Erich Kästner – Münchhausen at the Nazis: Subversion behind the scenes

November 1942: The Allied troops end up in North Africa and open a second front against Nazi Germany. On February 2, 1943, the sixth army of the General Field Marshal Paul champed Stalingrad. While the Red Army is promoting, the SS is promoting the destruction of European Jews. In Germany, life takes place more and more underground, in bunkers and air -raid cellar. But the National Socialist propaganda machine continues to run in full swing.

On March 5, 1943, one of the most ambitious and elaborate film projects of the Nazi era celebrated its premiere: “Münchhausen”. In the style of American Hollywood comedies, the film tells the fantastic adventures of the lying baron from Bodenwerder.

The Münchhausaden first appeared in 1781 in the Berlin magazine “Vademecum for Funny People”. Her author remained anonymous. For good reason, because the Freiherr’s figure had a historical model: Karl Friedrich Hieronymus of Münchhausenwhich, it is handed down, is said to have been extremely angry that his name was mentioned in the title of a collection of 16 lies.

From Berlin, the stories came to England about the fantastic adventures of the baron, where they were translated into English by Rudolf Erich Raspe. There she discovered the German writer Gottfried August Bürger, who transferred her back into German in 1786 and expanded a few new Münchhausaden: “The wonderful trips to water and land – campaigns and funny adventures of the Freiherr von Münchhausen, as he used to tell the bottle of his friends at the bottle”. Citizens’ book became the basis of all subsequent counts-also for the Münchhausen film.

The balloon ride to the moon, Cagliostros Ring, which can make Münchhausen invisible and, last but not least, Münchhausen’s famous ride on the cannonball, from which Hans Albers greets into the audience in the role of lying baron-the film version of 1943 presented an opulent and exotic-looking fairy tale world that celebrated its cinema premiere in the largest cinema in Germany: at the zoo. The script was written by the journalist, poet, children’s book author and Romanciers Erich Kästner. “He was a very media -savvy author for his time,” says Munich literary scholar Sven Hanuschek and emphasizes Kästner’s interest “in new forms and media”.

Anyone who believed in the dream factory in 1943 saw the paper mache here with their own eyes.

Although the writer was banned from writing and the Gestapo was considered the “cultural Bolshevist of the worst variety”, he was allowed to write the script for “Münchhausen”. In consultation with Goebbels, Reich Filmintendant Fritz Hippler granted an oral special permit in July 1942. However, Kästner could only write Bürthold Bürger under the pseudonym. That was no coincidence and corresponded to the National Socialist cultural policy: public-outlawed authors who had not fled abroad in front of the Nazi regime and had a certain reputation, enjoyed a number of privileges. So also Erich Kästner, whose socially critical satires and poems were in demand before 1933, especially in the featureleton of the “Vossische Zeitung” and in Carl von Ossietzky’s “Weltbühne”.

This is also why on May 10, 1933, Kästner’s books were burned on the Berlin Opera Square. In 1934 the Gestapo arrested him and released him again shortly afterwards; In 1937, Kästner was arrested and released again. In the meantime, he was allowed to publish abroad: “The flying classroom”, “The missing miniature”, “Doctor Erich Kästner’s lyrical house pharmacy” and his “Till Eulenspiegel”. The Nazi state needed foreign exchange, and Kästner was not ready to sacrifice his literary career because of the National Socialists.

Even before the seizure of power, Kästner wrote scripts for the filming of his novels. He also maintained his contacts to film circles during the Nazi era. In mid-1941, Eberhard Schmidt, production manager of the Berlin UFA and close friend, asked him whether he was interested in writing the script for the 25th anniversary of the UFA. Kästner agreed, suggested the Münchhausen fabric and thus received approval. Goebbels and the Reichsfilmskammer knew “that Kästner is the best who can do this who had wrote to many tabloids who had an incredible sense of dramaturgy, pace, ingenuity and joke,” said Sven Hanuschek.

At his premiere on March 5, 1943 in the Berlin UFA Palace, “Münchhausen” had a huge success and in the following weeks there was well over 25 million Reichsmarks. But in the credits of the film the name of the screenwriter was missing: Berthold Bürger alias Erich Kästner had a ban on writing again. When Hitler found out who was BERTHOLD Bürger, he had a “tantrum and expressed the total ban”. There were several types of typewriters of this command, says Hanuschek. “Kästner had one of them hanging on the wall in a wooden framework in the living room in the 1950s.”

Hitler’s propaganda minister Goebbel had recognized the importance of the medium of film like no other. He himself was a passionate cinema lover. His favorite films included “Panzerkreuzer Potemkin” by Sergei Eisenstein and “Die Nibelungen” by Fritz Lang. Goebbels left no doubt about the principles according to which art must be designed under the swastika: »just don’t get bored! I predict everything else: just no desolate! “

Of the approximately 1100 feature films of the Nazi era, only one in ten cinema strips proves to be open to National Socialist. These include war films such as “Stukas” by Karl Ritter and the anti -Semitic work “Jud Süß”. Almost half of all cinema strips were supposedly apolitical entertainment films such as the “Feuerzangenbowle”, but they were considered “valuable to state politics”.

Nevertheless, from 1933 around 5000, mostly Jewish filmmakers and politically dissenters were released from their positions. Numerous artists had to emigrate – including Hertha Thiele, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger.

The prestige object »Münchhausen« was particularly important to Goebbels. It should stand up to Hollywood, recapture the export markets in neutral countries and promote the cultural creativity of the Nazi regime. With the direction he entrusted the Hungarian entertainment routiner Josef von Báky. The most famous German actors were offered for »Münchhausen«: Brigitte Horney as Tsarin Katharina II, Ferdinand Marian as Count Cagliostro and of course Hans Albers, darling of the audience, as a blue -eyed lying baron Münchhausen.

Behind the adventure stories and film pictures, screenwriter Kästner had hidden his own message. Although he does not do without Münchhausen’s great leg dresses at home in Bodenwerder, not on the hunting horn, whose tones are frozen and that suddenly begins to play in the warm dining room. Not on the Harem of the Grand Sultan or the quick runner, who rushes to Vienna in the time lapse and asks Empress Maria Theresia for the bottle of Tokajer.

Otherwise, Kästner’s script didn’t have much in common with the original Münchhausiads by Gottfried August Bürger. Right at the beginning of the film, strange things are done in a Rococo-locked things: the portrait of Münchhausen on the wall winks at the cinema visitors, the chamber orchestra plays a tango in the background, and the dark-skinned servant has no black skin, but color on the face. There is still trouble: When Münchhausen wants to make light, his hand does not reach for the candlestick, but snaps the electric light. And the young baroness, who fell in love with Münchhausen, but is rejected by him, drives away angrily and disappointed in a sleek sports car.

It seems that the film has to demonstratively display its unreality. Anyone who believed in the dream factory in 1943 saw the paper mache here with their own eyes. Kästner doesn’t just tell a fairy tale. Rather, scenes were pushed away here to show the viewers the staging of the appearance. It is as if the moralist Kästner would stand next to the stage and whisper to the audience that it shouldn’t believe what it sees. Not in the cinema and not in the staged reality of the NSDAP’s Reich Party Day. Like a subversive thread of action, allusions are drawn to the time and their transience through the entire film. Kästner makes it clear that heroes are mortal-including Nazi heroes.

For the film scientist Barbara Flückiger, it is particularly important today to take a look at these films again and make it accessible to the audience, »because we have a distorted idea of ​​what it looked like during the Nazi era. We believe that the Nazis were somehow dark journeyman, which of course is also true. But it is interesting that you don’t see this in the entertainment sector. Elaborate productions were made to entertain the population, bread and games were literally and games in the truest sense of the word to distract from brutal political events. «

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After the end of the Nazi dictatorship, Kästner with his own history almost never dealt with publicly, the literary scholar Hanuschek states. A rare moment when he did this was in 1958 when he justified himself in front of the German Pen Club for his literary activity under the swastika with the reference to an inner emergency emergency.

When asked whether one could have opposed book burning, he replied: »In the modern, undemocratic state, the hero becomes anachronism, the hero without microphones becomes a tragic Hans-Wurst. His human size has no political consequences. He becomes a martyr instead of the hero, he becomes a nameless death display. «