ohm Krüger, and Ich klage an, are still under lock and key or only accessible to a limited extent as “Vorbehalt films,” which means that every screening must be accompanied by an expert introduction. Of these films “from the Giftschrank,” which literally means “poison cabinet” we are particularly interested in Wien-Film’s productions during the Nazi era, propaganda works, which although credited to the German market, were actually produced in Austria from 1939 to 1945. Through a variety of measures, such as control of the film industry, compulsory membership in the Reich Chamber of Culture, strict censorship, Aryanization, repression of “non-Aryan” artists, as well as stringent promotion of individual (“state”) artists and companies, the “ostmärkische” film industry was installed as a crucial part of the Nazi propaganda apparatus.

Wien-Film, which emerged from the Tobis-Sascha film production company in 1938, was presented by a rhombus with a treble clef enclosed within it, as a musical sign programmatically representing its namesake. Wien-Film’s founding guaranteed a viable economic and industrial base from which the material and aesthetics of a genuinely Austrian, or rather Viennese, film culture could be conveyed. Only a few of the fifty productions created during World War II, among them Anton der Letzte, Unsterblicher Walzer, Operette, Der Postmeister, and Schrammeln, are openly propagandistic, such as Heimkehr (1941) with Paula Wessely, which Elfriede Jelinek, who included some of the rabble-rousing dialogue from the film in her play Burgtheater (1985), considers to be the “most horrific propaganda feature film made by the Nazis.”

The repressed truth
With this historical special, we turn attention to the gladly hushed-up propaganda films from the Wien-Film production company in order to scrutinize their production process and style to reveal the perfidious attempts at manipulation through more or less open agitation, and ultimately, classify them correctly. In 1985, in the publication Wien 1945. davor/danach, filmmaker Bernhard Frankfurter delivered a compelling “reckoning with the Wien-Film,” which “blatantly stirred up enthusiasm for the Nazi regime with petty-bourgeois Heurigen kitsch.” With razor-sharp precision, Frankfurter analyzes the exodus of the artistic professionals who were thereby driven out: “Austria’s cinematic annexation had already been progressing rapidly since 1934. Parallel to this restoration and establishment of Nazi-controlled filmmaking, the purge was carried out both directly and indirectly, forcing an enormous number of powerful filmmakers into internal, and above all, actual migration.”

In post-war Austria, people gladly forgot that Wien-Film was originally an institution founded by the Nazis after the “Anschluss,” which was preceded by expropriations and the obligatory expulsion of Jewish employees. These gaps in memory will be addressed by showing the films, placing them in their historical context, analyzing propagandistic strategies, and discussing them with the audience. With this SYNEMA special, the festival offers space for a visual journey to the dark side of cinema and a response to the difficult task of handling the Nazi film legacy.

Curated by SYNEMA
Brigitte Mayr, Michael Omasta