With commanding figures like Gründgens at the Schauspielhaus, Heinrich George at the Schiller-Theater, and Karlheinz Martin, another former revolutionary, at the Volksblihne, Berlin held on to its status as the capital of German drama. Its various theaters continued to mount well-executed productions of the German classics, especially those with an exploitable nationalist message, such as Heinrich Kleist’s Die Hermannschlacht and Friedrich Hebbel’s Niebelungen. On the other hand, its new rulers banned works that seemed politically or aesthetically problematical. Thus Nazi Berlin rejected Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Weber as too gloomy. Haupt-mann himself, however, remained in the city throughout the Third Reich, a valuable cultural show-figure for the regime.
There were no longer any independent theaters in Berlin, unless one counted the small houses operated by the Cultural League of German Jews that were closed to Aryans. Berlin’s radical theater movement was decimated by the exodus of its most important practitioners. Erwin Piscator, as we have seen, had left even before the Nazis came to power. Brecht fled on the morning after the Reichstag fire. It is possible that he might have stayed on without being arrested, for the Nazis, especially Goebbels, wanted to retain some of Germany’s most famous artists and intellectuals as proof of Berlin’s continuing cultural importance. Yet had Brecht stayed on in Berlin he certainly would have been limited in what he (and his unacknowledged female coauthors) could produce, and he thought he could do better in exile, which he did not expect to last long. “Don’t go too far away,” he advised his friend Arnold Zweig. “In five years we will be back.” How could he have known that he would return to Berlin only after a fifteen-year exile in Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Los Angeles?
Berlin’s cabaret scene presented the Nazis with a particular challenge because it was central to the city’s world-image as a vibrant metropolis and also full of leftist and Jewish entertainers. Although the local cabaret’s satirical teeth had grown dull in the Weimar period, it could still bite off its pound of political flesh. The regime moved quickly to shut down Berlin’s left-wing agitprop cabaret and to eliminate its chief practitioners. Hans Otto, of the German Workers’ Theater League, was murdered at Golumbia-Haus; Erich Mühsam, who acted in leftist cabaret in addition to writing for Die Weltbühne, was killed at Sachsenhausen. For a brief period Aryan performers were allowed to produce political cabaret as long as they made fun of the right targets. But when Werner Finck of the Catacombs Cabaret began tossing out barbs that were a little too irreverent toward the leadership, his enterprise was shut down. In the same year, 1935, the Tingel-Tangel Cabaret was closed for defaming the National Socialist order with skits celebrating the resilience of “weeds” (dissident thoughts) in a field covered with “manure” (the Nazi state). Unable to cultivate a “positive cabaret” that was economically viable, the regime fell back on pure vaudeville and girlie shows.
Important as live drama was to the Nazis, film was even more so, inasmuch as it had a broader audience and was, along with radio, the perfect propaganda tool. Goebbels, who considered himself a “passionate fan of the cinematic art,” insisted that film was an instrument of popular education “at least as influential as the primary school.” He was fully aware that Berlin was a major player in the world of film, and he intended to keep it that way. His problem, however, was that Jews were especially prominent in the German cinema. A Nazi tabulation in 1932 claimed that Germany’s motion picture distribution companies were 81 percent Jewish-run, and that Jews constituted 41 percent of the screenwriters and 47 percent of the directors.
Although he was determined to end “Jewish domination” of the cinema, Goebbels was willing to tolerate a few renowned Jewish directors and actors in the interest of maintaining Berlin’s prominence. He hoped in particular to induce the half-Jewish director Fritz Lang, whose Siegfried and Die Nibelungen were among his favorite films, to remain in the German capital. Lang later claimed that Goebbels offered to put him in charge of UFA and to make him the “Nazis’ Führer of film.” This is probably fanciful, but Lang could undoubtedly have stayed and worked in Nazi Berlin had he wanted to. He left the city in 1933 because, like Brecht, he thought he could do better for himself abroad. Unlike Brecht he turned out to be right, for after a few years of exile in France he became a great success in Hollywood, and he was never inclined to return to Berlin.
Another refugee from the Berlin film world who made it big in Hollywood was Billy Wilder. He had moved to Berlin from his native Vienna in 1926, landing jobs as a reporter with the Nachtausgabe and Berliner Zeitung am Mittag. Chronically broke, he had also picked up a few marks working as a gigolo at the Hotel Adlon, escorting lonely old ladies around the dance floor. “I dance,” he wrote, “painstakingly but desireless, joyless, without thoughts, without opinion, without heart, without brain.” When he wasn’t covering stories or dancing he frequented the Romanisches Café, mingling with the movie people. There he learned about another way to make money: as a “Neger” (ghostwriter) on movie scripts. This turned out to be his unglamorous entree into the film industry. During the late 1920s he worked on almost fifty scripts, always without credit. His first major writing credit came with a low-budget film called Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a portrait of ordinary Berliners enjoying a Sunday excursion to the Nikolassee. The movie proved a surprising success, both with Berlin audiences and the local critics. Der Abend’wrote: “Once, Paris was shown to us in an impressive, simple manner; now, we see Berlin without the shine of advertisements in lights and the crazy nightlife of the bars.”
But as Wilder’s star was rising, so was that of the Nazis—a danger that the director, though Jewish, did not at first take seriously. Only when he witnessed a group of SS men beating up an old Jew did he decide to get out. In his case Goebbels seems to have made no effort to retain him. On the night after the Reichstag fire he and his lover, Hella Hartwig, boarded a train for Paris. Among their neighbors at Paris’s Hotel Ansonia were the actor Peter Lorre, the composer Friedrich Hollander, and Wilder’s writing partner, Max Kolpe. Wilder saw Paris only as a stepping-stone to Hollywood, whose films he had admired for years. In December 1933 he jumped at the chance to go to California to work on a movie called Pam Pam. Later he would claim: “My dream all along was to get to Hollywood, which would have happened even without Hitler.”
What surely would not have happened without Hitler was the transformation of the German film industry into a plaything and instrument of the government. After taking over UFA and expelling most of its Jewish artists, Goebbels worked hard to cultivate the stars who remained. His favorites were the actor Emil Jannings, the director Veit Harlan, and the actress-turned-director Leni Riefenstahl, who he said was “the only one of all the stars who understands us.” Goebbels invited his film friends on boating parties on the Havel and to elegant dinners at his Berlin town-house, located, to his dismay, on Hermann-Göring-Strasse. Although recently married to the blond beauty Magda Quandt, he made a point of personally interviewing all the up-and-coming actresses. Word went out in the Berlin film community that aspiring actresses could get ahead only via the randy little doctor’s casting couch.