LETTERS
Editors: It seems to me that Mario Snares, speaking from faroff Portugal, showed more understanding about Jimmy Carter and the 1976 elections than those Dissent editors who were wringing their...
...Now, I am not sure whether Mr...
...They forget that many radicals considered the early Roosevelt programs fascist...
...And of course Mr...
...Mabuse the Gambler (1922), which unambiguously caters to the sado-masochistic instincts that Adorno's studies identified with "the authoritarian personality...
...The inanely pompous BBC correspondent, if she really was meant to be from BBC, was a mistaken joke carried too far...
...Pachter and I are indeed referring to the same event, a great deal depends on where you let the emphasis fall...
...I was intelligent enough by now to know what that was about...
...Perhaps he understood better than some of his American friends that "working-class politics in this country has, therefore, meant allegiance to the Democrats," as William Spinrad put it in his perspicacious article in the Spring issue of Dissent...
...Mabuse (1930), for which Lang has claimed an antifascist message (Kracauer says that to contemporaries this could hardly have been noticeable), but of the earlier Dr...
...If Mr...
...I am sure it would not have entered his mind to make a similar offer to Erich von Stroheim or to Georg Pabst...
...A writer who alludes in passing to "that grandiose failure, The Magic Mountain" makes you sit up and wait for what he will say next...
...But she is sure this story line is part of his aim to degrade womankind...
...Patalas and Gregor charge that Lang knows no alternative to either chaos or dictatorship, and is fascinated by both...
...It may be controversial whether any work of art can contribute to the formation of political attitudes, but if they can do nothing but fortify existing inclinations, then Lang's films certainly pleased Hitler for good reason...
...Then came a letter from the income tax people, saying, "There is a slight difference in income tax of the year 1927...
...I would add that The Testament of Dr...
...Next morning I was in Paris, and things were quiet for a bit...
...Too many of us who are socialists forget the misgivings many socialists had about Roosevelt when he entered the campaign against Hoover...
...The question that David Bromwich thinks is too deep to go into—why did Hitler like Lang's films?—is just the one that is interesting...
...446 Pachter's: we know so little about the border regions of politics and culture that any front-line report is welcome...
...When one editor asked whether he would have supported military aid to the Angolan forces that had been backed by the U.S., Carter said—NO, he would not...
...Perhaps he recognized the path American workers have taken for almost a century to advance their class interests—through alliances and influence within the Democratic party...
...And here sits poor Fritz Lang, knowing that one day his Jewish grandmother will surface but obliged to say "Ja, Herr Minister...
...Mabuse seems to me as thoroughly anti-Nazi as a movie of its time could be, without indicting Hitler's party by name, rank and number...
...it is about moral vapidness...
...For deeper understanding of the human condition and for moral strength, Morris prefers the likes of Theodore Dreiser, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor...
...Eight days later I got a letter saying that they had confiscated all my money...
...I certainly did not mean to impugn the character of Fritz Lang any more than I would doubt Tucholsky's leftist credentials by recording his admiration of the Camelots du Rol...
...He didn't say anything about the real reason—the Nazi slogans in the mouth of an insane criminal...
...Because I was afraid that I was now tailed by someone...
...It may well be that the Nazis "discovered" Lang's Jewish grandmother and, at some point, made her count against him...
...q Editors: Celia Morris, in her piece in the Winter 1976 issue on Robert Altman's Nashville, finds Altman's characters unbelievable cliches, the movie antifeminist, pretentious, boring, and, compared with On the Waterfront, a failure in evoking common everyday life...
...448...
...Carter replied that he would not be boxed in by such an unwarranted inference...
...But it is significant that the first among labor organizations to support Carter were the more progressive unions, both within the AFL-CIO and among independents such as the UAW...
...DAVID BROMWICH New Haven, Connecticut HENRY PACHTER Replies: Does Dissent need "joke—unjoke" signs...
...The film is not morally vapid...
...And this was the moment where I said to myself, "This evening is the last moment you can be sure of getting out of Germany...
...It was the participation of labor in Democratic politics and the pressures of labor and liberals that brought about the first important redistribution of wealth and income in the New Deal period—inadequate though it was, not just by socialist standards but by the criterion of simple justice...
...Fritz Lang, the director of M, and Dr...
...The working people were the major beneficiaries of the enactment of social security and unemployment insurance, of freedom for collective bargaining through the Wagner Act, and also of the programs of jobs through WPA, CCC, P W A, and many of the other agencies of the '30s...
...Then they confiscated M and took everything...
...Goebbels...
...Mabuse...
...But these were not elections for the Prussian assembly in the 1840s nor even for the British and French parliaments today—these were elections that took their pattern and path from a distinctive American version of politics...
...In April the Washington Post published the text of a long interview with Carter...
...In that same interview Carter made it clear that the crisis of American cities would never be solved unless welfare costs were taken over by federal and state agencies...
...This makes it look as if Lang wanted very much to throw in with the Nazis...
...I thought people would understand the irony: Goebbels calling in the representative of expressionist anxiety films to organize a Teutonic film industry...
...There are no good marriages and sweet relationships, she complains...
...Editors: Henry Pachter's comments on Weimar culture (Dissent, Summer 1976) must have struck many readers as a notably forthright contribution to the ongoing debate...
...The mistake, Carter said, was made when the United States supported Portuguese colonialism against Angola for many years...
...But so far as Lang knew, it was he that turned down the Nazis, by running away from them...
...Pachter's observations are worth having simply because they are Mr...
...What else could I say...
...Worst of all, in her view, Nashville is morally slack...
...I would, however, rescue one reputation from the ironic anecdote in which Mr...
...Perhaps his understanding of the failure of dogmatism and the progress achieved through coalition politics caused Soares to declare that Carter would be carrying on in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...Nevertheless, Morris herself goes particularly wrong with her not uncommon judgment that Altman puts down women...
...I didn't feel very agreeable...
...I put on striped trousers and my cutaway jacket, stiff collar...
...I was trying to warn: don't confuse avant-garde art with left politics...
...But it does seem that Soares did know something of American political history and of how American labor helped fill a vessel that seemed empty of specific social programs in 1932, but became the New Deal in the years that followed the election...
...He was very nice...
...She cannot understand how a successful female country music star could be "married to a boor and a slob—a man who may in some obscure way care for her, but who manipulates and humiliates her as a way of making his living...
...Altman hails from Kansas City, and to this old St...
...But I have heard Fritz Lang tell a remarkably different version of his encounter with the Nazi propaganda organization, and he has repeated the account in Andrew Sarris's Interviews with Film Directors, from which I quote: I was ordered to go to see Dr...
...People who see little difference between the Ford-Dole and Carter-Mondale tickets can hardly be immersed in the political struggle of this country...
...Oddly, one of these is specifically related to a matter that is very close to the activities and interests of Soares himself...
...I think you should come back as fast as possible...
...I said, "I am tickled pink, Herr Minister...
...Too many socialists forget that there were some who adamantly took their stand for socialist revolution against social reform in the'30s...
...Incidentally, I was speaking not of The Testament of Dr...
...Even the second Mabuse film permits the viewer total identification with the powerful though evil leader...
...I looked at the clock...
...If this abandonment to the inevitable is compared with Brecht's methodical effort to prevent such identification, for instance in the current production of The Three Penny Opera, the difference leaps to one's eyes...
...That was the policy Carter would have opposed, and support of colonialism was the reason why American influence was so lacking when Angola finally fell to the Russian/Cuban-backed forces...
...Consciously or unwittingly, Lang's films granted his audiences vicarious participation in the Black Mass...
...They also forget that some of the sharpest criticism of Roosevelt was that he was running without clear-cut ideas and programs for meeting the economic crisis...
...The reporter shot back, Then you would allow events everywhere else to take the course they did in Angola [where the Russian/Cuban intervention was so successful...
...No one, least of all this writer, knows just what kind of president Carter might actually be...
...The hope that Soares expressed about a Carter administration may yet come to pass...
...Editors: It seems to me that Mario Snares, speaking from faroff Portugal, showed more understanding about Jimmy Carter and the 1976 elections than those Dissent editors who were wringing their hands and expressing various degrees of distress about the Carter candidacy, in the Summer issue of the magazine...
...Perhaps Snares was more aware of the minuscule size of the organized socialist movement in this country...
...She wants Altman's explanation...
...Nor is his election a cinch at this writing...
...Really, it is unfair to have someone with such a simplistic and rigid view of realism write about the kind of work Altman did in Nashville...
...Louisian the character types he peopled his movie with are not far-fetched...
...At two thirty the banks close and how can I get out of here...
...I was sitting opposite Dr...
...It was like a very bad moving picture...
...When I got out, it was too late...
...Pachter left it to perish...
...Kracauer thought that all Lang films glorify the power of evil...
...The movie is flawed, so is On the Waterfront, but it is great too...
...There was some truth to this, and some of the programs Roosevelt articulated in his 1932 campaign were far from the New Deal he finally offered...
...Morris at times writes as if she wanted some redeeming schmaltz and oodles of firm answers to open questions...
...Nor was I surprised that Soares was informed of those specific programmatic attitudes Carter had espoused during his primary campaign...
...So, I am sorry for sloppy wording, but it is a fact that Goebbels thought Lang was their man, and I just wonder whether he had not inquired first among knowledgeable people whether Lang had uttered social democratic or pacifist thoughts...
...but no one would mistake Marinetti or d'Annunzio for Communists...
...Finally he said to me, "The Fuehrer has seen your pictures, and he has said, 'This is the man who will give us the big Nazi pictures...
...It's worth working for...
...The leader of the Portuguese socialists must be as aware as any American socialist that Carter had not articulated and sponsored a specific and detailed program to advance this country's social and economic welfare...
...I said "Yes" to everything...
...I looked around over my shoulder...
...It is about mass society, mass and individual self-deception, illusions, and screwed-up values—very realistic in its way and on a deep level...
...If the history of the sexes were reversed, and men were oppressed, men would be protesting with the same nonsense...
...I didn't get out...
...I came just one minute before the train left...
...Without regard to sex, Nashville's characters effused mixed-up, selfish feelings...
...Goebbels...
...Probably he had seen Die Nibelungen done by Lang with his Nazi wife, Thea von Harbou, which indeed was the acme of tasteless selfglorification of the German race, and Metropolis, which (according to Gregor and Patalas in the authoritative German History of the Film) "contains all the Nazi tenets...
...Why Hitler was able to enjoy such a movie, is a question that would plunge this discussion farther into certain depths than any of us, I believe, wishes to go...
...The great organizing drives of American workers, especially in the previously unorganized mass-production industries, took place under the impetus of the Roosevelt victory...
...It was the ending we didn't like...
...Mabuse, and of the populist, anticapitalist Metropolis, was about to become a maker of cultural policy in the Third Reich—when it was discovered that he had a Jewish grandmother...
...Put out the things necessary for a few days," because by now I didn't dare tell anybody the truth...
...Altman's picture of the landscape is too relentlessly chrome and plastic...
...I went home and said to my butler, "Look, I have to go to Paris...
...I couldn't get my money out...
...Pachter found the evidence for his statement in Walter Laqueur's book or somewhere else...
...Kracauer has 447 shown in detail how German film-makers (and especially Lang) succumbed to the temptations of their environment, and he has also pointed to some glaring inconsistencies between various accounts that Lang has given of his interview with Dr...
...Goebbels and he said to me, "Look, I am terribly sorry, but we had to confiscate this picture [The Testament of Dr...
...Strangely, this equation is made where Weimar intellectuals are concerned...
...The "mistaking of 'modern' for `left'," he writes, "was almost universal...
Vol. 23 • September 1976 • No. 4
