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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
PhD Thesis Project - Mythos ex Machina: Motor Sport as an Icon of Modernity in the Popular Culture of Nazi Germany
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Uwe Day
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PhD Thesis Project - Mythos ex Machina: Motor Sport as an Icon of Modernity in the Popular Culture of Nazi Germany
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MYTHOS EX MACHINA: MOTOR SPORT AS AN ICON OF MODERNITY IN
THE POPULAR CULTURE OF NAZI GERMANY
Uwe Day / PhD Thesis Project
Universität Bremen




  Up to now there have been few attempts to look at motor sport in Nazi Germany from
the angle of the contemporary mass culture and mass media in the Third Reich. This is
surprising because on the one hand Jeffrey Herf’s studies about “Reactionary
Modernism” have led to a new paradigm, in which the historical evaluations of fascist
Germany emphasize the Nazi enthusiasm about modern technologies and their engage-
ment for a progressive public life style with high standards of cultural consumption
and modern mass culture. This was directly influenced by the cultural model USA, but
also tightly connected to reactionary folkloristic, cultural, and ideological values or tra-
ditional strains of ideology like “blood and soil” or pride about home and nation in the
romantic and racist terms of Heimatverbundenheit, Volk, or Deutschtum. On the other
hand, in the last ten years motorcar racing has been remarkably successful in the mass
media, particularly as a result of the popularity of the formula-one stars like Michael
Schuhmacher or the attraction of the competition between Ferrari cars and the so-
called “Silver Arrows” of Mercedes-Benz. Especially in Germany, the upswing of
Formula One racing has revitalized memories of the “glorious era” of the Silver Arrows
in the 1930s and the German racing stars of that period like Bernd Rosemeyer, Rudolf
Caracciola, and Hans Stuck.
  However, most of the illustrated books and documentary films today ignore the con-
nections to the Nazi regime and the function of the motorcar racing as an instrument of
propaganda and an effective event of popular culture and mass entertainment. The cult
of motor sport as something constructed in and by the media in the mid-1930’s, can open
a historical window into the inner life of mass culture in Nazi Germany for us. It shows
the divided mentality of the German people, which Hans-Dieter Schäfer called
Gespaltenes Bewußtsein1 (split consciousness). This means a kind of multiple existence
caught in the tension between the daily ideological requirements of the regime, people’s
own national yearnings and their individual desires for a life in privacy and personal hap-
piness. It refers to an existence between technological progress, popular heroism, cultur-
al consumption, modern life, mass motorization and again reactionary attitudes, uni-
formed Nazi aesthetic and its permanent acclamation of pre-modern elements.
  The images of the victorious racing drivers and triumphant German technology came
together to form a powerful mental construct that reinforced national self-confidence.
Bernd Rosemeyer or Rudolf Caracciola, the drivers from the German automotive com-
panies Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz, became modern masculine heroes. Behind the
steering wheels of fast and powerful machines, they represented a strong, modern, and
capable industrial nation, which – in the discourse of the time – as an organically
grown and socially classless community of German workers (Volksgemeinschaft,

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                                   MYTHOS EX MACHINA: MOTOR SPORT AS AN ICON OF MODERNITY

Werkmänner) never lost its roots to tradition, history and the virtues of workmanship
and handmade, high-quality-products (Deutsche Wertarbeit). The “motor battles”
(Motorenschlachten) at the Avus in Berlin and the Nürburgring were more popular
than the usual mass party rallies of the Nazis in Nuremberg or other cities. In compari-
son to the stiff rituals there, the marching uniformed, disciplined bodies and the ideo-
logically unequivocal acclamation of the total hegemony of one party, car races were a
demonstration of the joy of life. They manifested the so-called Volksgemeinschaft as a
national community of joy and fun. Motor sport as a mass media construct moreover
shows the effective strategy of the Nazis and the significance of modernity.
   Sound film was the most effective mass medium to present the dynamics of racing
sport. International races and trials in setting up new speed records already belonged to
the standard topics in the newsreels of the Weimar republic. In the Third Reich,
German drivers drove their foreign rivals from the pole position and the screens. Now
the Wochenschau and Kulturfilm presented the triumphs of German drivers over
Italian, French, or American fighters as a success story. The films were produced to pro-
claim the powerful “New Reality”2 and the rise of motor sport under the NSKK
(Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps), the Nazi motor organization. Furthermore,
these films supported the mass motorization propaganda of the Volkswagen and the
construction of the new motorways, the Reichsautobahn.
   While in the reality of the Third Reich mass motorization was out of question, the
documentary shorts and features (Kulturfilme) that were produced showed an auto-
motive wave rolling towards the cinema audience. Like no other medium, the movies
were able to turn the propaganda of mass mobility as well as the popular desires of the
viewers for tempo, spatial and mental freedom, and national edification into a virtual
experience. In the cinema, the car, the power of the Silver-Arrows, and the motorized
life style could become part of this virtual reality. The Kulturfilm transformed the
rapidity of motor sport into an agile audiovisual speech and film structure, which
ranked virtual experience and visual attractions far over the ideological loading of the
film text. The screen as a dispositive of perception suggested speed, potency, and
strength through the imaginary goggles of the racing driver. Therefore film analysis
must be directed to the topics of modern life because the films presented the “society of
the spectacle”3 in the same way as they mobilized individual and collective fantasies of
acceleration, infinity, and dynamism. Simultaneously they pleased the popular fasci-
nation for modern technologies, tourism, and adventures in connection with ideologies
close to Nazism like the sense of duty, discipline, toughness, or typically “German” or
“Prussian” virtues.
   The length of the Kulturfilme ranged between 15 and 90 minutes. They were pro-
duced by the NSKK in cooperation with the automotive industry and other Nazi organ-
izations or institutions like the SS, the military, or police forces (Wehrmacht). The films
were titled Deutscher Kraftfahrsport voran! (1935), Deutsche Rennwagen in Front
(1938), Sieg auf der ganzen Linie (1939), and Sieg der Arbeit (1940). Parallel to the offi-
cial productions, Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz ordered their own films, in which
esthetical elements from several genres of documentary and promotion films were
amalgamated. In Sieg – Rekord – Meisterschaft (1940) Mercedes stylized its team and
racing cars into unbeatable representatives of unsurpassable German precision work.
   The main titles are significant for the film’s major themes: national superiority, tech-
nical power-fantasies, and acceleration make up the center of the film text. The motor

                                                                                       ­153
UWE DAY

sport films of Nazi Germany came astonishingly close to the esthetic concepts of the
Italian and Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s. They were influenced by the dynamism of
the Italian futurists and by the genuine cinema, the “cinema of attraction”4 in the the-
oretical understanding of the Soviet avant-garde. Eisenstein viewed the cinema in rela-
tion to the fairground amusement parks. Thus the film audience should be given the
elemental feeling of sitting in a roller coaster. Film montage should be an instrument to
stimulate the audience, to charge it psycho-energetically and to impress it psychologi-
cally. Dziga Vertov raved about the possibilities of the “mechanical eye” that grasps an
modern accelerated world of living through different perspectives and the continuous
motion of the film operator and his camera, which has to hurry from extreme low to
extreme high perspectives.
  The Nazi motor sport films carry on with these concepts: The cinema became a driv-
ing simulator for an audience that previously had been immobile. Now movies could
present the experience of virtual mobility:

  When he sits behind the wheel and then the compressor is roaring and the thundering
  sound of the engine bounce against the walls of the rock face. […] I honestly believed I myself
  was sitting in this racing car. It was so near, so reachable, when the trees passed by. […] How
  these guys filmed the Freiburger mountain record, so compressed, as if you are at all places
  and at same time in the back of the car, too. That is magnificent. I was totally excited.5

  The Filmkurier praised the dynamics of the filmic synesthesia:

  Mighty motor battles are raging here, and over and over again it’s a triumph for the genial
  constructions of German technicians and engineers. Out of the roaring of compressors and
  the screaming of the brakes sounds the hymn of the racing driver. […] The film is brilliantly
  made, it has a fascinating tempo.6

   The rapid editing of these reels broke with the official ideal of the Kulturfilm as an
educational medium and a sublime film format, which should keep to the high culture
demands of teachers and the well-educated middle classes. Films like Deutsche
Rennwagen in Front placed national edification and the “Cult of Distraction” that
Kracauer7 had described above the cultivation of the audience or esoteric building. The
films aimed less at simply distributing Nazi platitudes or high culture than at impart-
ing a medially entertaining world-view, which at the same time was unmistakably
coded with the symbols of National Socialism. However, it was primarily just national-
istic and thus offered a wide range of the ideological address of the mass audience.
   One expressive example for the mixture of traditional Kulturfilm genres like the
ethnographic documentary or tourist and landscape film is the movie Deutsche Siege
in drei Erdteilen, produced by Auto Union in 1938. Wolfgang Staudte was in charge of
post-production.8 Rather than using the usual chronological arrangement of the films,
the script of Deutsche Siege in drei Erdteilen sketched a narrative structure, in which
the Auto Union team is stylized to a German pioneer troop of motorization. The racing
season is turned into not only a global expedition, but also a worldwide campaign to
conquer virtual countries, symbolized through the trophies of triumph. And like a fea-
ture movies, this promotion film presented stars like the German idol Bernd Rosemeyer
and his wife Elly Beinhorn, a popular aviatrix. They were used as popular attractions

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                                      MYTHOS EX MACHINA: MOTOR SPORT AS AN ICON OF MODERNITY

just like the luxurious cars that were placed in the film cosmos of the Italian “Forum
Mussolini” or the “modern” colony Libya. The film text alternates between filmic sight-
seeing, ethnographic expeditions, and a tourist excursion, in which the cadre becomes
a space for product placement. The film transformed the screen into a car’s windscreen.
The film gives the spectator the point of view of a virtual tourist, a civilized European,
who becomes acquainted with foreign countries, people, and exotic sceneries. From the
virtual front passenger seat he could enjoy a filmic anticipation of the coming mass
motorization, which the “Führer” had promised.



1 H. D. Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewußtsein: über deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit,
  1933-1945 (München: Hanser, 1982).
2 W. Uricchio, “The Past as Prologue? The ‘Kulturfilm’ before 1945,” in H. B. Heller, P.
  Zimmermann (eds.), Blicke in die Welt (Konstanz: UVK Universiätsverlag, 1995), pp. 263-288.
3 G. Debord, Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels [1967] (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 1996).
4 T. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in A.
  Arker, Th. Elsaesser (eds.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 59-
  62.
5 Allgemeine Automobil-Zeitung, vol. 34, no. 1 (7 January 1933), p. 33.
6 Filmkurier, 18 February 1939.
7 S. Kracauer, Die Angestellten: aus dem neuesten Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main:
  Suhrkamp, 1971).
8 E. Orbanz, Wolfgang Staudte (Berlin: Spiess, 1977).




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