Our latest blog comes from stipend holder Dr. Stephan Ahrens from Paderborn University in Germany. Stephan writes on discovering how Jewish émigré filmmakers and stars fleeing from Nazi Germany were received in Britain, through our collections.
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Initially, there was speculation and curiosity. The collection of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum has not yet played a major role in research into the Jewish emigration of filmmakers to Great Britain after 1933. There are other archives that form the basis for research to date. In Germany, there is the German National Library’s German Exile Archive 1933-1945 in Frankfurt am Main and the archive of the Hollywood agent Paul Kohner at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. Kohner arranged jobs in the studios for many emigrants. At London University, researchers have access to the Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Archive. Martin Miller and his wife Hannah Norbert-Miller were Austrian and emigrated to Great Britain in 1939. He was the co-founder of the Austrian centre and had a huge impact on émigré life in Britain.
My research in the collection of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum is a bottom-up approach. I will start my exploration by looking at the objects that collectors have brought together based on their personal interests, rather than starting from the side of film production. Most of these objects belong to the field of cinema-going.
The collection of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum holds almost all of the issues of the two journals Picturegoer and Picture Show. Looking through the magazines from the period after 1940, it is striking that actors who emigrated from Germany are frequently covered. The presence of the émigrés was the result of the nature of film production at the time. After the beginning of World War 2 in 1939, films dealing with war and espionage were released in British cinemas. According to Jeffrey Richards, the film Freedom Radio (1932) was “the first anti-Nazi project”[i] of the British cinema industry, to be followed by numerous other films. While no emigrants were involved in the film, apart from the Jewish-Ukrainian composer Nicholas Brodszky, war films gave several emigrant actors the opportunity to appear in movies. In the film Hotel Reserve (1944), there were many émigrés in the cast. The German Fritz/Frederik Valk who had emigrated to Great Britain via Prague played a social-democratic resistance fighter. The Czech Herbert Lom plays an evil German spy. The supporting cast included Martin Miller, Hella Kürty and Lucie Mannheim. Like Miller, Walter Rilla played in many war films and mostly portrayed Nazis. For example in the film Mr Emmanuel, in which Arnold Marlé, Erik (Erich) Freund, Friedrich Richter, Joseph Almas, Oscar Ebelsbacher, Charles Goldner and Ludwig von Wohl appeared alongside Rilla in other supporting roles and small parts.
[EXEBD 32803 Picture Show Vol49 No1249 2 November 1944 p8]
In addition to this information on the casting of films, the fan magazines reveal another important dimension of the marketing of films at the time. The journals reported on the lives of emigrants.
In her column “British Studio Gossip”, Edith Nepean recounts a conversation with actor Martin Miller:
One of the most interesting personalities playing in films in this country is Czech Jewish actor, Martin Miller. ‘In 1937,’ he was telling me, ‘I was acting in Vienna. On March 18th the Nazis marched me out of my house to scrub the streets of the city. They call for me at 3 p.m., and I knew what was going to happen. I asked to be allowed to wear my overcoat, as I had a slight cold. Amid a jeering crowd I walked along the streets, carrying a bucket and broom. The Nazis also dragged out my old doctor friend. I remember, as we were scrubbing out a pavement café, a Nazi trooper stood by saying, ‘That’s not clear yet. It’s going to by clean enough to eat off.’ I got warm scrubbing, and was going to remove my coat, but the crowd yelled: ‘You asked for it. Now keep it one!’ I did not mind the ignominy so much,” he went on, “as having to resume the leading role at the theatre the next night, as I was indispensable to the cast. The play was given in honor of Hitler, and there were tears in my eyes as I stood in the wings that night. Strangely enough, at all subsequent performances I got the usual amount of claps as before![ii]
In 1943, the year Nepean’s article was published, Martin Miller had just appeared in two British films, The Adventures of Tartu (1943) and Squadron Leader X (1943). Nepean and her readers, however, were interested in his biography. Born in 1899, Miller was a theatre actor. After the annexing of Austria in the German Reich in 1938, he fled to London. The situation Neapen depicted could have been taken from a movie.
In 1944, Fay Filmer painted a similar empathetic portrait of Walter Rilla in his gossip column. Commenting on Rilla’s embodiment of Nazis in recent films, Filmer wrote: “Perhaps it is because he can get unto the skin of such a part that he is cast in these roles, for Nazis are no mythical people to him. He knows them and their ways. In fact, it was because of his opposition to Hitlerism that we have the benefit of his talents on our British screen and radio. […] Germany’s loss is our gain, for his acting ability is an asset to British films.”[iii]
Based on the material in the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, providing an insight into film culture during the war, it becomes clear that emigrants and their biographies were present.
Emigration did not begin in 1939, however. What can be learned about the period from 1933 onwards? After the National Socialists took over the government, the Ministry of Propaganda was established. The condition for working in the German film industry was the membership of the Reich Film Chamber (Reichsfilmkammer). Jews and political opponents were not allowed to become members. Even before the Reich Film Chamber was created, the biggest studio in Germany, Universum Film AG (Ufa), had dismissed the majority of its Jewish employees.
One object reminds us that we should not only look at only those who left Germany in 1933. A leaflet from 1932 announced the screening of Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform at Academy Cinema in London.
EXEBD 89085 Madchen in Uniform at the Academy Cinema
Director Leontine Sagan was born in Austria-Hungary and raised in South Africa. After several theatre assignments in Germany she directed Mädchen in Uniform based on a play by Christa Winsloe. Sagan didn’t just come to the UK to present her film. Producer Alexander Korda also assigned her a new film project. Sagan was not in Germany when Hitler was announced Reich Chancellor. She decided not to return to Germany.[iv] The Academy Cinema was a well-known repertoire cinema focusing on avant-garde and foreign filmmakers. German films were screened regularly. The programme note is an important reminder. When we look at the integration of emigrants in the UK, it is also worth considering what goes on beyond the film industry. Film culture is more than just commercial cinemas and feature films. Film culture also includes the small repertory cinemas. Elsie Cohen’s Academy Cinema was managed after the war by George Hoellering, who had emigrated from Hungary and Austria.
After 1933, however, German actors also had the opportunity to break into British cinema industry. While most research highlights the boom in the film industry in the mid-1930s, I would like to look at how the actors who emigrated from Germany were received by the public.
Cinema stills and images have a rich history. They are meant to arouse the public’s interest. For fans, they are popular collector’s items to possess the star visually. There is a cinema still of Austrian born actress Grete Natzler, which is the featured image at the beginning of this blog (EXEBD 95316).
The crime film is one of three films Natzler shot in Great Britain before changing her name to Della Lynd and leaving for Hollywood. After her part in The Scotland Yard Mystery Natzler starred in The Student’s Romance. She plays Princess Helene who falls in love with a commoner foreshadowing the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. There is a cigarette card from The Students Romance. This was a widely used advertising product. These cards could be collected. The material on which the images are printed is quite thick. But it also looks cheap. As a result, the images were widely distributed. I suspect that the cigarette cards were still in circulation when the film was no longer shown in cinemas.
EXEBD 81283 Cigarette card for 'The Student's Romance'
As Princess Helene, Natzler wears a yellow gown, which is not seen in the black and white film. The film is designed for Natzler. She plays a noble, ethereal beauty who chooses love over tradition and hierarchy. This is also how she is portrayed on the cigarette card. Her German-Austrian accent suits the film, which is set in Heidelberg. In British film history studies, Natzler’s films have hardly been examined in any detail. Yet she has left a few traces in the collection of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. There are only two images, but they are intriguing. They suggest that we were dealing with a gorgeous diva.
The case of Elisabeth Bergner, who was already a star before she had to leave Germany, is rather different. There are numerous cigarette cards of Bergner in the collection, in which she appears in various roles. One of these pictures produced by Carreras Cigarette depicts Bergner in her title role in Catherine the Great (1934).
EXEBD 81630 Ciagrette Card of Elisabeth Bergner
She is portrayed as “the famous continental stage and film star.” In addition to the lobby cards and the cigarette cards, there are more objects documenting the practice of cinema going at the time. There are different volumes of scrapbooks titled “A Record of Picturegoing.” These contain pictures from films. Several pages are dedicated to Elisabeth Bergner. Obviously, the person was a fan. Most of the pictures are cut out of magazines and glued on one page.
EXEBD 63655 Scrapbook Featuring Elisabeth Bergner
I think of scrapbooks as a form of diary writing. There is something intimate about them. It’s more than just recording one’s visits to the cinema. You confess your passion for an actress. The object is a counterpart to the biographies of Elisabeth Bergner. In her biography, Margret Heymann describes how Elisabeth Bergner was one of the few emigrants whose career succeeded in Britain. The scrapbook provides evidence of Bergner’s popularity. The fact that Bergner and her husband Paul Czinner went to Los Angeles at the outbreak of the war was a “betrayal against England.”[v] Bergner herself later spoke of a betrayal of her duty of loyalty. At first glance, this seems to be a rather harsh sentence. But here too, another object from the BDC's collection helps us to understand the significance of the émigré Bergner in British film culture. The collection of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum contains an issue of the magazine from 26 November 1938 with a photograph of Bergner.
EXEBD 1934, Picture Post, November 26, 1938; p. 16-17.
But it is not about a new film by the actress. The caption reads: “These are some of the world famous Jews for whom there is no room in Nazi-Germany to-day.” It is obvious that Bergner was perceived as an emigrant who had to leave Germany. Based on this public image, it becomes clear why Bergner had a sense of loyalty. Great Britain was a refuge for her.
In this way, the objects from the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum complement the image of the emigrants. But it also shows that Bergner was an exception. Grete Natzler did not become a star, but the objects remind us that there were attempts to popularise her.
It is fascinating to see how the escaped actors and filmmakers were integrated into people’s everyday cinema experience before the war.
[i] Richards, Jeffrey. The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930 - 1939. London: Routledge [and] Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 128.
[ii] Nepean, Edith. “British Cinema Gossip.” Picture Show 17, no. 1206 (1943): 4.
[iii] Filmer, Fay. Picture Show Gossip.” Picture Show, vol. 46, no 1233, 25-3-1944, p. 4.
[iv] Sagan moved to South Africa in 1947.
[v] Heymann, Margret. Elisabeth Bergner - mehr als eine Schauspielerin. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2008, p. 64.