Enemy of Women

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Movie
Original title Enemy of Women
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1944
length 85 minutes
Rod
Director Alfred Zeisler
script Alfred Zeisler
Herbert O. Phillips
production WR Frank
music Artur Guttmann
camera John Alton
cut Douglas W. Bagier
occupation

Enemy of Women is an American propaganda film by Alfred Zeisler from 1944. The focus of the event is the National Socialist Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels , played by Paul Andor .

action

The film begins in the opening credits with the following line: "The following story unfolds the private life of the greatest villain of our time." The background of the picture is the Brandenburg Gate , which was badly damaged by the Allied bombings . Prussian marching music is also played.

Berlin, spring 1943. From the loudspeakers the rasping voice of a spokesman for the Reich German radio resounds and yells through the streets of the battered Reich capital, which has been badly damaged by Allied bombing raids. While people are pushing aside the smoking and burning debris, a car drives up. It gets out: Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda. He walks alone into a building destroyed by bombs and ponders for a while. Then he sits down on a grand armchair that survived the bombing inferno unscathed.

The film fades back 18 years, to the year 1925. The armchair is in the same place in a magnificent villa. One learns that it is the residence of the industrial family Quandt , to whom the young, unsuccessful writer Goebbels pays his respects. He wants to work as a tutor for the head of the house in order to keep himself afloat financially. With his teaching methods, he conveyed ideas about the Aryan superman and the master race that was born to conquer early on .

One day Goebbels met the young, beautiful, blond young actress Maria Brandt. Goebbels is immediately caught by her charm and falls in love with her. But Maria rejects his affection when he approaches her too stormily during a reading sample of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and wants to kiss her. He falls backwards. Maria laughs at him. When his father, Colonel Brandt, expelled him from the house in which he had found accommodation, Goebbels was deeply offended. The humiliated goes to the nearest pub and washes his frustration down with alcohol. There he was given a leaflet announcing a speech by a certain Adolf Hitler in the Hercules Auditorium in Munich on the subject of 'We must break the chains of Versailles ' . The whipping words of the fanatical young politician found fertile ground with Goebbels, and soon he became an ardent admirer of the self-proclaimed 'Führer'.

In the meantime, the first resistance to Goebbels' hateful hate speech is forming in Germany's liberal press. The spokesman for a free German press is the liberal publisher Wallburg. At this time, at the end of the 1920s, Goebbels also met Maria Brandt again. He confronts her with his injuries from back then, notices that the Nazis have a very good memory and tells her right in the face with a warning undertone: “Today nobody laughs at Dr. Goebbels ”. When she replies that all of her hopes for an acting career have not been fulfilled, he is nevertheless concerned. Then January 30, 1933 began ...

Goebbels' protection finally brings Maria, who is engaged at the Hanover theater, a film contract with the UFA . The minister has ordered her to play the leading role in the film "Queen for One Night" . But the hope that the young actress would now also fall in love with him is not fulfilled. This has a young doctor, Dr. Hans Träger, who has lodged with her father as a subtenant. During the Röhm putsch , Goebbels only narrowly escaped arrest after he was told that his name was on Heinrich Himmler's death list. Goebbels himself, in turn, asked Himmler to send some of his SS henchmen to the now retired Colonel Brandt to have him murdered - as a belated revenge for the disgrace that Brandt once suffered from expulsion. When Maria receives an audience with her greatest admirer, the latter feigns dismay at the death of her father. Then he promises her a top career in film if she becomes his lover. But she rejects this request brusquely. Goebbels then instructs his speaker, Hanke , to inform UFA boss Correll that a contract with Maria Brandt is no longer desired.

1937 in Vienna . Maria meets Dr. Carrier again. They both fall in love and get married. One day, Austria's annexation has now been completed, and Maria Träger has to travel to Berlin. When she wanted to return to Vienna, Goebbels prevented this. Her husband then traveled to Berlin for their fourth wedding anniversary in 1943. Soon after, he was arrested by the Gestapo . Maria then watches Goebbels on a visit to the hospital and receives the confession from him that he is behind the carrier's arrest. He wrestles a dirty deal from her. Porters come free and are allowed to leave for Switzerland if the accompanying Maria turns around at the border and drives back to Berlin. Maria gets involved. Back in Berlin, Maria does not flee to the bunker during an Allied air raid and dies when a bomb hits her house. Meanwhile, Goebbels gives another radio broadcast propaganda address full of lies in the bombed house he entered at the beginning of the film. The film ends with the following fade-in: "Events have proven you are a good liar but a bad prophet, Dr. Goebbels. "

Production notes

Made by a tiny, independent US production company, this anti-Nazi propaganda film from Hollywood is of cinematic historical interest for several reasons. It is the only US production in which the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is at the center of the action. The historically proven facts, however, are far behind the fictional character of the film.

The Jewish director and screenwriter Alfred Zeisler knew Goebbels personally from his time as a UFA producer from 1933 to 1935 and only left the country when he was no longer acceptable for the production company. He was thus recognized in Hollywood as a proven Goebbels specialist. Therefore, as early as 1943 Zeisler was given a psychological analysis of Goebbels in the form of a short documentary film portrait entitled Dr. Joseph Goebbels - Making His Life and Loves . The following year, Zeisler also seemed the right man for this feature film about the notorious chief propagandist.

Leading actor Wolfgang Zilzer called himself Paul Andor in the late phase of the Second World War in order not to endanger his father Max Zilzer , who lived in Berlin . At this point in time (1944), however, his father Max had already died, which Wolfgang Zilzer only found out after the war ended. Enemy of Women was to remain the only film in exile in which Zilzer got a leading role.

Although both German, Zeisler and Zilzer were born in the United States. For them, exile in the United States also meant a homecoming.

For incomprehensible reasons, Goebbels, contrary to the custom in the German Reich, is not called Joseph in the film, but always with his two first names Paul Joseph.

Enemy of Women was the last film by the Viennese film composer Artur Guttmann, who fled Germany and Austria to the USA, and at the same time the first film by German editor Wolfgang Loe Bagier in exile in America .

Since Enemy of Women was never shown in a German-speaking country, there is also no German dubbed version.

criticism

The New York emigrant newspaper Aufbau sharply criticized the fictional character of the film: “[T] his film, which claims to show the“ private life of Paul Joseph Goebbels ”, only shows Nazi Germany from the perspective of little Moritz. The well-known historical facts, which are interesting enough to be processed into an exciting film, are lied to and a main story is invented in which a little actress from Hanover refuses Mr. Goebbels and has to take his anger for it. Alfred Zeisler wrote the book and directed it. The fact that the film is cheap in terms of budget does not justify its confusion and futility. "

Kay Weniger's “In life, more is taken from you than is given”, in Wolfgang Zilzer's biography, referred to the propagandistic intentions of this production. Enemy of Women is "a pseudo-biography of Goebbels expert Alfred Zeisler that can easily be interpreted as a propaganda coup" and noted on the same page: "Zilzer's propaganda minister appears here as a vengeful, uncontrolled and misogynist with strong inferiority complexes, who quickly loses his composure when rejected. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Translation: Events have shown that you are a good liar but a bad prophet, Dr. Goebbels
  2. ^ Structure, year 1944, issue 38 of September 22, 1944, p. 10
  3. ↑ Kay Less: “In life, more is taken from you than given”. Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. ACABUS Verlag, Hamburg 2011. p. 554

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