Analysis of a Nazi Titanic

Jared Poley

 

On the evening of July 31, 1942, Herbert Selpin’s pants fell down. He dared not reach down to retrieve them, because doing so would require him to loosen his grip on the bars to the window high in his Berlin jail cell. His suspenders, once used to keep his trousers securely in place, now stretched from the bars of the window to his neck. As his pants began their delicate descent past his buttocks, thighs, knees, and calves, his arms grew more weary, the suspenders tightened, slowly throttling him. As his pants settled around his ankles, Selpin too reached his low point. The cell‑bench upon which he was forced to stand had been removed from the cell by his SS guards, following orders from Joseph Goebbels and his aide Fritz Hippler.[i]

Herbert Selpin was a German film‑maker. He began his directing career in 1934 with Die Reiter von Deutsch‑Ostafrika, made several other action films, and then was asked by Goebbels to create a cinematic version of the sinking of the Titanic due to his expertise in both catastrophe and naval films. Goebbels, searching for a cinematic vehicle to propound Nazi ideology, settled on the story of the sinking of the Titanic as a suitable one to express to a German public an anti‑English sentiment required by war‑time. One of Selpin’s colleagues, Walter Zerlett­-Olfenius, was selected to write up a script. Zerlett‑Olfenius, described by one writer as a “fanatic Nazi,” developed a plot that played on common assumptions about the malfeasance of the idiotic English (the American characters being transmogrified into British nationals), thus serving the propagandist purposes that Goebbels initially had in mind (Hull 24).

Filming began in Berlin in May 1942, and proceeded smoothly. Selpin sent Zerlett‑Olfenius to the port of Gotenhafen (now Gdynia, in Poland) to begin work with a second film crew on the naval scenes. When Selpin arrived, however, he discovered that Zerlett‑Olfenius had been lax in his duties, more concerned with sucking up to the local SS officers than with working on the film, which was requiring the expenditure of huge amounts of money. When Selpin found out that the SS men had been attempting to seduce his cast members, further delaying action, he exploded. Selpin, who according to his widow had never liked the regime, berated Zerlett‑Olfenius and burst forth with “Ach du! Mit deinen Scheißsoldaten, du Scheißleutnant überhaupt mit deiner Scheißwerhmacht!” upon which the screenwriter resigned and scurried back to Berlin to tattle on the director’s indiscretion. Selpin was recalled to Berlin, given a chance to recant (which he refused), and then escorted to his cell (Hull 226-9; Heyer 125-6).[ii]

When news of Selpin’s “suicide” reached other members of the German film industry, Zerlett-Olfenius was ostracized and Goebbels was forced to proclaim that anyone refusing to speak to Zerlett‑Olfenius would be dealt with in a manner similar to Selpin. Goebbels dispatched a second director, Werner Klingler, to the set to finish work on the film and forbade the mentioning of Selpin’s name. Klingler finished the film in April 1943, and Goebbels previewed the film on April 30.

Titanic, however, did not meet Goebbels’s expectations, and he refused to allow the film to be shown in Germany. Many argue that Goebbels yanked the film because the dramatic sinking would remind Germans of their own experiences in bombing raids, thus lowering morale (Sakkara 170; Hull 129). Instead, the film was distributed outside of Germany, premiering in Paris and Florence on November 10, 1943, then briefly showing in the Netherlands as well.

While the theory that Goebbels refused to allow Titanic to be screened in Germany due to the disturbing nature of the catastrophe scenes is persuasive, a more sophisticated and nuanced reading of the film may enrich this argument. On the surface, Zerlett‑Olfenius’s script is a fine work of propaganda: the anti‑English sentiments are clear and are generally supported by the facts of the sinking. However, the disaster has consistently been employed as a metaphor, functioning (perhaps inappropriately) as a “floating signifier,” which has been mobilized in different ways and different times for political effect (Poley; Zizek). Another reading of the film indicates that the film’s source proved too ambivalent in its use as a way of depicting German qualities. The film was produced in the middle of the war, when the Eastern Front was becoming more and more unstable, as resistance became more organized (the White Rose and Stauffenberg’s circle of conspirators both arose at this time, and the Warsaw ghetto uprising occurred just as the film was being finished), after the American entrance into the war, but also during the period in which the mass killings of Jews began in earnest. Against this backdrop, Titanic, and Goebbels’s reaction to it, must be rethought.

The film is interesting in that it depicts, as Goebbels recognized, a society in crisis. It shows how rational humans must react to crisis, but more important, how they must relate to errant and inflexible leaders who have brought catastrophe upon themselves and society. Moreover, Titanic narrates specific ways of negotiating order, discipline, and power. Additionally, the main character, First Officer Petersen, who Zerlett‑Olfenius hoped would represent a contrast between the stupid English and the sensible, intelligent German, does exactly that, but also provided audiences with a radical critique of the “bad Germans,” the Scheißwehrmacht, Scheißleutnants, and Scheißsoldaten who were unable to act ethically or self-critically. Thus, Selpin’s film (and to whatever extent appropriate, Klingler’s) encodes a critique of Nazi power as it seems to uphold it. It is this potential for radical critique that I am interested in discussing, as it suggests that even those who worked daily in support of the Nazis had the opportunity to engage critically the power of the regime, allowing even the propagandist nature of artistic expressions to be subverted.

Two arguments are required to make this point effectively. First, the plot of Titanic will be examined in some detail, showing how and why it could serve as an effective propaganda piece. When appropriate, I hope to explain how the propagandist elements historically drew on arguments first presented by Germans in 1912. Examining those places at which Zerlett‑Olfenius’s representation of the disaster in his screenplay significantly deviated from the historical record will similarly expose the usefulness of the story of the Titanic disaster as a propagandist strategy. The second argument I hope will be more sophisticated. In this section of the paper, I would like to examine the manner in which Selpin’s filming of the disaster, the ways in which he cinematically represented this trauma, carried the potential to subvert Zerlett‑Olfenius’s screenplay.[iii]

Titanic opens with a board meeting of the White Star Line, the owners of the ship. The costs of constructing the Titanic have been so prohibitive that the White Star Line has been devalued on the stock exchange. Thus, the ship’s‑maiden voyage is particularly important to the economic health of the company. To boost the value of the shares, the president of the company, J. Bruce Ismay, hopes that the Titanic will break the transatlantic speed record (held at that time by the Cunard ship Lusitania). With this in mind, Ismay orders the captain to rush “full‑steam ahead” along a northern route that will ensure a speedy arrival in New York. Despite warnings from other ships in the area about the danger of ice floes, Captain White, secure in the ship’s unsinkability, follows Ismay’s orders. A series of strange twists then begin. The fictional German First Officer, Petersen, aware of the danger presented to the ship, begins lobbying through a variety of channels for a reduction in the ship’s speed: he confronts the captain, he addresses himself to Ismay, he tries to convince Sigrid Oole (a fictional Danish character reported to be fabulously wealthy) to use her feminine charms on Ismay as a way of getting him to forgo the lure of money in favor of a safe speed. Of course, the Titanic has its brush with the iceberg, and in a now‑famous ending, a mad dash for the lifeboats ensues. Oole, by this time in love with Petersen, volunteers for lifeboat duty. Ismay and Astor attempt a variety of schemes to get a safe place on a lifeboat, while the captain unleashes further chaos by jettisoning rationality, shouting out “every man for himself.” Petersen, always selfless, is only saved because he hears the cries of a young girl, rushes to her aid, and swims her to the safety of a lifeboat. He climbs aboard, exhausted, to find Oole. Reunited with the Teutonic female, he sits wrapped in her comforting arms, transfixed by the sight of the sinking Titanic as it breaks up and founders. One ending of the film (but not the one released after the war) contained a governmental inquiry in which the slippery Ismay succeeds in pinning the disaster on the captain (who, like all good captains, went down with the ship), thus escaping prosecution for his role in the sinking.

As propaganda, the film’s messages are clear, so clear, in fact, that British censors refused to allow Titanic to be shown after the war. The repugnant qualities of the English in this representation of the disaster are easily recognized, making the propagandist content of the film straightforward. As a counterpoint to Ismay, the Astors, and Captain White, the Teutonic Petersen and Sigrid Oole, who finish the film locked in a bourgeois embrace, offer an opportunity to analyze the ways in which the tropes of the bad English are contrasted with that of the good German. Although the Nazis have been generally described as being opposed to bourgeois conventions, their valorization of “traditional” systems of gender and the family vis-à-vis those they associated with Weimar‑working women, homosexuality, a declining birth rate should be seen as a return to certain bourgeois discourses on the family and gender.

Petersen and Oole, always in implicit contrast with the British and Americans, provide a depiction of the cultural ideals that made Germans superior to their war‑time rivals. Petersen, of course, is sensitive to the natural environment, sensing the danger presented by the ice even when his superior officer is confident of the Titanic’s unsinkability. A second component to this aspect of Petersen’s sensibility is his ability to understand the technological capabilities of the ship. Indeed, Petersen’s awareness of the Titanic’s dangerous situation, while profoundly gendered, marks both his Germanness and the buffoon‑like qualities of the English.

Through an analysis of how Zerlett-Olfenius invoked gender and sexuality in his screenplay it is possible to see how German difference was crafted in the film. George Mosse’s famous isolation of “nationalism and sexuality” makes clear the theoretical implications of heterosexuality and gender to the construction of national identity, particularly during wartime, and this avenue provides a fruitful area of analysis when looking at the film. The Petersen/Titanic and Petersen/Oole dyads, like the German immigrant couple traveling in steerage present a way of analyzing the National Socialist ideology of the family and of domesticity as opposed to that of corrupt organization of the family in Britain. Petersen and Oole can be said to represent an ideal of German bourgeois domesticity (especially at the end of the film): an example of genuine affection, Oole has been awakened to her true, sacrificial femininity by Petersen.  Petersen too is equally responsive to the concerns of the community, exemplified by his rescuing of the young girl and his concern for the safety of the passengers on board the Titanic. When the two are united at the end of the film, this pristine picture of authentic sentimentality and of mutual gender compatibility presents a visual example of how German domesticity differed in kind from that of the corrupt domesticity found in English and American circles, particularly the refusal of Astor to pay attention to his wife and Ismay’s manipulation of women for financial gain. Furthermore, Petersen is grounded in the part of the good father to the rescued girl as opposed to the cad who abandoned her. Similarly, the visual unification of the immigrant couple (matching that of Petersen and Oole) after they have been physically separated by sex in steerage, suggests as well the ways in which German domesticity was superior to the artificiality of its counterpart in other countries, shown by the steerage passengers of other nationalities who stand meekly apart from their love ones. The desperate search of the divided couple amidst the chaos of the final scenes, culminating in the man’s leap overboard in a futile attempt physically to rejoin his wife, provides another example of German qualities counterposed to those expressed by the flaccid Astor and Ismay, who abandon their female counterparts when danger approaches. Finally, unlike the British captain’s inability to control or understand his female counterpart, Titanic suggests that the British lacked the technological and sexual mastery of females present in the German Petersen. In each case, German sexuality and gender were understood to be superior to their British counterparts, allowing Titanic to present an argument about the ways in which gender and sexuality were used to construct and privilege a German national identity based on National Socialist ideologies about the role and nature of women, male ability to understand technology and nature, and certain masculine qualities of affection and familial hegemony that found expression in other realms of Nazi ideology.

Gender and Teutonic superiority were also expressed through characterization. Sigrid Oole, like Petersen, is able to avoid the traps found in western culture. Although she once masked her authentic self, appearing as an aristocratic vamp (although her fortune has disappeared and she is actually quite penniless), by the end of the film she has announced her affections for Petersen and during the sinking scenes acts in a selfless manner. It would seem that this element of Oole’s character is drawn from the historical example of Molly Brown, the Denver socialite who inspired the people in her lifeboat to keep rowing, even taking the oars herself. In 1912, this was upheld as an example of selfless femininity, which when transposed to a Teutonic character attaches those positive traces to Germany rather than America.

Following the disaster in 1912, the British hoped to redeem their tarnished national pride by arguing that the men who remained on board the Titanic acted in calm, rational ways, that they approached death in a masculine, civilized manner. When these activities and qualities were transposed to the Germanic characters, Petersen and Oole, the argument becomes reversed. Rather than acting in ways that reflect an acculturated civilization, the British are shown to be hysterical and duplicitous.  They act in ways that signify a dystopic natural order when the veneers of civilization are stripped away. Petersen and Oole, however, reflect a more positive possibility. The Germans are able to withstand terror, their selves fortified against impending death, always maintaining civilization, rationality, and bourgeois decency in the worst of situations.

Assuming the gendered characteristics of civilization, which in the British case were always attached to masculinity (as opposed to the natural and feminine), Titanic offers an opportunity to examine further Nazi conceptions of gender, civilization, and nature. If the disaster is read (as it often was in 1912) as the triumph of nature over human endeavor, then Titanic presents, in some ways, a celebration of the natural world.

Petersen and Oole humbly accept and do not attempt to conquer the natural world. They­ recognize its chaotic character, its danger, its irrationality.  They respect nature, attempting to understand it and to accept nature’s blows rather than simply exploiting it. Shown in this light, they are represented as being superior, allowing them to survive the disaster’s conclusion. Instead of dominating a feminized nature that has been opened to a specular gaze in the scientist’s laboratory, the German characters, due to their innate ability to understand nature, are able to negotiate the natural world through less‑invasive procedures. In this way, the gendered characteristics of nature and civilization are rewritten. Petersen should certainly be understood as a representation of the rational German bourgeois. Even Oole, whose character was scripted to depict certain feminine characteristics (moving from the manipulative and dangerous mistress to the genuine and affectionate “Frau”), expresses a certain masculine quality of sensitivity to and acceptance of nature. Contrary to common analyses of gender in the Nazi period (in which domesticity and maternity were emphasized and encouraged through programs like tax credits for children, motherhood medals, a celebration of Mother’s Day, and so on), this would seem to suggest that Nazi systems of gender expected masculine qualities to be attached to females, which may have been particularly important in 1942 and 1943, as the wartime situation demanded greater sacrifice and the potential for invasion grew.

The Nazi narration of the disaster invoked many of the gendered arguments current in 1912 in its critique of British society and in its representation of fascist ideology. Klaus Theweleit argues that the fascist psychology imaginatively and materially used women as a way of marking the boundaries of the self. This has important implications when one considers two elements of Titanic. First, Petersen is the only male that is successful in controlling and understanding femininity. Unlike the captain, Astor, and Ismay, who each have very strange relationships with the women in their lives (for Astor, his wife; for Ismay, his mistress and Oole; for the captain, the ship), Petersen is successful in negotiating the dangerous and deceptive women he deals with—Oole and the Titanic. Discourse on the sinking in 1912 represented the Titanic as the death-dealing woman, relying on familiar nineteenth‑century tropes of vampirism, the natural evil of women, and ideas about sexual difference (that were then reified through certain practices like the rule of the sea, in which sexual difference marked life or death). The Titanic was pulsatingly powerful, a hyper‑modern cyber‑woman, capable of unmatched speed, her thick skin seemingly impervious to any threat. However, the Titanic ultimately threw off masculine surveillance, destroying the men who attempted to control her, thus subverting a masculinity centered on the manipulation and control of women. Indeed, the ship subverted even the most hallowed of bourgeois cultural conventions—heterosexual marriage—by spurning her domestic lover, the captain, in favor of the “icy phallus” that penetrates her in a strange simulation of intercourse (Larabee).

For our purposes, the responses of the male characters to femininity reveal the ways in which fascist systems of gender could be legitimized through historical example. The cultural world on the Titanic, and by extension, England and America, is one of strong women and hysterical men, a reversal of the expected system of gender. The masculine exception, Petersen, remains calm and collected throughout the ordeal, first in his awareness of the danger to the ship, then in his attempts to subvert the captain’s orders through influencing Oole, and finally during the sinking. In opposition to Ismay, who frantically attempts to buy his way onto a lifeboat, Petersen’s approach to the disaster is stoical. Indeed, the sinking scenes are primarily focused on men and their reactions to the disaster: some head to the bar, others rush the lifeboats, the captain gives the “every man for himself” order, the other officers (in a depiction of the rumors. surrounding Second ­Officer Murdoch’s gunplay that circulated in 1912) must resort to firearms to maintain order. Petersen, though, attempts to manipulate situations for the good of the collective. His supplications to Oole (asking her to use her influence on Ismay to slow the ship), rather than placing him in an inferior position, privilege him as rational, safe, bourgeois, and German in contrast to the smitten, money‑hungry British aristocrat Ismay.

Another element common to discourse on the disaster in 1912 focused on the intertwining connotations of luxury and safety. The British, looking for explanations of the disaster, isolated the luxuries on the Titanic as items preventing the inclusion of adequate safety measures, namely an appropriate number of lifeboats to support the large population on the ship. As might be expected, these luxuries, tennis courts, swimming pools, cafes, and Turkish baths were understood by many British to be included at the behest of female passengers, who required luxury as a condition of their femininity (interestingly, many British avoided a class analysis of luxury, refusing to identify luxury as being a requirement of the middle‑ and upper‑classes). In this way, luxury was opposed to safety, while at the same time being attached to a familiar feminine/masculine dichotomy. When Germans entered into this debate, they nationalized these qualities, locating luxury and femininity as peculiarly British attributes. This argument was recapitulated in Titanic. For example, women are shown sunbathing, playing tennis, getting manicures, fetishizing jewelry, suggesting that luxury was linked to femininity in the film, especially as it feminized British males when they are shown playing tennis, fawning over women, and, in a complicated subplot, stealing their jewelry.

In 1912, the British used the disaster to paint sacrifice as a marker of British national identity by identifying the ways in which men approached death as being particularly British. It would seem as if a similar ploy was used by the Germans in Titanic. Considering that the film was explicitly made for propagandist purposes within a wartime situation, the representation of sacrifice as an Aryan/German quality should be examined. Petersen and Oole, presumably passing muster as a racially‑adequate couple (although this is exceedingly problematic as filmed, a point I will discuss in a later section), are allowed to survive the disaster but still locate sacrifice as a quality peculiar to the Germans. Christian Delage argues that Nazi ideologues upheld sacrifice as a quality of the Aryan new man that then could serve as markers of Aryan difference and superiority and that sacrifice and Aryan identity were to be cinematically linked, employing film as a way of constructing racial and national identities (Delage 183). Delage cites Mein Kampf to address the ways in which Hitler theorized sacrifice as an Aryan quality:

SA, soldiers and SS were thus charged with incarnating the myths and the reality of the creation of a racist state where the elements considered as more typical of the Aryan race distinguished of those whose status was merely auxiliary. In his initial definition of existing links between “the people” and the “race,” Hitler clearly expressed his eschatological conception of the coming Aryan man: “This disposition to sacrifice . . . is the greatness of the Aryan, who is not rich in intellectual faculties, but in his propensity to lay out all his capacities in the service of the community. The instinct to self‑preservation takes a very noble form: he subordinates himself to the life of the community and he performs sacrifice when the circumstances require it.” (182-3)

When this attitude is transposed to the film, the self‑negating qualities of Petersen and Oole take on an ideological weight. Petersen, sacrificing his pride when begging the captain to lower the speed or supplicating himself before Oole, is always concerned with the effects of disaster on the ship’s community. His worry for innocent people endangered by pride and greed leads him to a position of sacrifice. Of course, his dangerous and heroic actions at the end of the film, in which he risks his life in order to rescue the young girl (and, one could argue, ironically facilitates his own survival) reveal both the heroic and sacrificial qualities inherent to the Aryan character. Oole, too, casts aside her artificial self and takes on these sacrificial qualities as well. She is one of the last to enter a lifeboat and then works as an organizational force. Unlike in 1912, when sacrifice entered discourse on the Titanic around gendered categories (due to the rule of the sea, in which male sacrifice was privileged), German ideologues theorized sacrifice as revolving around race and nation (which, of course, were intimately linked); because both males and females are equally qualified and expected to sacrifice for the good of the larger community, sacrifice could be divorced in crucial ways from gender.

Titanic functioned as a propaganda device not only through contrasting the British with the Germans, but also in the ways that it depicted certain fascist ideologies. Theweleit argues that the fascist psychology required violence as a way of creating boundaries: only by destroying others could the fascist reaffirm his own aliveness and overcome the fear of bodily decomposition. One method of accomplishing this, Theweleit argues, is through imposing order on the mass through violence. Theweleit writes that:

. . . a mass of diverse consistencies, from fluid to viscous, in which the soldier male “sinks and is irretrievable lost.” A damp mass: all that is hybrid within, across, on, or emanating from the body; everything “filthy.”

If the soldier male speaks negatively, with hatred, loathing, fear, disgust, of the mass (the human mass), it is not from any direct relation to the human masses themselves that his emotions spring; they arise in relation to the “mass” that issues from his own body. The emergence of revolutionary masses into the public arena occurs as a consequence of the rupturing of dams. At the same time, it threatens to undermine the internal dams of these men, as if their bodily boundaries might collapse under the pressure of the masses without. Their own inner mass “dissipates” into the mass which is outside, and the external mass comes to embody their own erupted interior. The man is “inundated.” (Theweleit II: 3)

Theweleit’s conceptual reliance on liquid metaphors to explain the fascist psychology leads to an interesting comparison with Titanic. Of course, the ship provided the dam, which (for a time) prevented the “inundation” of male bodies, but then, as another sinister, death‑dealing woman, consumes men upon breaking up. However, the responses of the men to the impending inundation reveals a fascist aesthetic of violence and order: the weak English captain, with the declaration “every man for himself’ gives free reign to the mass, chaos explodes, and is quickly followed by scenes of men jumping into the water, the complete inundation. More sinister, perhaps, is the attempt to maintain rationality, which may occur only through imposing order on the mass. Theweleit argues that the soldier must impose order on the mass, constructing channels into which the flood may flow, building and rebuilding the dams that will protect him from internal dissolution. In one crucial scene in which steerage‑ passengers are prepared for the disaster, whistles ring out, the terrified mass, confronted with men in uniform, recoil. The sailors wade into the mass, channeling them into two columns—one for men and one for women, one which will live and one which will die, combining ideologies of fascist violence and sexual difference.

This scene requires additional comment. In many ways, the representation in the film of the sexual division of steerage passengers in preparation for the loading of the lifeboats and the distribution of life vests is eerily like the ways in which cinematic representations depict concentration‑camp Selektions. That such a scene was created in 1942 (early 1943 at the latest) compounds the uneasiness that it evokes when watching it now. Despite the violence portrayed in the scene and the traces of the Holocaust it evokes, the scene is also notable for how resistance is represented, for the ways in which the mass retained a distinctiveness. The German immigrant couple, forced to separate by the ship’s officers, gradually inch closer to one another, finally grasping one another by the hand in a gesture of terror and defiance. In a sense, the couple refuses to be absorbed into the mass, remaining distinct through their displays of affection. The camera follows this as well, focusing primarily on these two Germans who are able to maintain a distinguishing characteristic.

These two, who suffer a series of separations and reunifications until they finally lose sight of each other and die (presumably) apart, seem to be drawn from the historical example of Isador and Ida Strauss. The Strausses, the Jewish owners of Macy’s, were lauded in 1912 due to the fact that Mrs. Strauss refused to enter a lifeboat or to leave her husband, choosing instead to remain behind so that the couple could die together. A similar dynamic seems to be motivating the German pair in Titanic, in which they attempt to live together or die together as a couple. In the film, this sentiment appears to be approvingly represented—the soulful looks the couple give one another, the protective mannerisms the husband adopts, and the final, desperate, search for one another as the ship founders, all appear to be expressions of genuine sentiment. However, that this cinematic representation had its source in a Jewish and upper‑class example reveals the ideological purposes to which history could be turned. Imposing these qualities onto lower‑class Germans, who are revealed to embrace the norms of bourgeois domesticity and sentimentality, then privileges their actions as having a national (and, it would appear, racial) basis.

      This scene is also important for a third reason. It appears that the scene, in which social, national, and sexual differences are reified, allowed Titanic to function as a visual indicator of the ways in which racial ideology, gender ideology, and national ideology were coalesced in their expression. Theweleit writes that “the qualities of ‘race’ are in every detail the precise opposites of the terror of the ‘the mass’.” (II: 73-4)[iv] This binary opposition, and the qualities that come to be subsumed under the terms, could then be visually expressed through film narrative. When visually intertwined with the mass/race distinction, these three characteristics could function as an educational tool through which Nazi ideology could be expressed. Equating the mass with a sexual division and with a racial characteristic, the scene also displays the ways in which the film medium provided another avenue through which the regime could impact the ideological worlds of movie­goers (Rentschler).

It seems clear that Titanic was an effort at dialogue with the past, but had profoundly present concerns. As a piece of propaganda, the film relied on implicit contrasts between Teutonic characters and their British rivals, and in so doing, showing a German superiority appropriate to wartime. In addition, the film visually explores certain elements of a fascist mentality and ideology. Focusing intently on the way in which gender, race, and nation were intertwined, the film can be said to put forward a thesis in which the British could be feminized as the Teutonic characters, self‑sacrificial, masculine, correctly gendered, could be represented as natural, hence superior.

Now that I have discussed the propagandist possibilities included in the film, I would like to turn to a discussion of how the film encoded resistance to the regime. First, I would like to discuss the ways in which Titanic was constructed so that it would bore the viewer. Second, it seems plausible that the casting of the film was carried out in such a way that it subverted the arguments of the screenplay. Finally, the structural qualities of the film, in which good Germans are highlighted as subverting authority, provide the most clear example of how Titanic undermined its own textual arguments by upholding a right to resist even as it critiqued the enemies of Germany.

Film critics have noticed the ways in which the narrative style of Titanic appears drawn out and overbearing. While it is possible that these critics are simply not enamored with the details of the financial shenanigans that form the bulk of the film, the possibility exists that Titanic was self‑consciously filmed in such a way as to bore the viewer, thus minimizing the effects of its propagandist screenplay. In a critique cited by Cinzia Romani, two German writers argue that:

The degree of boredom that Selpin and Klingler are capable of imparting to the episodes preceding the sinking of the Titanic is truly awesome; the quarrel between the British plutocrats . . . for example, is so unimaginatively photographed, with routine shots endlessly repeated, effectively robbing their argument of any dramatic interest. . . . Until the final catastrophe, one never has the feeling, even for an instant, of really being on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. The total insensibility with which these directors have treated their actors is clearly demonstrated by a scene in which the camera focuses on the face of Sybille Schmitz [Sigrid Oole], giving this actress, so attractive and expressive in other films, the appearance of a painted cadaver. (qtd. in Romani 71)

 

Indeed, the casting may have had a subversive quality to it as well. Romani writes that Sybille Schmitz (who played Sigrid Oole) was attacked because she “represented a type of ‘foreign’ beauty. To be sure, with her face she could only be cast in a certain type of role; with her unsettling glance, it would be impossible to imagine her as a wholesome German milkmaid.” (Romani 68) It seems possible that Selpin chose her as the heroine in order to circumvent the screenplay’s ending, in which Petersen and Oole stand in the lifeboat, clutched in a love‑embrace as the Titanic founders. In other words, the ideological foundations of the Nazi racial family that could have been expressed through appropriate casting (many other actresses in the film possessed suitable physical characteristics) were visually disrupted by the triumph of the less‑than‑ideal couple at the end of the film. This is indicated as well by the fact that Schmitz’s role in another film, Fährmann Maria, led to it being criticized by the editors of Volk und Rasse for “lacking racial awareness” (Romani 68).

Just as the casting may have subverted the screenplay of the film, it seems plausible that other filmed elements, particularly the ending, also worked to undermine Zerlett­-Olfenius’s messages. Saul Friedländer, commenting on the strange ways in which Nazism has come to be represented, indeed as it represented itself, argues that

it is the juxtaposition of the kitsch aesthetic and of the themes of death that creates the surprise, that special frisson so characteristic not only of the new discourse but also, it appears, of Nazism itself . . . There is a kitsch of death . . . And yet this kitsch of death, of destruction, of apocalypse is a special kitsch, a representation of reality that does not integrate in the vision of ordinary kitsch. (26)

Friedländer goes on to assert that

It has often been said that one of the characteristics of kitsch is precisely the neutralization of “extreme situations,” particularly death, by turning them into some sentimental idyll. This is undoubtedly true at the level of kitsch production, hardly so at the level of individual experience, when one has to imagine or to face death. As I have just mentioned, whatever the kitsch images surrounding one, death creates an authentic feeling of loneliness and dread. Basically, at the level of individual experience, kitsch and death remain incompatible. The juxtaposition of these two contradictory elements represents the foundation of a certain religious aesthetic, and, in my opinion, the bedrock of nazi aesthetics . . . (27)

 

Titanic clearly fits this mold, placing it well within the realm of the “nazi aesthetic.” Nonetheless, I would like to argue that the ending, the kitschiest section of the film, complicates the representations of death present in other sections. The sickly‑sweet sentimentality of the ending, formed by Petersen and Oole’s reunion and the rescue of the girl, suggests that kitsch was a requirement of the ending (as a way of mitigating the horror) but also undermines the heroic narratives into which the Germans were placed. To develop this argument, one must consider what constituted an appropriate ending to the film. We know that the original release was to include a governmental inquiry in which Ismay is exonerated, and did not end simply with Petersen and Oole looking forlornly at the foundering of the Titanic. The unreleased conclusion would hammer home the intended propagandist messages, suggesting that the film’s conclusion was perhaps not suited to that impulse and was unable to leave the viewer with the bad taste of idiotic Englishness in his or her mouth. With that in mind, how does the sentimentality of the conclusion function? It would seem as if kitsch could be mobilized, not as a bedrock of Nazi aesthetics, but as a way of undermining other elements of Nazi ideology presented in the film, especially the heroic narratives of Petersen and Oole. Petersen, by surviving the disaster only to be represented cinematically in a melodramatic embrace, glowing in the light of exploding ship‑boilers, is hardly the armored fascist hero. Kitsch, it would seem, magnifies Petersen’s ultimate inability to prevent disaster. The employment of kitsch in what would be the penultimate scene was perhaps an artistic point of resistance. The actors in the last scene, who have survived both the Titanic’s sinking and Goebbels’s fury at Selpin, had to be represented in sentimentality. Kitsch, a response to their “authentic feelings of loneliness and dread” at the possibility of meeting a fate like Selpin’s or drowning as a Titanic victim, marked an unrepresentable caesura between the material and the imagined world.

Most importantly, however, was the way in which Titanic presented an opportunity to represent disaster as a metaphor for Germany under Nazi rule, being bombed nightly, on the brink of implosion. Drawing on elements of discourse from 1912, the disaster could be read as a sign of degeneration, a society being destroyed due to the hubris of its intellectual and cultural leadership. The conclusion of the film, in which some of the ship’s leadership has been dragged down through a disaster operatic in its dimensions reveals the problematic nature of selecting the Titanic disaster as a vehicle for expressing a propagandist message.

The film portrayed a series of ways in which ethical and rational people should respond to rigid but fallible leadership. The mechanisms of authority shown in the film, ranging from a ritualistic calling out of orders and their carrying out at the various levels of authority (“Stop the machines! . . . Stop the machines! . . . Stop the machines! . . . The machines are stopped.”) to the confluence of military and civilian leadership (Ismay’s influence on the captain, leading to Petersen’s query: “who is in charge here?”), which at all times is shown to be fatefully irresponsible, is filmed in such a way as to bring out the absurdity of the situation. Petersen, constantly frustrated by the captain’s flaccidity regarding safety and his inability to stand up to Ismay’s assumption of inappropriate power, moves at the margins of official power, searching for ways to co‑opt surreptitiously an irrational, corrupt, and illegally‑assumed authority. Rather than allowing order to provide a sign of rational and civilized social organization, Titanic presents an argument to the contrary: order is shown to be the sign of arbitrary, irrational, uncivilized power.

It is clear that Zerlett‑Olfenius used the Petersen character as a way of examining German difference, yet Petersen retains ambivalent as an ideologically correct example of propaganda. Instead, Petersen provided Selpin and Klingler the opportunity to construct an on-screen example of the good German who critically engages authority, comes to a rational decision on how to respond to bad leadership, and then works on the margins of power to subvert authority. Petersen, because of his ethical commitment to the safety of the passengers, feels it to be his duty to challenge the captain, who, unlike Petersen, is unable to challenge his orders from Ismay. This element of the film, in which Petersen is shown to do it all—critiquing authority, rescuing girls, foreseeing danger, manipulating women, understanding technology, protecting his community—in short, acting as a 1940s James Bond, seems to be an ethical call to arms to a German audience that would watch the film late in 1943. It seems equally persuasive that this element of the film led to its being banned, not, as it is believed, because Goebbels was concerned about a German public unable to withstand the trauma the film represents.

In conclusion, Titanic’s legacy is a perplexing one. On one hand, it retains a sinister quality as an example of fascist ideology in practice‑marking out the cultural boundaries of a special Aryanness that is in every way superior to a British civilization in the midst of devolution. Yet, Selpin’s demise seems instructive. I have speculated that his attempts to subvert elements of Zerlett‑Olfenius’s screenplay, coupled with the selection of the Titanic disaster as source material, allowed the opening of a form of artistic resistance to the regime, perhaps recognized by Goebbels when he banned the film.

 

 

Notes

 

Works Cited

 

Brederoo, Nico. “Titanic: Goebbels’s Greatest Mistake” appeared as guide article in VPRO (Netherlands), Guide 13‑1996. http://www.vpro.nl/htbin/scanlwww/gids/1996/gidsl3‑96‑Titanic.

Delage, Christian. La Vision Nazie de L’histoire: à travers le cinéma documentaire du Troisième Reich. Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme, 1989.

Deutscher Film Katalog: 1930‑1945 (Ufa, Tobis, Bavaria). Frankfurt am Main: K. L. Kraatz.

Friedländer, Saul. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death. Trans. Thomas Weyr. New York: Harper and Row, 1984.

Hembus, Joe and Christa Bondmann. Klassiker des Deutschen Tonfilms 1930‑1960. Munich: Goldman Verlag, 1980.

Hull, David Stewart. Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema 1933‑1945. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.

Heyer, Paul. Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth. Westport: Praeger, 1995.

Larabee, Ann E. “The American Hero and His Mechanical Bride: Gender Myths of the Titanic Disaster.” American Studies 31.1 (Spring, 1990).

Poley, Jared. “Sinking Vessels: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster.” Master’s Thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder, 1996.

Rentschler, Eric. The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Romani, Cinzia. Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich. Trans. Robert Connolly. New York: Sarpedon Publishers, 1992.

Sakkara, Michele, ed. Die große Zeit des deutschen Films. 1933‑1945: Zeitgeschichte im Bild. Augsburg: Druffel‑Verlag, 1980.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Trans. Stephen Conway. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

- - -. Male Fantasies. Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. Trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Titanic, prod. Walter Zerlett‑Olfenius and Harald Bratt, dir. Herbert Selpin and Werner Klingler, 1943.

Zizek, Slavoj. “Titanic‑le‑Symptôme.” L’Ane 30 (April-June 1987):45.