An Archive of Exile

A Fresh Perspective on a Canonical Critic

Lotte Eisner’s review of Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform, Leontine Sagan, 1931) hails it as a triumph of communal production. Eisner attributes Mädchen’s formal perfection to collective work and the “will to togetherness” of creative supervisor Carl Froelich and his “helpers” (1931). Mädchen’s cooperative production model was innovative and therefore noteworthy. Yet, if you read Eisner’s review—as I once did—with the soon emergent Nazi film industry in mind, Eisner’s rhetoric has troubling resonances. Eisner’s praise of artistic collectivity and “will,” and her simultaneous positioning of Carl Froelich as a leader, foreshadow the Third Reich construct of the “artistic personality”—a creative genius, whose aesthetic leadership unites, embodies, and elevates the national collective.1 I hadn’t thought about Eisner’s Mädchen review, or the consternation it caused me, for a long time, until I was reading Naomi DeCelles’s Recollecting Lotte Eisner: Cinema, Exile, and the Archive. Several passages in this excellent book highlight Eisner’s longstanding intellectual engagement with questions around film production as a collective endeavor and the implications of such collectivity on film aesthetics and historiography. These passages both reminded me of and gave me additional context for the Mädchen review: While still resonant with other German film criticism of the 1930s, Eisner’s emphasis on the collective and the dialectic between leadership and helpers also reflects her own ongoing interest in “filmmaking teams,” which influenced both her writing and curatorial practices, and would later evolve into scholarly differences between herself and French auteur theorists (DeCelles, 91–92). DeCelles’s insights, like those that encouraged me to rethink my interpretation of Eisner’s Mädchen review, led to several such “Aha!” moments while I was reading Recollecting Lotte Eisner. My eye-opening experience illustrates how DeCelles’s monograph should motivate film scholars to take a fresh look at Eisner’s work and provides us essential information and context for doing so.

Lotte Eisner’s writings, her decades as a curator at the Cinématheque Française, and her mentorship of emerging German filmmakers in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s helped shape the narrative of twentieth-century German film history. Eisner’s The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt anchors any respectable bibliography on Weimar cinema (Germany 1918–1933) and her monographs on F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang are cited frequently. Despite Eisner’s reliable presence in our footnotes, however, scholars frequently gloss over her most important intellectual interventions and have ignored many of her publications. Moreover, because Eisner was at the vanguard of the emerging discipline of film studies, when later scholars engage her writings, it is often to show just how far we have advanced beyond her purportedly outmoded ideas and methods. Additionally, the work of other (male) Jewish film critics who fled Nazi Germany, such as Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balász, and Siegfried Kracauer, and of her boss at the Cinématheque Française, Henri Langlois, has overshadowed Eisner’s contributions. DeCelles’s important and well-written intellectual history begins to address the scholarly imbalance that has left Eisner’s contributions in the shadow of her peers’. Drawing on rich archival sources and feminist and queer historiography, DeCelles explains currents in and implications of Eisner’s work and factors that have obscured them. In doing so, she reclaims the generative potential of Eisner’s thought.

A Career Marked by Continuities and Dislocations

DeCelles traces Eisner’s intellectual development from her dissertation, through her years as a journalist in Berlin, to her work in exile in Paris as archivist, author, mentor, and perceived representative of a Weimar film culture destroyed by the Nazis. Situating Eisner’s writings historically and in relation to relevant critical debates, DeCelles highlights diverse areas of interest as well as stylistic and thematic consistencies. By emphasizing patterns and connections across Eisner’s work, as well as discontinuities and lacunae, DeCelles teases out Eisner’s most significant methodological, historiographic, and aesthetic interventions and offers a sophisticated and multi-faceted analysis of how and why Eisner’s insights have slipped from view.

Eisner trained as an art historian, and DeCelles shows how that training influenced her film criticism. Eisner’s dissertation, “The Development of Composition in Greek Vase Paintings,” responds to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about the influence of socio-historical developments on artistic style and the appropriate role of normative taste in the writing of art history. Concerned more with periodization than authorship, Eisner’s dissertation focuses on the evolution of composition, expression, and mood. DeCelles underscores various resonances between the dissertation and Eisner’s later work, including attention to cultural, historical, and artistic influences, analysis of visual composition, focus on the development of style and mood, and a narrative voice characterized by erudition and elegant rhetoric. In drawing out these parallels, DeCelles emphasizes Eisner’s distinct interventions and puts them in conversation with her contemporaries. For example, DeCelles contrasts Eisner’s more visually oriented, art historical interpretations of Weimar film with her rival Kracauer’s predominantly narrative and sociological approach. She reads Eisner’s approach to authorship, which emphasizes production context and historical influences, both as continuous with her art historical work and as response to the auteur theories by the younger French men at the Cahiers du Cinéma, who failed to recognize her as a peer.

Because I have spent countless hours immersed in microforms of the Film Kurier—the German film industry’s most widely circulated trade paper in the interwar period—I particularly appreciated the chapter and appendix on Eisner’s employment there between 1927–1933. DeCelles situates Eisner’s film journalism within her longer career trajectory and the cultural landscape of Weimar Germany, combining detailed historical background, qualitative and quantitative analysis of Eisner’s articles, and careful close readings of representative documents. DeCelles identifies several of Eisner’s pseudonyms and bylines and analyzes patterns across her various journalistic identities. DeCelles attributes a unique voice and set of cultural and aesthetic concerns to each byline and puts them in dialogue with Eisner’s larger corpus and broader conversations in Weimar film culture. As DeCelles details, “Dr. L.H. Eisner” wields academic credentials to command respect for their expertise on high culture or scientific developments. “Flapper,” by contrast, writes in a more jocular, feminine-identified style, which nevertheless expresses misogyny and class snobbery similarly to Eisner’s other writing. DeCelles reveals how Eisner’s prolific theater, culture, and film journalism offers valuable insights on topics from film production to mass culture and the male gaze. DeCelles’s close readings of representative texts demonstrate the relevance of Eisner’s engagement with Weimar cinema discourses for contemporary film scholars. Readers interested in the postwar period, French film theory, and the development of institutional film studies will find DeCelles’s analysis of Eisner’s later contributions to prominent French film journals equally compelling.

A “gleaner’s historiography”

DeCelles draws on theories about the production of marginalized histories from feminist and queer historiography, archival studies, and critical race and postcolonial studies to help conceptualize the effects of gender, exile, and dislocation on Eisner’s archival practice. Eisner’s archival work, DeCelles argues, does not conform to normative, purportedly rational and scientific, archival practices. Instead, Eisner’s methods, resulting collection, and narratives about it feel deeply personal. DeCelles outlines carefully how Eisner’s methods and emotional investment resemble queer archival practices theorized by Ann Cvetkovich, which express and generate affect and bear traces of trauma and loss (95). DeCelles offers numerous examples from Eisner’s correspondence and publications to illustrate how for Eisner, and often the filmmakers whose stories and work she labored to salvage, the traces of the Weimar film industry were not the only losses to be reckoned with. They also struggled with the loss and trauma of exile, displacement, World War II, and the Holocaust. Supplementing her thorough research and careful analyses with insights from Cvetkovich, Marika Cifor, Sara Ahmed, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Saidiya Hartman, and others about the archives, affects, and discourses of marginalized communities, DeCelles reveals how Eisner’s archival practices and her sometimes snarky or gossipy writing express trauma and disruptive affect, bear witness, salvage traces, create community, and assert her own position and status. In short, Eisner’s work, despite her sporadic misogyny and disavowals of feminism, makes more sense once we view it alongside the archival practices of marginalized and traumatized communities, as described by feminist and queer theorists. Such queer and feminist scholarship enables DeCelles to decode the trauma and affect undergirding Eisner’s efforts to salvage Weimar’s cinema culture, efforts that others have dismissed in gendered terms as too personal and unserious (104). This critical move not only enhances our understanding of Eisner and the Weimar film archive more broadly, but also, like Kerry Wallach’s Passing Illusions, demonstrates effectively that queer feminist theories and methods have much to offer German-Jewish studies.

Throughout Recollecting Lotte Eisner, DeCelles considers gender, class, and ethnicity as significant factors in Eisner’s lived experience, intellectual development, and reception. DeCelles parses Eisner’s accounts of her upper middle-class, secular Jewish background, and explains how contemporary expectations of girls and women and Eisner’s experiences of gender shaped her educational and career trajectory. DeCelles suggests that Eisner’s intellectual ambitions and self-perception were at odds with normative femininity and argues that such tensions led to repeated ambivalent expressions of misogyny in her work. She also addresses how Eisner’s investments in aesthetics and high culture, her snobbery, and a certain discomfort with acknowledging and managing her own financial distress were characteristic of her class and ethnic background. Throughout the book DeCelles wrestles with the paradox that, as an educated, upper middle-class German-Jewish woman in the early and mid- twentieth century, Eisner occupied an unstable social position that was alternately privileged and precarious. DeCelles tracks this privilege and precarity across Eisner’s life, career, experiences in exile, and interpersonal relationships. DeCelles’s analysis of Eisner’s time in Paris, Henri Langois’s influence, and her behind-the-scenes accomplishments on his behalf is emblematic of such tensions. DeCelles complicates this picture further, however, by arguing not only that Eisner’s positionality hid her accomplishments in the shadow of others, but also that the stylistic and narrative features of Eisner’s own writing and self-presentation placed her outside the mainstream of film theory and historiography, exacerbating the structural, institutional, and interpersonal factors that have contributed to her underrecognition.

DeCelles’s own version of feminist, queer historiography neither writes a parallel history of an ignored woman nor reifies the conventional historical narrative by shoehorning Eisner’s work into established intellectual genealogies. Instead, DeCelles deploys a “gleaner’s historiography,” which looks for seeds dropped in the fields and at the margins that still have generative potential (158–59). Exploring that potential across decades of Eisner’s work, DeCelles unveils a complex web of experience, affect, intellectual and social connections, blind spots, lacunae, and opportunities for future research. By recollecting and reflecting on Eisner, who figures as both central and marginal to German film history, DeCelles demonstrates how we can change the way we do German film historiography. She advocates for feminist and queer historiographical methods, which acknowledge the gaps, investigate the paths taken, the limitations posed on them, and recuperate some of the potential in paths not yet explored.

DeCelles’s engagement with Eisner’s corpus and feminist and queer historiography is productive and satisfying. Her study of Eisner demonstrates well how feminist and queer theories of the archive, trauma, affect, and loss make their work particularly salient for the study of German-Jewish exile from Nazi Germany. Such use of queer historiography is not dependent on the subject’s gender or sexual identification. Hence my one quibble with DeCelles’s otherwise excellent work: I wince each time DeCelles’s calls Eisner’s negative attitudes toward traditional gender roles and normative femininity “gender dysphoria.” DeCelles’s otherwise historically contextualized analysis is much more convincing than her deployment of this anachronistic and unnecessary diagnosis.2 Referencing Harriet Pass Friedenreich’s work, DeCelles finds echoes of Eisner’s narrative in the memoirs of other Central European Jewish university women of her generation, many of whom experienced girlhood as limiting and sometimes wished to have been born boys (25). Scholars of gender, sexuality, and gender nonconformity in early twentieth-century Germany, such as Katie Sutton, offer historically more relevant interpretive frameworks than the DSM for such feelings and identifications (2011, 2019). To use queer methods, however, DeCelles doesn’t need to establish whether Eisner might have identified as LGBTQ+. A woman who earned a Ph.D. in 1924, who rejected marriage and family in favor of a male-dominated career path, and who spent much of her life in exile, Eisner experienced space, time, gender, and sexuality nonnormatively. Her life narrative manifests “queerness,” as Jack Halberstam encourages us to conceive of it, “as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” (1).

DeCelles reminds German film scholars of Eisner’s pivotal role in the creation of our archive, the figures and forces that have shaped our disciplinary narrative, and the need to “recollect” Eisner into it. Although I have consulted and cited Eisner many times, Recollecting Lotte Eisner showed me how much more remains to be learned from her. DeCelles’s reframing of Eisner’s contributions, her relative intellectual marginalization, and her experiences of gender and exile inspire me to read Eisner again, this time more reparatively, and to look for the unharvested seeds of future projects.

Valerie Weinstein is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Niehoff Professor in Film and Media Studies, and affiliate faculty in German Studies and Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany (University of Indiana Press, 2019), numerous articles and book chapters, and co-editor of Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema (Berghahn Books, 2021) and Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema 1928–1936 (Camden House, 2016).

Notes

1. 1. For more on Third Reich film aesthetics, the artistic personality, and Carl Froelich, a prominent director who became head of the Reichsfilmkammer (Reich Film Chamber) in 1939, see Carter, 2004.

2. 2. “Gender dysphoria” is the diagnosis that replaced “gender identity disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM) in 2013. It establishes criteria for treating the significant psychological harm some trans people experience because of the discrepancy between their gender identity and the gender they were assigned at birth.

Works Cited

1. American Psychiatric Association, ed. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing.
2. Carter, Erica. 2004. Dietrich’s Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film. London: British Film Institute.
3. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.
4. DeCelles, Naomi. 2022. Recollecting Lotte Eisner: Cinema, Exile, and the Archive. Berkeley: University of California Press.
5. Eisner, Lotte. 1969. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Trans. Roger Greaves. Berkeley: University of California Press.
6. Eisner, Lotte. 1976. Fritz Lang. Trans. Gertrud Mander. London: Secker and Warburg.
7. Eisner, Lotte. 1973. Murnau. Trans. Gertrud Mander. Berkeley: University of California Press.
8. Eisner, Lotte H. 1931. Review of Mädchen in Uniform. Film Kurier, November 28, 1931.
9. Friedenreich, Harriet Pass. 2002. Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
10. Halberstam, Judith [Jack]. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.
11. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1947. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
12. Sutton, Katie. 2011. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books.
13. Sutton, Katie. 2019. Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World 1890s–1930s. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
14. Wallach, Kerry. 2017. Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Cinema. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press