7 - Hitler's Voice: Media and Politics of Embodiment

Summary

I. Introduction

Roberto Rossellini's 1948 film Germany, Year Zero chronicles 12-year-old Edmund Köhler as he attempts to navigate the decimated city of Berlin, its rubble and black markets, lingering Nazi ideologues and sexual predators. In the first half of the film, Edmund runs into his former schoolteacher and still fervent Nazi, Herr Henning, who after some inappropriate touching gives the boy a gramophone record of a speech by Adolf Hitler and instructs him to sell it to the Allies. Equipped with a portable record player in a suitcase, we watch the boy and two other children traverse the rubble of the city and enter the infamous Reichskanzlei. Here British soldiers take photographs of the spot where, as one explains, “they burnt the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun” (26:30). After running up the front stairs to the building's entrance, the camera cuts inside to show Edmund and his companion descending an interior staircase to meet two Allied soldiers who are there to inspect and possibly purchase the recording. As Edmund drops the needle of the portable player, Hitler begins mid-sentence a 1943 speech delivered at Berlin's Sportpalast, in which he explains that he is proud to rule “not only in happy times, but especially in hard ones.”

Resounding from within the literal ruins of the empire he claims to lead, and from the same space in which he committed suicide, Hitler's plea for listeners to “stick it out” is both ironic and unnerving. The irony only intensifies as the camera cuts back outside to pan across the destroyed facades of countless buildings. In the next shot, a man and his son stop short; presumably they hear the recorded voice emanating from inside. The man's reaction remains ambiguous: his sudden pause implies fear, a freeze response, while the fact that he and his child look upward for the offscreen voice invests it with an authoritarian, or even divine status—it is a voice one expects to hear from on high. The scene testifies to the perceived danger of the Führer's disembodied voice, with the Allied soldiers ultimately agreeing to purchase the recording for 200 DM in order to remove it from circulation.

II. Screaming as Self-Effacement

Rossellini's juxtaposition of ruins and the voice resonates productively with accounts of Hitler's speaking that emphasize the violence exerted by the voice upon itself, described as a vocal self-effacement through con-tinuous overexertion.