The German Genius

first Nazi film of any consequence. It concerns a youth who is torn between loyalty to his Communist father and his growing belief in the Hitler Youth movement. He is killed in the course of street disturbances, which the Nazis had made such a feature of their activities in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
    Ritter went on to produce a series of films which, until Stalingrad, were increasingly influential. Urlaub auf Ehrenwort features a handsome junior officer in World War I and his unit as they are transported by train back to Berlin from one area of fighting before going on to another, where they will almost certainly meet their death. When the unit arrives in Berlin, the men have five hours to wait for their next train. Most of the soldiers come from Berlin and although leave is forbidden, the junior officer allows them to go home after they have given an undertaking they will all be back at the station in time for their train. The film then follows the challenges they face—pacifists and communists taunting them along the way, unfaithful wives, wives who have taken their husband’s jobs, wayward children, illness. All the men save two are back at the station in time, and the others catch up with the train when it makes its first stop.
    Non: Pour le Mérite , possibly Ritter’s finest film, was a biography of a World War I pilot, made with the cooperation of the air ministry. Having downed an English ace, who is not wounded, the German pilots honor him—for his bravery—over dinner. Elsewhere, a German pilot withholds fire when he realizes the English pilot’s guns have jammed. The film then shows the still-young pilots going to seed in the Weimar Republic, their talents and war record ignored, only to be redeemed with the arrival of Hitler. 23
    During the Blitzkrieg years, Ritter shifted his focus to World War II itself. The 1941 Stukas is devoted to comradeship in the flying corps and featured a very popular song, “Stukalied.” 24 The film also depicted Prussian mothers who, “instead of sadness and melancholy” because their sons have been killed, feel “pride and a sense of fulfilment that [their boys] had the privilege of dying a heroic death.” 25 The Stukalied ends:
    We’re not afraid of hell and never relent,
Till the enemy is destroyed,
Till England, till England, till England is crushed,
The Stukas, the Stukas, the Stukas.
     
    Ritter was captured by the Russians, escaped, and returned to Germany. After being “de-Nazified,” he emigrated to Argentina. 26
     
     
    Hitler’s assault on music and musicians was—in its aims at least—no less severe than his attack on artists and publishers, but what transpired was more complex. The modernist repertoire was purged from early on in 1933, with “degenerate” composers such Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Toch and conductors including Otto Klemperer and Hermann Scherchen, expelled. A commission of leading musicians—including Max von Schillings and Wilhelm Furtwängler—was set up in Berlin in June 1933, their task to supervise and censor the programs of music performed in the capital. 27
    Richard Strauss was treated gingerly and so was Furtwängler. Strauss’s collaboration with Stefan Zweig, the Jewish writer who wrote the libretto for his opera Die schweigsame Frau was not stopped, though performances were forbidden shortly after the premiere, and Strauss was eventually asked to resign his post as director of the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK), “on grounds of age and ill health.” Furtwängler was forced to resign his post as vice president of the RMK in protest against the regime’s treatment of Hindemith, but he wasn’t further harassed, not then anyway. 28
    Goebbels’s propaganda ministry did not have its own music division until 1936, and only then was pressure stepped up. Just 2 percent of German music was of Jewish origin but the prominence of Jewish musicians, such as Schoenberg, Klemperer, Kurt Weill, and Hanns Eisler helped the Nazis spread the message that there was a conspiracy to debase what the average German saw as a national treasure—the tradition of German music. Jews were banned from various musical organizations but given their own self-financing cultural outfit, the Kulturbund deutscher Juden. After Kristallnacht, Jewish musical publishers were closed down or “Aryanized.” 29
    Goebbels was, however, in general careful about precipitate dismissals. He was told early on that it would take