Political developments between 1933 and 1934 placed Austrian cinema under more governmental control than at any time since World War I. In 1934 the new chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, attempted to counter a looming civil war and the growing power of the Austrian National Socialists by disbanding the embattled parliament and instituting a nonparty clerico-authoritarian corporate state, often referred to as Austrofascist. Although Dollfuss's Fatherland Front was intended to be a national unity movement above party politics, it was, in fact, led by the conservative, Catholic-oriented Christian Social Party. Subsequent laws, which outlawed all political parties, may have temporarily silenced the National Socialists, but they also alienated a substantial portion of Austria's electorate that had supported the Social Democrats.

Dollfuss, who admired Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini and benefited from his support, based his new corporative state on the Italian model and flatly rejected Nazism and its racist, expansionist policies. He strove to make Austria the “better Germany” and chose the symbol of the crusader's cross as a counter to Germany's pagan swastika. Although his Fatherland Front may have incorporated external fascist traits—uniforms, mass meetings, leader-cult imagery—it never developed a cohesive platform nor did it embody a truly populist movement. Its members, a collection of Christian Socials, monarchists, conservatives, military officers, aristocrats, capitalists, Catholic youth, and anti-leftists/anti-German nationalists, found their ideology in an amalgamation of the Catholic-based corporatist philosophy of Othmar Spann, Habsburg nostalgia, anti-Socialism, and a Central European union against German Nazism.

Dollfuss's authoritarian regime immediately turned to film, appreciating its immense value for spreading political, cultural, and economic propaganda. Rather than work with the existing industry, however, the new regime decided to take the film industry under its “protection.”Footnote ¹ The first step in this new political relationship between regime and industry was to transfer ownership of film theaters currently in the possession of the now outlawed Social Democratic Party to the state. The government conferred control over the Viennese theaters of the Socialist-led Kiba organizationFootnote ² to Karl Imelski, who had been active in film production since 1919 and had been employed by MGM in Austria since 1924.

The corporatist regime put Imelski in charge of several film organizations, and he became one of the most powerful men in the Austrian film industry up to the Anschluss in 1938. The new regime gave support to the Austrian camera and projector industry, decreeing that all films must be shown on Austrian-made equipment. Weekly newsreels were to be solely Austrian productions promoting the country's achievements, so that the public would come to identify with the modern, sovereign Austria, rather than with German hegemony. To this end, the government founded the Vaterländische Tonfilmgesellschaft (Fatherland Sound Film Company) that absorbed the Österreich in Bild und Ton (Austria in Image and Sound) newsreel and culture film productions run by the Selenophon Company.

Official censorship, which had fallen with the monarchy and had been difficult to apply in the First Republic (Ekstase [1933] for its nude scenes; All Quiet on the Western Front [1931] for its disdain of the Central Powers), was reinstituted by decree on 9 March 1934. In addition, all independent film organizations and societies associated with political parties or movements were disbanded and replaced by a large state-controlled umbrella alliance, the Österreichische Filmkonferenz (Austrian Film Conference). This association was responsible for representing the film industry inside and outside the country as well as for mediation between different professional branches of the industry. The Ministry of Education, as well as the government departments responsible for financing and censorship, would advise the conference organization. The Catholic Church was also included in this new structure. Vienna's Cardinal Theodor Innitzer so praised the idea of an organization to guide filmgoers that in October 1934 the Institut für Filmkultur (Institute of Film Culture) was created out of an earlier youth culture group. The new state cinema publication, Der gute Film (The Good Film), would enable the Church to propagate its input regarding film production and presentation in Austria.

The institute also set the criteria for topics and scripts that might be made into Austrian films in the service of the “Christian, German and corporate state.” It created a rating system that divided films into five categories: I. Films of general artistic or technical acceptability were rated “valuable entertainment”; II. Those of limited artistic or technical acceptability were rated “conditionally valuable entertainment”; III. Films that were generally well made but without particular cultural or ideological value were rated “non-objectionable entertainment”; IV. Films of a problematic thematic, artistic, or technical nature were to be “viewed with reservation”; V. Films of little artistic or technical value or with negative cultural and/or ethical effect were “to be avoided.”Footnote ³ The final two categories were particularly used to stem the flood of American imports and to filter out Nazi propaganda.Footnote ⁴ Many filmmakers questioned, if nothing else, the regime's vague notion of a “good” film and thus also the institute's authority. But the government did not have the ability to enforce its will on production in the manner of the German dictatorship. Der gute Film therefore attempted to add credibility to the regime's relationship with cinema by being critical and artistically demanding even of films that promoted the government's ideology. This is particularly clear in the cases of Singende Jugend and Der Pfarrer von Kirchberg, which will be discussed later.

The greatest disruption to the Austrian film industry, however, was neither the dire economic situation nor the policies of the authoritarian Austrian regime but, rather, Nazi Germany. Following Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in Germany in January 1933, the National Socialist Party began the Gleichschaltung, or coordination of society and culture to its ideology. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ speech to the German Organization of Filmmakers on 28 March 1933 provided the first indication of the coming nationalization and “Aryanization” of German cinema. From that point on, the German film industry was subordinated to Goebbels’ Ministry and the goals of National Socialism.

Germany's largest film studio, UFA (Universum Film AG),Footnote ⁵ immediately severed contracts with Jewish talent and organizational staff. In April, Goebbels called for the boycott of all Jewish businesses, and the emigration of Jewish and anti-National Socialist film talent began—mostly to Vienna and Hollywood. In July the government had officially pronounced that employment in any field no longer depended on citizenship but on ancestry. As non-Germans, Jews would have to be granted a work permit similar to those required for foreigners. In the case of Jewish film talent, additional approval would have to come from the Propaganda Ministry. Few permits were given and all were terminated prior to the end of the year in preparation for the Nuremberg Laws, which were announced in September 1935 and which laid the foundation both for the total “Aryanization” of German society and for the later deportations.

The Austrian film industry became a haven for Jewish and left-wing talent fleeing Germany. Vienna might have benefited from such an influx if it were not for the plans Hitler had set in motion from his first days in office—to isolate and impoverish Austria to foster a Nazi coup there and to accomplish eventual annexation. Even tourism, Austria's most important industry, was to be hindered. Nazi Germany instituted the “1,000 Mark Sperre,” which required a deposit of one thousand marks for Germans who desired to travel to Austria for either business or pleasure. The Austrian film market heavily depended on Germany for production and distribution. Many German companies had invested in Austrian firms during the early years of sound (1929–32), and Germany constituted Austrian film's largest export audience.

Beginning in March 1933, Nazi Germany officially refused to release Austrian films that used Jewish or alleged anti-German/anti-National Socialist talent. Of the fourteen Austrian films in distribution at the time of the first National Socialist German film industry guidelines (March 1933 to February 1934), five were blocked from release and one was pulled from distribution. The three films that had already been sold to German distributors, Abenteur am Lido (Adventure on the Lido) (1933), Frühlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring) (1933), and Wenn du jung bist, gehört dir die Welt (When You Are Young, The World Belongs To You) (1934), were rejected in an evasive manner that provides particular insight to the process. The new arm of the German Propaganda Ministry, the Reichsfilmkammer (Reich's Film Chamber) known as the RFK, flatly dismissed the well-made Frühlingsstimmen due to its alleged “poor quality.” The real reason for its rejection, however, was the fact that operetta composer Oskar Straus, who was Jewish, had composed some of the film's score.

Both Abenteuer am Lido and Wenn du jung bist… had been directed by an Austrian long active in German film, Richard Oswald, who was not only Jewish but whose filmography was comprised of socially critical and antiwar interpretations that the National Socialists had condemned before January 1933.Footnote ⁶ Furthermore, the two films starred singers Josef Schmidt, Alfred Piccaver, and actor Szöke Sakall, all of whom the RFK branded as “non-Aryan” and thus “unacceptable.” Ironically, the production company of Wenn du jung bist…, the Haas-Film company, founded by Heinrich Haas in 1933, was acceptable to the Nazi regime because Haas was considered “Aryan.”Footnote ⁷ Believing that he understood the new limitations on Austrian film in Nazi Germany, Haas had even contacted the RFK during the film's production and offered it the script for censorship approval. The RFK insisted on several changes, with which Haas had complied; but the central criticism focused on Josef Schmidt, whom it considered too unattractive to help motivate the uninteresting plot.Footnote ⁸ The Austrian cabinet advisor for film, Eugen Lanske, avoided the obvious racism in this accusation and blamed the film's ban on the director's vaguely “negative personal reputation,” stating that even “non-Aryans” in the Austrian film industry disliked him.Footnote ⁹

The Film Agreement of 1934 between Austria and Nazi Germany placed the Austrian film industry under strangulating external pressure, especially since the agreement forbade the export to Germany of any Austrian film that included among cast or crew “non-Germans” (emigrés from Nazi Germany) or “non-Aryan” Austrians. That this condition specifically aimed to destabilize the economy and to “Aryanize” Austrian cinema from the outside was clear to Oskar Pilzer, who served both as the director of Vienna's largest studio, Tobis-Sascha, and as president of the government-controlled Austrian Association of Film Production. His Pilzer Group held part or direct ownership in many Austrian film companies, including Vienna-Film, Gloria-Film, Viktoria-Film, Walter Reisch-Filmproduktion, and Tobis-Sascha. Pilzer argued that the Third Reich had set a special standard for Austrian films but was not as insistent on the use of “Aryan” talent when it came to other foreign imports:

Pilzer and others in the Austrian film industry believed that the Germans were not targeting Austrian citizens as such, only ex-German (“non-Aryan”) nationals in Austrian film, that the racial laws of Germany should not apply to Austria, and that Austria would not institute an Aryan Paragraph of its own to suit Germany. Unfortunately, Austrian film did exactly that by conceding to German demands for the sake of film distribution. Film credits were edited to remove the “undesirable” names, and in 1935 a new agreement put the now seriously disadvantaged and dependent Austrian film industry one step closer toward mandatory “Aryanization.” Austria was now limited to the distribution of twelve films annually in Germany through German companies, whereas Germany could export an unlimited number to Austria. Cases involving work permissions now no longer required German citizenship. Austrian citizenship would be acceptable, but this concession meant little since German proof of Aryan status, the Ariernachweis, was still demanded.

This gave Germany substantial control over the creation and casting of Austrian film. Exceptions would be made on an individual basis, but only following the procedure Berlin used for dealing with its own film talent, meaning again that exceptions were almost never granted. One of the rare instances of such an exception was made for Walter Reisch, who had written and directed a new film for rising “Aryan” film star Paula Wessely, Episode (1935). His credit on Willi Forst's Maskerade (1934) had already been removed in printed programs and advertisements in Germany. In what appears to have been another tactic to confuse and destabilize the Austrian industry, the German censors did not pass this widely anticipated film until an Austrian delegation met with the RFK and the German distributor complained of lost investments should Episode be banned.Footnote ¹¹

The National Socialists in both countries no doubt intended that disruptions to the Austrian film industry (and to practically every other aspect of the Austrian economy and culture) would be a brief but fruitful policy. On 25 July 1934, Austrian Nazis succeeded in assassinating Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in an attempted coup aimed at achieving Anschluss with Germany. However, the expected internal collapse did not occur, and Kurt von Schuschnigg, minister of education in Dollfuss's government, subsequently took over as chancellor. Although Schuschnigg continued the corporate state in the form he had inherited it, he differed in many ways from his predecessor. His regime, which lasted until the Anschluss in March 1938, intended to reduce the government's authoritarian aspects. An aristocrat and monarchist who maintained good relations with the Habsburg family, Schuschnigg downplayed the Alpine-rural-oriented propaganda of Dollfuss. He hoped to see Austria recover its cosmopolitan reputation as the reborn center of Mitteleuropa. No great admirer of Mussolini, Schuschnigg also allowed the Fatherland Front to fade somewhat as a national movement. Its militia lost power, and the regime became less specifically ideological and more pragmatically bureaucratic. Schuschnigg could, however, still count on the Duce's protection, at least until the Berlin-Rome Axis Agreement of 1936, which gave Mussolini a powerful ally at the cost of abandoning Austria to potential German annexation.

Hoping to promote the Anschluss, Austrians who were illegal members of the Austrian National Socialist Party openly aided Germany's involvement in the Austrian film industry. German producer Serge Otzoup and Austrian banker Wilhelm Gaik founded a company to help Austrian productions ensure their cast and crew were “Aryan” and thus permit German distribution without problems. The German government also encouraged Austrian producers to make bilateral agreements with the Otzoup firm and the leader of the outlawed Austrian National Socialist Party, Josef Leopold. Austrian silent film pioneer Heinz Hanus, former president of the Filmbund and head of its authoritarian successor organization, assisted in providing racial information about the talent being employed. Several major Austrian companies participated in this Faustian agreement.Footnote ¹²

The Austrian Independent and Emigrantenfilm

In his 1975 documentary on film talent emigration from Germany after 1933, Günter Peter Straschek reports that the racial laws made about nine hundred members of the German film industry unemployable in Germany and ultimately stateless.Footnote ¹³ Many of them headed for Hollywood, but a substantial portion went to Vienna and Budapest where they could work in the German language or because they had originally hailed from Austria or Hungary. Since they were subsequently prevented from working with most major Austrian film companies, a secondary film industry developed around this talent. These new companies did not depend on Germany for investment or distribution, and they rejected Germany's racial guidelines. Their independent Emigrantenfilm (emigrant film) would utilize emigré and Austrian “non-Aryan” talent, coproduce their films with foreign studios in multilanguage versions, and market their films across Europe.

While most early sound films were produced in multilanguage versions in Central Europe to reach beyond the isolated language markets of Czechoslovakia or Hungary, this practice had only been partially the case with German or Austrian films, which were occasionally produced in English or French versions.Footnote ¹⁴ German-language films generally played in their original language throughout Central Europe, often with the assistance of intertitles.Footnote ¹⁵ Nationalist demonstrations and protests in Prague (and later in Budapest and Warsaw) protested the use of an allegedly “foreign language” in Prague movie theaters as an example of attempted “Germanization,” but one could just as easily argue that many Czechs understood German and wanted to attend German-language films.Footnote ¹⁶ In fact, most audiences preferred the Austrian and German imports to the “kitschy” American films.Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, the nationalist claim that Austrian films glorified the Habsburg Empire, whose alleged hegemony offended Czech viewers, was itself a complete distortion.Footnote ¹⁸

While many early sound Austrian musicals and historical fictions were indeed set in imperial Austria and romanticized Vienna, their nostalgia avoided any revanchist propagandistic aspects that would have certainly imperiled the film's chances of success at home. They also tended to be critical of the class structure of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and many included antiwar undertones. Silent and early sound films frequently ridiculed the aristocracy or monarchist ideals, choosing comedic plots that revolved around social misalliances often set in contemporary Austria.Footnote ¹⁹ Nevertheless, the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany did transform the ways in which German and Austrian films were received in Czechoslovakia.

The arguments regarding what constituted national film in Hungary also affected Austria's independent film industry. With the opening of Hungary's first sound studio in 1931, Trade Minister János Bud set in place a deceptively simple concept for the national cinema: productions by Hungarians in Hungarian for Hungarians.Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, István (Stefan) Székely, a leading director who had worked in Berlin, advocated a limited degree of internationalism for Hungarian cinema. As long as the source material stemmed from Hungarian literature or theater, films should be designed to find success abroad. They could be led by a foreign director and crew and should not necessarily even have to be made in the Hungarian language to be considered “Hungarian.” A move towards coproduction, particularly with Germany and Austria, was for Székely a healthy one. For Hungary's cinema to attain international attention, it had to grow beyond the cliché characters and stock situations that hitherto provincialized and limited Hungarian film. Nationalist cultural critics and government officials, however, insisted that a true Hungarian cinema required films based on history and folk tradition. They considered that Székely's cosmopolitanism and willingness to use international genres (romance, contemporary drama and comedy, mystery/detective film, etc.) constituted a threat to Hungarian culture and were “distant from the spirit of the Hungarian people.”Footnote ²¹

Sándor Jeszenszky, a member of the National Film Censorship Committee, crystallized this school of thought in an article in Hungary's leading Filmkultura publication in 1934, in which he insisted that to fulfill its cultural mission, film must “always [be] nationalist.”Footnote ²² Influenced by Nazi Germany, anti-Semitic and nationalist groups also attacked films with bourgeois urban or modern liberal attitudes as products of a “Judeo-Capitalist” concept of filmmaking, brought to Hungary by Jewish talent that had been trained abroad and that stood “outside the Hungarian spirit.”Footnote ²³ Nevertheless, the attempt to create a more sophisticated nationalist cinema focused on peasant life and folk themes remained largely unsuccessful, despite the cry to evoke a national difference in Hungarian cinema and move away from market-based filmmaking. While Nazi Germany did coproduce a few films with Hungary between 1933 and 1938, the multicultural Austrian Emigrantenfilm productions constituted, at least on a cinematic level, a means to enforce a non-Nazi Central European (read: not German but German-speaking) form of regionalism. Székely's internationalist school of Hungarian film helped created one of the coproduction venues for the Emigrantenfilm.Footnote ²⁴

Two former employees of the German Terra Company, Rudi Loewenthal and Erich Morawsky, opened the first of these independent Emigrantenfilm production houses, the Wiener-Film/Morawsky & Co., in Vienna in 1934. Fritz Schulz directed their first film, Salto in die Seligkeit (Salto Finds Happiness) (1934), which featured performances by Schulz, Felix Bressart, and Olly Gebauer. Loewenthal and Morawsky intended to follow the format of the original United Artists company in Hollywood, where the performers were essentially shareholders in their films.Footnote ²⁵ This innovative financial structure did not work for the follow-up film, Letzte Liebe (Last Love) (1935), also directed by Schulz, which was shut down in preproduction. A member of one of Austria's important business families, Julius Meinl II, eventually bankrolled the film by trading financial support for his Japanese wife's (Michiko Tanaka-Meinl) leading role in the film. His generosity attracted major names to the Letzte Liebe project—Hans Jaray, Albert Bassermann, Oskar Karlweis, and opera singer Richard Tauber. Although the expensive film managed a return on its production costs, the experience forced the producers to consider international investment, particularly Scandinavian partnerships, for future projects. The company never produced another film, and Morawsky emigrated to France in 1936.Footnote ²⁶ Director and actor Fritz Schulz made several independent and successful comedies before he fled to Switzerland in 1938 to work primarily in theater.

Despite its limited success, Wiener-Film/Morawsky opened the doors to what became a secondary tier of Austrian film production in the 1930s and which allowed for a “star system” of its own. The Emigrantenfilm stimulated significant careers for leading actors Hans Jaray and Hungarian-born Franziska Gaal, one of the important but nearly forgotten comedians in German-language film. Singer and dancer Rosy Barsony was able to continue working in independent productions until she was banned from performance in 1938. Hungarian star Szöke Sakall, German character actor Felix Bressart, and rotund, former UFA comedian Otto Wallburg all gained wider fame in Emigrantenfilm. While Sakall and Bressart ultimately transferred their characterizations to Hollywood film, Wallburg fled to Holland after 1938, where he survived underground until his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944. Another Emigrantenfilm staple was the non-Jewish actor Fritz Imhoff, who continued his work in Austrian film after the Anschluss and into the postwar period. Austrian female film pioneer Louise Kolm-Fleck and her husband and codirector, Jakob Fleck, returned to Vienna in 1933 after several years of productions in Berlin, where they had become known as the “film couple,” and created four independent Austrian projects (two of these were considered “Czech” films) in Prague. They were interned at Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps after 1938 but regained their freedom and emigrated to Shanghai with the help of German-Hollywood director William Dieterle. István (Stefan) Székely, whose importance in Hungarian and Emigrantenfilm briefly brought him a wider European reputation, and his wife, actress Irene Agay, moved to Hollywood after 1938 for careers in “B” movies. Producer Joseph Pasternak, who had been active in Germany before 1933, was head of Universal Studios in Austria, and responsible for Franziska Gaal's best independent efforts, moved to Hollywood in 1936 and invited director Henry Kosterlitz (who reinvented himself as Henry Koster) to join him. He served as producer of Koster's first Deanna Durbin film, Three Smart Girls (1936). Contact with Pasternak also helped Felix Joachimson (later Felix Jackson), who scripted most of the independent Austrian-Hungarian films and some Austrian-Italian coproductions, become an Oscar-nominated screenplay writer in Hollywood after 1937. Pasternak also attempted to relocate director Max Neufeld, but Neufeld declined and chose to continue his work in Vienna. After the Anschluss, he moved to Italy where he had minor success as a director.

Singende Jugend as Sociopolitical Film

One of the greatest successes among the independent films was the 1936 Singende Jugend (Orphan Boy of Vienna) (1936), an Austrian-Dutch coproduction. The film, which featured the Vienna Boys’ Choir, was directed by Max Neufeld, written by Hermann Heinz Ortner together with the director, and shot by Hans Theyer. Singende Jugend begins as a neorealistic Austrian melodrama about an orphaned boy Toni (Martin Lojda) who is living in poverty with his street-musician friend (Hans Olden). Toni dreams of joining the Boys’ Choir, and his friend convinces the priest-rector of the choir's school (Ferdinand Maierhofer) and a nun, Sister Maria (Julia Janssen), to accept the boy for training. During a summer trip to Tirol with the choir, Toni risks his life to defend Sister Maria, who has become a mother figure to him, from suspicion of theft. After nearly perishing in a river, Toni finds himself finally welcomed into a new home and identity. Singende Jugend may well have influenced the troubled-but-good orphan-boy theme in later Hollywood films, such as Norman Taurog's Boys Town (USA, 1938) and Austro-Hungarian expatriate Michael Curtiz's Angels with Dirty Faces (USA, 1938). It was also a bit like the nun and child-laden Sound of Music (USA, 1965) of its day, finding success with audiences in France, England, and Czechoslovakia.Footnote ²⁷

A close reading of the film reveals the qualities that make it the quintessential propagandistic entertainment film under Austrofascism, especially the cinematic vocabulary that supported the regime's ideology. The son of a Jewish father and a gentile mother, director Max Neufeld's sensitivity to political Catholicism to the point of generating its imagined “national front” imagery articulated the ambivalence that characterized the relationship between the politically conservative Austrian Jewish population and the Austrofascist regime.Footnote ²⁸ Although unable to participate in the religious basis of its value system, many Austrian Jews identified with the regime's anti-Nazism, anti-Socialism, imperial-nostalgic cosmopolitanism, and even monarchist tendencies. Yet, despite Jewish involvement with Emigrantenfilm, the productions did not feature Jewish characters. As in Hollywood at the time, Jewish actors played gentiles or suggested Jewish ethnic clichés in only very light doses.Footnote ²⁹

Singende Jugend is set in three general locales: the suffocating urban squalor of the backlot structures, which offer a glimpse of an impoverished Vienna without vegetation or sky; the palatial home of the Vienna Boys’ Choir—complete with its park-like surroundings that offer the audience visual and emotional relief from the urban scenes and suggest the expanse and grandeur of the lost empire—and the alpine paradise of the Tirol. In the last locale, the music is fused to the beauty of nature, and the depiction of the Grossglockner Highway promotes the regime's public works. The locale serves as a virtual vacation for the urban audience, especially the poor, who could not otherwise enjoy a country respite. This aspect of the film also anticipates the Heimatfilm of the early post-World War II era, in which such provincial settings provided relief from the stress of Allied occupation and urban rubble. Catholicism plays a central part in these last two segments of the film, most notably in the religious leadership of the school and the crucifixes that adorn most walls, to the depiction of a mass during the climax of the film.

The viewer is bound in sympathy to the central character, the orphan boy Toni, from the first shot. He is blond, attractive, and, except for his proletarian Viennese dialect, might be interchangeable with any of the young male actors who were portraying Hitler Youth in contemporary German films. Bearing a name that is a de-Germanized version of Anton, Toni lives with an unkempt and bitter cobbler who exploits and abuses him, punishing the boy for every wrong move. The cobbler's overwhelming interests are the money he fails to make and the wine he sends the boy to buy. While not quite an indictment of the capitalist system, the negative characterization of the cobbler underscores the destructive materialism and spiritual poverty of a working class that might well be associated with the Left and is fallow ground for Nazism.

It is music, particularly that of composers Mozart and Johann Strauss Jr., that bridges the romantic division of urban corruption from nature's purity. As an ironic and disturbing recollection of Austria's past cultural greatness, Toni, dressed in his tattered clothing, plays Strauss's On the Beautiful Blue Danube waltz on his harmonica as he wanders through the forlorn and dusty tenement passageways of an unrecognizable Vienna. Our introduction to the clean and natural beauty of the choir's school is also accompanied by the students’ vocalizing and serves as a corrective to Toni's dark world. A later performance by the choir in period costume against the beauty of the Tirolean landscape attempts to fulfill the “longing” the film wishes to create in the audience for a suitable set piece that would transcend the urban squalor and unite music and location into a nostalgic/kitsch romanticism framed by a benevolent Catholicism.

Toni provides an allegory for the reactionary image of postimperial Austria. As an abused and dejected orphan, he wanders through the claustrophobic streets of squalid working-class Vienna, unable to connect with anyone or anything. This sense of loss can be understood in terms of a broader relationship to the First Republic. Russell Berman relates that former Austrian president Kurt Waldheim elucidated his own such identification with the “infant republic,” which in 1918 “was set adrift, its mighty parent dead.” Berman sees Austria's attraction to fascism and the image of a strong leader as a response to these feelings of loss and persecution: “the son responds to this abandonment with melancholic resentment rather than with mourning.”Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, Toni's maltreatment at the hands of his guardian and street urchins is ended by the chance meeting with a beggar musician, Herr Blüml, a father figure who helps Toni overcome his resentment and to enjoy his unique talents despite poverty. Never directly associated with Catholicism in the film, Blüml appears to be the surviving cultural nature of an idealist/operetta Austria, singing about singing, disregarding his lack of money, and thus underscoring the value of the spiritualized Kulturstaat over materialism. His name is important not only for its association with nature and beauty, but in the diminutive form of the word for flower, it also prefigures the edelweiss Toni will later pick for his mother figure, Sister Maria. Blüml is thus destined to be united symbolically with her in a spiritual reconstruction of the family and in metaphor of a traditionalized Austrian nation for the sake of their “adopted” child, Toni.

Blüml takes the boy in, sings with him, feeds him, is taken aback when Toni thinks he will be beaten, but strokes his head in response. He also enforces cleanliness and a wry twist on the Nazi slogan “Kraft durch Freude” (Strength through Joy) with the more genteel and aesthetically pleasing formula: “Immer Sauber; durch Schönheit zur Kraft” (Cleanliness always; with beauty to strength). Like the Nazi propaganda that posited the Weimar Republic as “dirty,” so too did Austrofascism define the First Republic and its “Red Vienna”Footnote ³¹ as unclean. It also, however, considered National Socialism as part of the same corruption, hence the suturing of the “Immer Sauber” motto to a blatant corrective of the Nazi's slogan of empowerment. In comparison with the dirty and ill-mannered cobbler, Blüml keeps an impossibly neat hovel under a bridge, manages to have one good suit, and displays an endearingly clumsy attempt at being a gentleman. The absurdity of the postman who cannot locate Blüml's nonexistent address but automatically exchanges the imperial-era deferential greeting, “Habe die Ehre” (I have the honor….) with the homeless man indicates the attempted embourgeoisement of the (lumpen) proletariat.

The regime claimed that its corporatism could transcend class conflict, as could Catholicism and idealized notions of a national front. In this regard it is telling that in escaping the police, Blüml and Toni find refuge in a church where the Vienna Boys’ Choir is performing. The close shot of Toni's face indicates an epiphany—his sudden self-realization through identification with the other boys’ voices and a suggestion of spiritual relief from squalor and abuse through the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) of the church's aesthetic environment, ritual, and music. As the sequence ends, both characters instinctively cross themselves to clearly convey to the audience that even the lost, poor, and immoral (like the nation as a whole) will find a home in, and can become “good” again through a reconnection with, Catholicism.

Toni claims the cobbler repressed his desire to sing; and with a display of Toni's impressive natural talent, the film consciously reframes one of the most important National Socialist genres, the “genius film,” which offered a “biologistic celebration of Leader, Genius, or Personality.”Footnote ³² The fact that most German genius films are set in the eighteenth century suited Nazism's distorted affinity with the Enlightenment, since the decay of that period eventually generated the “aesthetic of genius.” As public attention shifted from the work of the Enlightenment to the deification of authors such as Goethe and Schiller, an “increasingly reactionary genius-religion” developed. Footnote ³³ The connection of this worship to romantic notions of the poet-leader transposed into a National Socialist messiah who would rescue the Volk from industrial mass society is strong.

Most often biographical dramas such as Herbert Maisch's Friedrich Schiller–Triumph eines Genies (Friedrich Schiller, Triumph of a Genius) (Germany, 1940) could be understood as both the story of a German “superman” and an indictment of the oppression of the spirit. Among its many ruptures is the “ambivalent critique of disciplinary tyranny … the necessary Other against which he [the genius] realizes himself.”Footnote ³⁴ For Nazi purposes, it becomes a “narcissistic mirror” for the masses in their identification with the German geniuses, who are praised both for their commonness and their roles as rebel heroes against forces that do not understand their greatness.Footnote ³⁵ The Nazi genius aesthetic nullifies such banalities as parents to fulfill the idea of an artist's self-birth through the creation of a masterwork.Footnote ³⁶ Toni, of course, fits this pattern initially, as a repressed and misunderstood orphan who ultimately escapes from an “Other” who would destroy him. But Neufeld's film eventually replaces the missing parents with generous and encouraging stand-ins, showing that Toni's talent only flourishes through familial love and Catholicism. The director subsequently presents us with an entire school of “Tonis,” who are shown to have doting parents and who are additionally encouraged and appreciated by the clerico-social system.

While such a characterization does provide a “narcissistic mirror” for the corporative-Catholic Austrians as the genius film does for the National Socialist Germans, and can even be interpreted as conveying a pseudobiological “Austrian nature,” the racist, pan-German element is replaced by localized nationalistic cultural imprint. This underscores the traditions of Austrian (or even Austro-Hungarian) artistic superiority in the common Austrian and indirectly praises a regime that, unlike one made up of leftists, capitalists, or Nazis, can comprehend and nurture such a cultural phenomenon. Instead of essaying the rebel hero, the Austrofascist cinematic take on the genius genre is to regularize the genius as mass and to utilize the regime as represented by the church and/or other positive apolitical figures, such as Blüml, as enabling agents. Toni sings because it is in his nature to do so, and Neufeld understands this natural flow of art representative of a healthy spiritual society, which would be stifled by materialism or atheistic political forces. The scene in which Blüml and Toni are presented in a Biedermeier-like familial tableau as the new “father” plays guitar at a table on which rests a large vase of flowers while Toni washes the dishes leads to the discovery that the new “son” can quickly learn a song by ear. It is followed by an exchange between the harmonious and encouraging Sister Maria and the choir school's conductor and music teacher Schmidt. Having just completed an opera that he has dedicated to the nun who has inspired it, Schmidt proudly shows his work to Sister Maria.

Blüml attempts to present Toni to the rector of the choir school but is firmly denied entrance by the prefect whose arrogance and very German pronunciation Blüml ridicules by addressing the man as “Herr Defekt.” After a rapid-fire comic exchange that suggests the correspondences between Hollywood's screwball comedy genre and Austrian cinema style of the era, the prefect suddenly shows deference when he is informed that Toni has actually been recommended by the “Komponist Blüml.” The humor, which plays on the Austrian obsession with titles, academics, and musicians, even under a regime that enforces this, also reveals the specific cinematic quality of Blüml to the Austrian and Central European audience. He is a character of the Viennese Film genre created by Walter Reisch and Willi Forst, which in its stylized orchestration of melodrama, classical music, and romantic setting, focuses on the artist (the first having been Franz Schubert in Leise flehen meine Lieder [Unfinished Symphony] [1933]) and self-sacrifice. This genre had helped create a national-historical myth for Austrian audiences in the early 1930s, and the utilization of its ideology across Austrian cinema enforces the aesthetic impulse as a specific national quality. Indeed, Toni is himself an embryonic Viennese Film character in shunning his possible materialistic life with the cobbler or any other possible future for music and the church. For this sacrifice, he gains the riches of identity, home, and community.

Emigrantenfilm also managed to assail the style and content of Nazi German filmmaking through parody and subversion of visual tropes associated with German film at the time. The introductory action at the choir's palatial school is a parodic revision of cinematic Hitler Youth imagery. The first look at the grounds features a uniformed marching troop of boys, but they are singing operetta, rather than martial music, and are dressed in the quaint nineteenth-century imperial sailor-type uniforms. They are greeted by their leader, Sister Maria, who is shot from below as she observes their parade from a balcony of Schloss Wilhelminenberg in a parody of famous Riefenstahlian images that deified Hitler's greeting of the masses in Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) (1935). As the camera pans slowly across the columns behind the lone figure on the terrace, the boys are marched by and ordered to stand at attention below the balcony. Rather than giving a fascist salute, Sister Maria happily waves to them and later interacts with the boys on an encouraging and nearly equal basis. Chastised by the stuffy and overtly Reichshochdeutsch (Nazi High German) lecturing Herr Brunner for undermining pedagogical authority by participating in the boy's games, Sister Maria informs him about the importance of identification and communication: “Whoever wants to raise youth, must also feel young.”

The progressive and humanistic female teacher who disturbs masculine order and personalizes her relationship with the students reframes Austrian director Leontine Sagan's earlier German film Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform) (1931), which the Nazi regime eventually banned for both its lesbian undertones as well as for its critical statements on child-rearing and authority. Sagan's film, which takes place in an aristocratic girl's boarding school, parodies Prussian military values and hierarchical male social constructs. The result not only disparages the military values in German and Austrian culture, but it also criticizes the displacement of women in that society, their lack of identity, and their problematic self-definition along male norms. The core of the film's message is the humanist nonconformism of the teacher Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck), who rejects the notion of being a male authority figure to her female charges.

Like Bernburg, who becomes a mother substitute to the lonely and impoverished girl Manuela, Sister Maria promises to be Toni's special mother; although she also asks him to accept that she loves all her “children.” While the relationship in the Sagan film leads to a favoritism that entitles Manuela, suggests lesbianism, and disrupts tradition, Maria's focus on Toni becomes a mother-son relationship. The couching of that relationship in a framework of Catholicism has the opposite effect of Fräulein von Bernburg's efforts. Rather, that relationship supports Toni's adjustment to the mass society of the school, teaches him to share, and makes him part of an extended family unit. There is also a quasiprogressive gender role message in Singende Jugend that paratextualizes Sagan's antimilitarist metaphor: boys in the service of musical art framed by Christian faith can only be preferable to girls suppressing their nature by emulating militarily repressed males.Footnote ³⁷

The Catholic Austrian regime's value system is elaborated as Toni witnesses the choirboys playing a rowdy game of soccer. They are not weak or decadent, as German propaganda would have it, but they balance their creative and physical abilities. Toni is then introduced to the rector, a kindly father-figure priest, who also speaks with an Austrian accent and immediately recognizes Toni's musical ability, while the more German Herr Brunner, who had earlier criticized Sister Maria, does not. The new student is immediately sent to the showers and issued a uniform, a response perhaps to the emphasis of the cleanliness of young male party members in Triumph des Willens and in Hitler Youth films. Given the church-like surroundings, the washing clean of a street urchin also equates to a baptism into a new Catholic-sponsored identity.

Unlike the German genius film, both parental figures continue to have strong presence in Toni's life throughout the film: Sister Maria takes pity on Toni but also scolds him when he is jealous of the other boys whose mothers visit bearing gifts. Nevertheless, she asks one of the boys to donate his new harmonica to Toni so that he will not be left out. Understanding Blüml's sadness at being separated from his new son, the rector arranges for Blüml to work as a handyman at the school so he can be useful and close to Toni. While this image of the church remedying unemployment is pure narrative contrivance, its symbolism supports the anticapitalist and familial elements of the corporative state. Here, the focus shifts away from the social problem itself (impoverishment) to the symptoms (emotional and social) that can be “resolved” through the regime's ideological blend of profamilialism and faith. The reconstitution of the family unit and its avoidance of political conflict, rather than the escape from family into the political leadership cadre (as in the 1933 Hitlerjunge Quex: Ein Film vom Opfergeist der deutschen Jugend [Our Flags Lead Us Forward]), differentiate the trajectory of the Austrofascist cinematic bildungsroman from its National Socialist counterpart.

The film's final concert in Tirol fuses the image of a wagonload of happy, healthy singing boys with the pride of the regime's public work accomplishment, the Grossglockner Highway, producing a propaganda documentary that espouses a “progressive” ideology to make the rural idyll accessible to all Austrians. Further, while dressed in eighteenth-century costumes with the Alps as backdrop, the choirboys perform Mozart's Bastiene und Bastienne; and this scene synthesizes high art, imperial nostalgia, and national landscape imagery into one memorable cultural tableau.Footnote ³⁸ This is enforced by the large appreciative mass of spectators, which encourages cinema audience identification with the film in the same way that National Socialist propaganda films featuring mass ritual (Triumph des Willens) and variety films with an audience as part of its narrative, such as Wunschkonzert (Request Concert) (1940), function.

Both the natural genius child and virginal good woman are associated with the Alpine edelweiss flower, which the Hollywood Heimatfilm imitation of the Sound of Music would so indelibly use as symbol for an idyllic, small and “pure” Austria nearly three decades later.Footnote ³⁹ Sister Maria's confession that she is fond of edelweiss sends Toni to dangerous heights on the Grossglockner, where he gathers a bouquet for his new mother figure. This transcendence of urban life through a mountainous idyll also represents antimodernist longings, as in any Bergfilm (mountain film). Nevertheless, the genre often included modern technological aspects, particularly regarding modes of transportation and mountain rescue that contrasted with the mystic romance of nature.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Singende Jugend, the journey into the Alpine landscape and Toni's further mountain exploration are made possible by the new highway and the concept of easily motorized vacations for the masses, accomplished by the efforts of the regime.Footnote ⁴¹

The melodramatic conflict of the film concerns a one-thousand-schilling note that has gone missing while Sister Maria has been balancing the concert books. The music teacher Schmidt had interrupted her accounting work and remarked that just one of the many bills she put into the safe would help him to have his composition transcribed so that he can send it to the Vienna State Opera, where it has been requested. When the rector questions Sister Maria, she does not mention her suspicions regarding Schmidt, who later informed her that a friend had suddenly loaned him money so he could have his manuscript duplicated. Toni, who was seen climbing into Sister Maria's window with a bouquet of edelweiss, is accused when the other boys claim he had admitted to taking something from her room (a picture of her) but would not show it to them. The rector and Blüml dismiss this accusation, but Toni is heartbroken that Sister Maria has fallen under suspicion of theft and runs off to the mountains hoping to deflect this blame by refusing to say what he had taken. As the others come to suspect him, Toni temporarily transcends the corruption of money and the modern world in the freedom of the mountains. If Sister Maria is constructed as a madonna, then at this point, her “adopted” son Toni suggests a Christ figure, as he falls into a river and nearly dies in his desire to sacrifice himself to save her.

Although the missing bill is found among the pages of the music Schmidt had brought into Maria's room during her bookkeeping, the half-drowned Toni, saved by his father figure, Blüml, hovers between life and death. The film moves into a long sequence of intercuts between Maria's vigil at Toni's bedside and an outdoor mass, which not only heightens the tension regarding Toni's survival, but also literally serves Mass to an audience and encourages their reception to prayer. When the doctor pointedly informs Maria that she “has done something superhuman,” the concept of the Nietszchean Übermensch omnipresent in Nazi culture at the time is here linked to Christian faith rather than racist paganism. Toni awakes as the Mass continues, and the concluding shot of the sequence is of a crucifix.

The coda of the film is the choirboys’ departure for concerts in America. Toni now resolutely accepted by his new mass family is praised as “my little hero” by Sister Maria, who remains behind, while Blüml hitches a ride in the trunk of the open air bus taking the boys across Germany to Hamburg to board a ship bound for New York. This path suggests that Austria might well transcend Nazi Germany to reconnect with and promote Austria's cultural essence to the powerful and perhaps sympathetic world abroad.

Press Reception

The state cinema publication, Der gute Film, awarded Singende Jugend a Category I rating and marketed it with a still photograph from the film on the issue's cover. While praising the fine acting, “clean and attractive camerawork,” and the performances of the choir, Der gute Film criticized the not always convincing action and the rather ineffectual role of the rector, “hoping” that real rectors are better pedagogues than the one portrayed in this film. While the review appreciates the film's “ethical-religious values,” it has no illusions about its lack of sophistication. The writer clearly suggests that the film's ideological elements succeed because of its “unpretentious-naïve” (anspruchslos-naïve) construction and claims they would be most effective on an “unsophisticated audience” (einfache Zuschauer).Footnote ⁴² This somewhat critical stance against a film supportive of the regime demonstrates that the clerico-authoritarian Austrian corporatist state was in no way comparable to totalitarian Nazism in terms of its control of the media.

The government's Institute for Film Culture was clearly concerned about popular and artistic reception of its propaganda. The fact that film studios had not been nationalized and placed under government control, as in Nazi Germany, allowed for relative artistic freedom. While the institute's publication made its opinions known with its rating system, Der gute Film allowed its reviewers to be honest and artistically critical even of films that strongly supported the values of the establishment. This was obviously done to reassure filmmakers and the popular readership that even as state propaganda, Der gute Film was an intelligent and fair publication. Ironically, patriotic film critics from long-established daily newspapers allowed themselves to be far more jingoistic and far less critical for the sake of promoting the nation. Their reviews underscore and praise the shrewd catalogue of cultural-emotional cinematic vocabulary in the film that enforces the national imaginary.

Publicity for the release of Singende Jugend began with Cardinal Innitzer's visit to Vienna's Tobis-Sascha studio. With the Vienna premiere scheduled for 9 April 1936, most of the daily newspapers reported an identical press release two days earlier regarding Cardinal Innitzer's viewing of excerpts from the film. He is reported to have shown “interest” and “praised” what he saw, especially the performances of the Vienna Boys’ Choir. The release further remarks that most of the central actors are “notable names” from the Burgtheater and other Viennese stages.Footnote ⁴³

On 12 April 1936, The Neue Freie Presse called Singende Jugend “a heimatlicher film based in realism that is laced with music and joy” and lauded Max Neufeld for his confident direction. The premiere is reported to have been a success, filled with “the warmth that the film itself embodies.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The same day, the review in the Neues Wiener Tageblatt introduced the film by reducing it to a set of cultural codes: “A film with the Vienna Boys’ Choir, a film with popular Viennese actors, a Viennese film.” The reviewer rejects anything but major success for this film simply because of the presence of the choir, which has “conquered the world” with its tours. The film's title is considered appropriate for the film because the “heartfelt joyous” song of these “young throats” echoes across the images and scenes, particularly in the church, on the stage, and in the “glorious Austrian mountain world, as edelweiss is being picked, in happy images of youth.” The review itself frames the film by citing several cultural-political elements of the Austrofascist ideology: the Catholic Church, Viennese high art, and Alpine purity. Only secondarily does the reviewer consider the value of the film, not as cinema art but as “propaganda in the best way” (im besten Sinne) for “our Heimat, our glorious Alpine landscape, for our Vienna, and for our splendid warm-hearted Austrian people.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The choice of using the term “österreichische Menschen,” which suggests ethnicity as opposed to the word Österreicher (citizens of Austria), implies the reviewer's unspoken anti-German stance and a nationalistic belief in an Austrian nation (as opposed to being part of the German nation) that had emerged with Dollfuss but was only partially promoted by the regime. The reviewer continues: “Propaganda is being made here, in that this land and its population are shown in beautifully chosen scenes and types.” Martin Lojda as Toni receives the greatest praise of all the actors. As a member of the egalitarian Vienna Boys’ Choir, he was not given star billing in the original program, but his name soon became well known.Footnote ⁴⁶ The reviewers also explicitly use Singende Jugend to decouple Austrian film culture from its German counterpart, especially given the Austrian film industry's concessions to Germany's racial and distribution laws, the imitation Viennese films being made in Berlin, and the growing coproductions between Austria and Nazi Germany. Lojda is hailed as “a discovery for film, for the good, genuine Austrian film, which already has a great tradition,” and what Neufeld's direction gives the young actor is “finely and psychologically observed.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The Neues Wiener Journal's review four days later was no less enthusiastic. It opened its evaluation with a patriotic frame that encouraged Austria's independent and Emigrantenfilm production: “This beautiful film, produced in Vienna, shows that even without large finances, one can create an effective film, if one has a solid idea and the cast and crew [Mitwirkende] approach their work with love and expertise.” Later the review praised Neufeld for having created the film with “great love” and for including the “glorious Alpine world” as a backdrop. The critic considered that such an auspicious debut as Lojda's would have already gained him a star contract in Hollywood and that one should hope that he will also be duly appreciated “by us.”Footnote ⁴⁸