If he upsets you, just imagine what he looks like naked, Mrs Hoffman.
In general, when I hear the word propaganda, I automatically expect dishonesty and incompetence, but in The Man I Married[1] (1940) I found neither. Carol, a successful New York editor, married Eric Hoffman, an immigrant from Germany, eight years ago, and they have a son. Word has come from Germany that Eric’s father needs help with the factory he owns, so Eric is taking his family there to help his father settle matters.
The era? The late 1930s. A little background for those who didn’t follow along on the World War II section of your history studies. World War II didn’t start on December 7, 1941, when America entered the War. It started in stutters and stops. Some might include the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), although that was more of a proxy fight; the annexation of the Sudetenland in September, 1938 might be a proper start, although no actual fighting took place. For actual fighting, the invasion of Poland in September 1939 would be the beginning, at least for Europe. Based on some dialog, this movie appears to be set in perhaps August of 1938.
As they prepare to leave, a medical doctor of their acquaintance visits them and asks for a favor, the conveyance of $500 to his brother, a philosopher Gerhardt, who has been imprisoned at Dachau. They are happy to oblige, and embark on a passenger liner for the trip.
The movie makers take advantage of the disembarkation to surprise their audience, undoubtedly American, who may not understand how the dominance of Adolph Hitler has saturated all of German life at this juncture. Every social interaction ends with a Heil Hitler, and the tension on the dock is palpable to the audience, if not to the families coming off the ship. In the Hoffman family, all are delighted, both for the novelty and for the return home.
But it is on the train, in a compartment they share with a German, where the real propaganda kicks in. Eric is reading bits and pieces from a newspaper he’s picked up – radios are sold to the citizens by the German government for only 40 marks! After several other references, including Volkswagen, the German sharing the compartment politely sweeps up his belongings and leaves the compartment, but with a short monologue – yes, the radios are 40 marks, but you cannot use them to listen to Moscow, Paris, or London, and why, he says sarcastically, would a loyal German citizen need to listen to those when the German newspapers are right here?
It’s a lovely commentary on the importance of the control of information for a dictator, and conversely the gathering of true information from diverse sources for citizens.
They eventually arrive at Eric’s father’s home, an elderly man who is careful with his words. Why? Because one day after a gathering there, someone was arrested and taken away for disrespecting Hitler, and the old man suspects his man-servant for reporting the crime.
From here on we see the consequences of Nazi domination of Germany. There is the brutalization of non-Germans by Germans, but done with nuance: some of the Germans remonstrate with those Germans who are cruel, and those who are cruel are also coarse. I suspect the idea was that the lowest classes suffered the most from the incredible inflation caused by the World War I reparations demanded by France, and so given the opportunity to be dominant, they seized on the opportunity. There are other incidents, and then, of course, the caution that wafts throughout society: do not disrespect Hitler, do not cause trouble, do not help the bullet ridden neighbor stumbling through the night.
Carol, of course, wishes to convey the money to the doctor’s brother, and to this end she contacts an American foreign correspondent named Delane in Berlin, with whom she discovers that Gerhardt is dead. Delane then tricks the address of Gerhardt’s widow from a German official, and they visit her to give her the money. When the widow asks how her husband of forty years died, they report that he died of appendicitis.
She remarks that as being a bit funny, he having had his appendix out twenty years earlier.
Meanwhile, Eric has been captivated by his return to German society, and having only been gone for eight years, its improvement in terms of tangible wealth and intangible pride makes it entirely plausible. He has been trying to sell the factory, but has reported little luck; during this period, they attend numerous social events, from dinners to a full-on (and fascinating) political rally. But eventually an offer comes through, and now he won’t accept it – no one accepts a first offer, he explains to Carol, who now wants to return home.
Skipping some propaganda-motivated, yet organic plot-twists, we may know where this is going, and eventually Eric admits he’s cheating on his wife with a proper Aryan woman he knew growing up. The marriage is at an end, and Carol gives up on it. But there is still one thing to have a tug-of-war over: their son. In an era where a divorced woman always gets the children, he insists this is a German child and will remain in Germany, despite her protests that he is American and should come home with her.
In the climactic scene attended by Eric’s new girlfriend, the fight over the child appalls Eric’s father. He appeals to tradition, to good sense, even to patriarchal authority, all for naught. But in the face of the good Aryan woman of Eric’s dreams, so contemptuous of the old German man who refuses to subordinate himself to the new, better ways, Eric’s father drops the A-Bomb, the hidden fact.
Eric’s late mother was a Jewess.
The look of shock on the girlfriend’s face before she sprints horror-stricken to the door is fucking priceless – what, did he have cooties? Eric, already listing to port from having refused his father’s direct orders, capsizes and sinks before our eyes, a man caught in a system where he is suddenly no longer on top, but in the sewer with shit flowing all over him.
And it’s a system where he can never, ever hope to climb out of the sewer. Such is the nature of authoritarian systems where irrelevant, permanent attributes of a person are used to classify and assign people to economic categories. The opposite of a meritocracy, is means the best are stuck in their meaningless categories, while the incompetent can rise to the top, spreading disaster around them until the very ground beneath their feet opens and consumes them.
Eric is lost, but Carol and her son are not; they depart for America. So the story is neither happy nor noir, but like most of life, a mix. While I shan’t quite recommend it, for the audience concerned about the politics of today it’s worth a viewing, if only to admire the artistry of a propaganda piece that must have been made in quite a hurry.
1While I don’t care much for the title The Man I Married, the alternative title mentioned on Wikipedia is infinitely worse: I Married a Nazi.
