9 - Brigitte Helm and Germany’s Star System in the 1920s and 1930s

Summary

BRIGITTE HELM, THE “EUROPEAN ÜBERVAMP” of the late 1920s and early 1930s, is all but forgotten today. Although her life and films are depicted by Daniel Semler and she is included in Friedemann Beyer's recent anthology of Ufa actors, she is excluded from several contemporary accounts that investigate the German star system. Helm made her cinematic debut in a leading role as vamp and virgin in Fritz Lang's famous Metropolis (1927), a double role for which she was mostly praised in the press of the time. However, as Tim Bergfelder points out, Helm has been “virtually obliterated by the retrospective reception of Metropolis and its director,” and she is barely mentioned in contemporary works on the film. In contrast to the critical interest garnered by Metropolis, scholars have paid little attention to Helm's other films, which is an astounding oversight, given her continuous popularity during her time with Ufa (1925–35). In addition to Bergfelder's work, the scholarship of Andrea Böhm, Robert Müller, and Valerie Weinstein constitutes significant exceptions to the dearth of critical examinations of Helm's career. While these scholars emphasize the continuity of the actress's vamp image, they also argue that her career was revived with the comedy Die Gräfin von Monte Christo (The Countess of Monte Christo, 1932), and that her femme fatale image was incompatible with Nazi views. As I show elsewhere, Die Gräfin was only somewhat successful at reinventing Helm beyond her vamp image; though this reinvention worked narratively, the gestural and behavioral codification of Helm's performance remained that of a femme fatale. In contrast to Böhm, Müller, Bergfelder, and Weinstein, who consider only a select few of Helm's films and offer no interpretation of the bulk of her work produced between 1933 and 1935, in this essay I focus on the films produced during this time span and argue that Helm's image was changed to reflect Nazi ideology. My analysis of Die schönen Tage in Aranjuez (The Beautiful Days in Aranjuez, 1933), Inge und die Millionen (Inge and the Millions, 1933), Gold (1934), Die Insel (The Island, 1934), and Ein idealer Gatte (An Ideal Husband, 1935) reveals Ufa's continuous though not always similarly intense efforts to remodel Helm's image.