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Unlike the majority of other German exiles in America, so the argument goes, Sirk was conscious of making crucial compromises with American mass culture; as Michael Stern has put it, he "sought in popular culture a source from which high art could draw the energy it needed to escape the burden of a dead or dying culture" (Stern 29). Sirk's films, such critics maintain, make ironic use of mise-en-scène, chiaroscuro lighting, artificial sets, and textual manipulation in order to subvert what the viewer sees at the film's surface; Sirk pushes the limits of mass culture by fusing image, dialogue, narrative, and music into a highly disruptive constellation.

Sirk and the Culture Industry: Zu neuen Ufern and The First Legion

I

Douglas Sink's melodramatic universe is saturated with references to organized religion. While films such as The First Legion ( 1950) or Battle Hymn ( 1956) directly engage with the delicate role of religious institutions in a secularized world, other films are marked and often literally framed by religious signs and symbols. Church towers, for example, figure prominently in the opening shots of both All I Desire (1953) and All that Heaven Allows (1954). They set and survey the stage on which small-town America regulates desire and molds conformity. In films such as Zu neuen Ufern/To New Shores (1937) and Imitation of Life ( 1959), on the other hand, ecclesiastical spectacles draw to a close desire that seems to dissipate in every direction. Religious sights and sounds in these two films provide anchors to those lost in the storms of their own passion and excess. "I see religion as a very important part of bourgeois society," Sirk explained in an interview with Jon Halliday. "It is a pillar of this society, if a broken pillar. The marble is showing quite a bit of decay. If you want to make pictures about this society, I think it is an ingredient of a bygone charm-charm in the original sense of the word: sorcery" (Halliday, 1997, 95). Organized religion may have lost its hegemonic role in sanctifying norms and providing metaphysical securities. Its symbolic vocabulary, however, seems to speak even to a fully disenchanted age. Sirk resorts to the charm of religious signs in his melodramas to bind together images, narratives, and passions, to construe fictional worlds in which an overabundance of meaning may underscore or even counteract the profane disintegration of bourgeois society. Melodrama, in the hands of Sirk, reinvents the sacred in the hope of redeeming religion from its institutional decay. It rearticulates the former charm of religion as style and affective appeal. The priest's bygone sorcery reemerges as the magic of the film director who understands how to stir the imagination and captivate our emotions.

All significant concepts of Sirk's art of melodrama may be seen as secularized theological concepts. The omnipotent God becomes the omnipotent fate that rules over the lives of Sirk's protagonists; the miracle in theology becomes the random turn of narrative development, the moment of exception that drives the itineraries of Sirk's most striking characters. Sirk's films thus not only evidence but seem to anticipate and dwell upon Peter Brooks's influential definition of melodrama as an expressive form for a post-sacred era, a repository of fragmentary and desacralized relics of sacred myths. Sirk's melodramas fit comfortably within the bounds of what Brooks calls the moral occult. They traverse and expose an era "in which polarization and hyperdramatization offerees in conflict represent a need to locate and make evident, legible, and operative those large choices of ways of being which we hold to be of overwhelming importance even though we cannot derive them from any transcendental system of belief (Brooks viii). In the absence of a normative and numinous center of things, Sirk's melodramas hope to rediscover ethical imperatives that may operate as society's post-traditional glue. They seek to reclaim through Manichean intensification and aesthetic stylization what religious belief systems no longer uniformly authorize. Even not believing in God, as Sirk continued his line of reasoning in the interview with Halliday, may thus in a way be seen as a religious act today (Halliday, 1997,95).

Sirk's many references to religion bring into focus the theological legacy of the melodramatic mode; they reveal the status of melodrama as a paradoxical source of transcendence in a post-sacred world, the popular's inquisitive urge toward a reauratization of modern existence. But the symbolic inventory of religion in Sirk's melodramatic imagination serves far more complex purposes than merely the reinvention of a post-metaphysical sacred. As I will argue in the pages to follow, Sirk frequently takes recourse in the sights and sounds of organized religion in order to engage his viewers in an intricate discourse about the dialectics of modern culture and aesthetic experience. In both his German and his Hollywood period, Sirk makes use of religious themes and images to allegorize the great divide of modern culture into the spheres of autonomous aesthetic refinement and commodified diversion, as well as to take issue with the collapse of this division into the standardized gestalt of twentieth-century Fordist mass culture. Brooks's moral occult thus becomes a site at which Sirk proposes his very own version of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's famous culture industry thesis. In often paradoxical moves, Sirk's use of religion helps encode the faultlines that break apart modern aesthetic experience while at the same time promising a precarious reconciliation of high and low, of what no longer seems to add up to a whole anymore.

Ever since the early 1970s, academic critics have assessed and valorized Sirk's art of melodrama as a subversive intervention by which mass culture turns against its own leveling of distinction and authentic meaning. Unlike the majority of other German exiles in America, so the argument goes, Sirk was conscious of making crucial compromises with American mass culture; as Michael Stern has put it, he "sought in popular culture a source from which high art could draw the energy it needed to escape the burden of a dead or dying culture" (Stern 29). Sirk's films, such critics maintain, make ironic use of mise-en-scène, chiaroscuro lighting, artificial sets, and textual manipulation in order to subvert what the viewer sees at the film's surface; Sirk pushes the limits of mass culture by fusing image, dialogue, narrative, and music into a highly disruptive constellation. Rendering elements of style and rhythm instead of dialogue or narrative progression as the primary catalysts of meaning, Sirk's films expose the violence and constraints society imposes on the individual (see Elsaesser, Willemen, Mulvey). Though Sirk's German films of the 1930s have found much less critical attention than his 1950s Hollywood productions, they too have been read as exercises in social commentary and subversion. Available only to those who are able to look closely enough, the critical potential of Sirk's German films, critics have argued, lies in the director's irony of playing out sophisticated formal characteristics against the films' overt narratives and ideologies. A dexterous director with a putatively leftist background, Sirk has thus been canonized as an author who somehow succeeded in importing modernist aesthetic sensibilities into the domains of Nazi mass culture. For Jon Halliday, who seems to understand Ufa as a niche of countercultural expression, Sirk and his German melodramas constitute "a sign of what the German cinema could have been after 1933" (Halliday, 1972,22); for Marc Silberman, films such as Zu neuen Ufern engage in an exercise of "probing the limits" (Silberman 51-65) of what was possible under the Nazis' coordination of cultural expressions.

There is, to be sure, no reason to call into question Sirk's critical intentions as a director ostensibly familiar with Brechtian gestures of distanciation and self-commentary. What is striking to observe, however, is that several generations of Sirk scholars have accessed the cultural status of his German and American films solely through formal analysis, unearthing instances of rupture and ambiguity underneath the texts' glossy veneers. In the most extreme cases, critics have not hesitated to claim that Sirk's historical audiences, unqualified to recognize what constitutes irony in Sirk, simply got it wrong when indulging in the hyperbolic emotions of the films' narratives and characters. As Barbara Klinger emphatically states, "For many critics, Sirk's value was dependent on removing his films from the terms of their popular reception, since the average spectator tended to miss the social critique and became blindly enamored of the melodramatic content. Sirk had been previously misunderstood, and academic criticism acted to redress the lack of his audience's ironic consciousness by revealing the true political significance of his films" (Klinger 34). While Sirk's contrapuntal manipulation of textual arrangements may indeed push the limits of industry standards and dominant ideologies, one cannot ignore the fact that what critics have come to valorize as nonconformist in Sirk in fact also directly catered to far from subversive desires. Throughout both his German and his American period, Sirk's extravagant mise-en-scène, for example, offered ample opportunities to the broader public to view new stars (Zarah Leander, Rock Hudson) doing their peculiar things. Whether or not it was meant to be ironic, Sirk's melodramatic style was clearly marketed and consumed as a spectacular showcase that featured new sensations and enabled the intimate pleasure of looking at stars. It appealed to modes of spectatorship that were eager to convert cultural expression "into a form of personal property" (Jameson 11), that knew how to reify the object of desire into a thing the spectator thought "he can put in his pocket and take home" (Adorno, 1978,277). Within the context of the popular the meaning of Sirk's most celebrated melodramas was thus constituted not so much through the dynamic of internal textual structures, but a narrative of stardom originating beyond and literally usurping the films' actual diegesis.

This essay seeks to rethink Sirk's negotiation of high and low, of modernist sensibility and popular diversion. Instead of further reinforcing the current division of Sirk scholarship into the camps of deconstructive exegesis and reconstructive historicization, the following pages examine how Sirk's films picture the dialectics of modern aesthetic experience and industrial culture themselves. Zw neuen Ufern and The First Legion shall serve as a focus of my discussion. Both films not only mark critical moments in Sirk's career, they also allow us to think through important continuities and ruptures in Sirk's German and American productions. Both films, I argue, couch their respective negotiation of aesthetic refinement and the popular in the cultural vocabulary of religion. Read against each other, both films evidence how Sirk's quest for a moral occult is inextricably bound up with the attempt to clarify the boundaries of art and the location of culture in modern society. Moreover, however, in both films we find intriguing material at once to illustrate and to reposition the cultural criticism of Sirk's prominent co-exiles in Southern California, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Adorno and Horkheimer, we remember, understood American mass culture as a not-so-distant relative of the political coordination of everyday life in Nazi Germany, an argument which has earned them "less than favorable treatment" (Hohendahl, 1995,119) in recent critical debates on popular culture. Sirk's combined German and American work, by contrast, shall urge us to consider the possibility that Nazi culture outdid Hollywood not only in its mass spectacles at Nuremberg but also in the context of its own Americanstyle leisure industry. Sirk's films draw our attention to the fact that perhaps not Hollywood itself, which even during the studio era was much more heterogenous than Adorno and Horkheimer believed, but Goebbels's Germanified Hollywood was the most pertinent manifestation of the system of the culture industry, a system that put modern technology and standardization in the service of mass deception.

II

To examine Nazi film culture remains challenging, not only because it was characterized by an extraordinary familiarity with and outright emulation of Hollywood, but also because such Americanist inclinations were often not seen as antithetical to the Nazis' call for a self-consciously nationalistic mass culture. Far from simply providing tools of overt ideological manipulation, Nazi cinema aspired to be highly popular. In common with international trends of the time, Nazi cinema hoped to become German film's golden age, an entertainment industry that proliferated upbeat scores and attractive production values.1 Designed to move minds and engineer emotions, Nazi film culture played a crucial role in organizing consent and warranting consumer satisfaction. In its orchestrated search for both a stylistically and economically viable national film industry, Nazi cinema did not even hesitate to imitate the Hollywood star system. The cult of stardom occupied a key position in the era's popular imaginary; it was central to the ways in which the Nazis hoped to use peculiarly modern leisure activities in order to forge the people as universal consumers into a new public above class and conflict. The stars' aura was meant to remind the viewer of attractions beyond the domain of ideological mobilization and yet at the same time to assist in blowing the vessel of everyday culture into the harbor of an autonomous German distraction industry.

One of the cornerstones of postautonomous industrial culture, stars stimulate modes of spectatorship and visual consumption that tend to undermine what formalist film scholars consider as the primary engine of a film's meaning and ideology, namely the regime of narrative unity, closure, and causality. To the extent to which publicity campaigns and tabloid journalism define a star's persona as a public affair and social event, the star's presence within a particular text, as Miriam Hansen argues, blurs the boundaries between diegesis and discourse, between an "address relying on the identification with fictional characters and an activation of the viewer's familiarity with the star on the basis of production and publicity intertexts" (Hansen, Babel and Babylon 246). The star's performance perforates the drive of the diegesis; it interrupts narrative progress in favor of spectacular interludes in order to exhibit the star's features to the viewers' consuming glance. "By activating a discourse external to the diegesis, the star's presence enhances a centrifugal tendency in the viewer's relation to the filmic text and thus runs counter to the general objective of concentrating meaning in the film as product and commodity" (Hansen, 1991, 246). Recycling constitutive elements of the early cinema-of-attractions, a grammar of representation privileging spectacular displays over narrative development, stars promote viewing pleasures that are often heterogeneous to a film's peculiar narrative: the star system encourages the viewer to become not a hermeneutic reader, but a textual poacher who knows how to isolate those moments of spectacle when the image of the star can be consumed most intensely.

Walter Benjamin saw the cult of the movie star as a rather perverse perseverance of auratic elements on the postauratic ground of mechanical reproduction. The star's "spell of personality" (Benjamin 231), he argued, airlifts the religious nature of preautonomous art to the fields of twentieth-century mass culture. Sirk's Zu neuen Ufern was clearly meant to endow the Swedish actress Zarah Leander with such a spell of personality. Staging extravagant press and advertising campaigns long before the actual premiere in August 1937, Ufa considered the film from its very inception as a star vehicle whose purpose was not only to introduce a new face to the German screen but in fact to provide the film industry with a charismatic flagship for the entire star system. It is one of the many ironies and paradoxes of Sirk's career that he met this task by making a film that examined the curious theology of modern stardom itself. Intended as apiece of social criticism according to Sirk himself (Halliday, 1997, 45), Zu neuen Ufern takes issue with the role of the star in postautonomous aesthetic culture. As a typical example of what Gertrud Koch calls Sirk's system of double articulation (Doppelzüngigkeit),^sup 2^ the film provided Goebbels's culture industry with a much desired cult of stardom while at the same time it belabored the fascination and horror of making and consuming stars as simulation and mechanical reproduction.

Zu neuen Ufern tells a story about a peculiarly modern battle over the location of culture, about the division of modern culture into the commodified spectacles of popular entertainment on the one hand and the highly exclusive domains of aesthetic refinement and social representation on the other. Helplessly torn between these two spheres, the Leander character senses the popular consumption of her stardom as a form of violence and inauthenticity, while she experiences the elite's rhetoric of cultural refinement as hypocritical, as a strategy that links certain cultural practices to class positions in order to cement given architectures of power. At the same time, however, the elaborately choreographed mise-en-scène of Sirk's film caters to the logic of the star system and the popular's practices of textual poaching. Set first in England during the heyday of colonial capitalism and then in Australia, the film makes use of the narrative's shifting topographies to deliver effectively the image of Ufa's new star to the audience's consuming glance. Whether we see Leander in the role of Gloria Vane in London or as a prisoner in the Parramatta jail, whether we see her in moments of euphoria or melancholic suffering, Franz Weihmayr's cinematography conjures a panoply of perspectives that suspend the viewer from the film's overall narrative only to supply him or her with intimate looks at Leander's body and face.

Both in England and in its colony Australia, the institutions and practices of cultural refinement occupy a space in which the social elite represents class position and negotiates the terms of social mobility. Although the film leaves no doubt about the corruption that prevails behind the façades of cultural distinction, it presents the cultural practices of the colonial upper class as part of a symbolic order which derives its strength and tenacity from continual mechanisms of marking difference, of authenticating acts of inclusion or exclusion. At a party at the Governor's palace in honor of Queen Victoria, the elite come together in order to engage in a minutely staged ritual of social exchange, while an anonymous crowd gathers outside in the dark passively watching the elaborate gala. Significantly, what provides a source of scopic pleasure and voyeuristic diversion for the crowd offers the elite a platform to affirm and reconfigure the channels of power. The Governor's party and its sequence of formation dances serve as a spectacular backdrop to announce the marriage between the Governor's daughter and Gloria Vane's former lover Albert Finsbury, and thus to reinscribe the lineage of colonial rulership. According to Sirk's topography of culture, the institutions of cultural refinement and the traditional discourse of high art operate as stages on which power represents itself. Reserved as a practice for the colonial elite alone, the rituals of aesthetic cultivation transform the members of the crowd into cultural window-shoppers who consume their own exclusion from power, their transfixation as mute spectators, as a spectacle of first rank.

Popular culture, on the other hand, following the narrative development of Zu neuen Ufern, is far from promoting democratic participation and empowerment either; as the other face of the marred coin of modern culture, it in fact exhibits deformations and duplicities similar to the ones that mark the secluded arena of high culture. Mass culture's regime of diversion emerges as one of excess and exhibitionism, of aggressive sexuality and voyeuristic pleasure-a spectacular foreplay enticing desires but endlessly delaying gratification. While Gloria's performance in the opening sequence challenges the stuffy moralism of the Victorian bourgeoisie, the viewer is soon to learn that her provocative stage persona is only a pretense, a second skin catering to the voyeuristic pleasures of her male consumers. Already during Gloria's performance Sirk's diegesis is at pains to provide the viewer with a clear sense for the artificiality and constructedness of the singer's frivolous stage persona. The camera follows and reframes her movements on stage from ever-changing points of view and focal lengths. Frequent cuts and abrupt shifts between the myriad of perspectives draw the film viewer's attention to the fact that what we see is not the recording of an artistic expression, but a truly violent process of dismemberment-male desire mapped onto and exploiting the surface of Gloria Vane's body. Allowing us to see Gloria through the eyes of her delirious onlookers, Sirk's editing denounces the unembellished logic of popular diversion as empty spectacle and lie: Gloria's spell of personality, so central to the charisma of the star, is fake, a reflex of projective activities, a male fantasy.

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Sink's critique not only of Victorian moralism but also of popular diversion as sites of inauthenticity becomes obvious in a later sequence when the former star of the Adelphi theater, released from the Parramatta jail, performs in front of an Australian audience characterized by desires similar to those of the London public. In contrast to the London spectacle, however, Gloria now rebuffs any attempt to transform her body and stage presence into a pleasurable commodity. Not surprisingly, her effort to render her performance a screen of her true feelings, meets with the rude rejection of the audience, which is unwilling to endure Gloria's "Ich stehe im Regen . . ." (I stand in the rain . . .), an aria of passive, suffering femininity. As if to endorse Gloria's exercise in expressive authenticity, the cinematography and editing during this second performance avoids the feverish oscillations between various points of view from the audience. Instead, the camera immediately zooms in on Leander's face in order to present the singer in long and motionless medium-close up shots that isolate her from the unruly innerdiegetic audience and redeem the melodramatic power of her artistic virtuosity for modes of spectatorship that valorize contemplative identification and concentrated absorption over distracted and tactile appropriation. If the film's camera work and editing in the earlier London sequence defined the popular dimension as one in which male mass audiences crudely construct and exploit femininity according to their own needs and desires, during the second performance it tries to reinstate for the film's audience a legitimate notion of popular culture that incorporates principles such as originality, authenticity, and attentiveness typically associated with the discourse of bourgeois high art. Under the tutelage of Sirk, melodrama and its emotional intensity are thus meant to rearticulate auratic experiences in the heart of the most pertinent site of modern mass distraction itself, the cinema: mechanical reproduction reproduces the magic it-following Benjamin's famous postulate-originally set out to destroy. Strangely collapsing the discourses of high and low, the popular form of melodrama here seems to aspire to become an "intensified, primary, and exemplary version of what the most ambitious art, since the beginnings of Romanticism, has been about" (Brooks 21-22).

The film's passage from London to Sydney, from mass cultural consumption to aesthetic elevation, closely follows the logic described by Koch as the sadistic impulse behind Sirk's melodramatic imagination. The film first construes what amounts to a repulsive image of female sexuality only to resort to ritual acts of cleansing; Sirk privileges a gaze that moves from aversion to purification, and in so doing, he arrests the female body as a deformed, disciplined fetish. Zu neuen Ufern links this authoritarian logic to a conservative project of cultural criticism. True to Sirk's life-long preoccupation with religious themes and images, the end of Zu neuen Ufern takes recourse in the sounds and sights of organized religion in order to foreground and sanctify Sirk's vision of a homogenous culture consolidating aesthetic refinement and popular entertainment. Sirk literally exorcizes Leander's body in a final purgatorium so as to hammer home his vision of a new community integrated via affects and intuitions rather than formal principles, legal procedures, or economic relations. When Gloria marries the farmer Henry in the last sequence, the church's altar, the choir's "Gloria In Excelsis Deo," and the final close-ups of the choir boys allegorically picture and celebrate the end, not only of female sexuality, but also of the great divide of modern culture and what the film considers its spectacles of deception. However baroque they may seem, the film's final images of religious salvation and purification encrypt Sirk's dream of a culture in which melodramatic pathos and contemplative attentiveness heal the rifts between high and low, sublate the hostile tracks of cultural modernization into a new synthesis, and thus renew the symbolic resources necessary for successful processes of social integration and identity formation. Religious sights and sounds here channel conflicting voices and perspectives into a symphonic whole that encompasses everything and offers something for everyone. Mass culture becomes art, art mass culture, so that the formerly divided community may live and blossom again.

Narrative development and mise-en-scène in Sirk's Zu neuen Ufern Shores, then, delineate what appears to be a strangely ambivalent force field. On the one hand, the diegesis clearly supplied Nazi consumer culture with a spectacular commodity; Sirk's highly controlled miseen-scene unlocked a series of seemingly private windows on the new star. Focusing on the sight of Leander and her sentimental vacillations, the film's melodramatic intensity catered to the audience's consuming glance, and thus to modes of spectatorship associated with a Hollywoodlike star system. At the same time, however, Sirk's film also exposes to view in a critical fashion the very mechanisms that make and mark stars; the film's narrative seeks to undo the dialectics of modern culture, renounce the split between high and low, and overcome what makes stars into cultural commodities in the first place. Zu neuen Ufern not only denounces the modern triumph of commodified spectacles and mass consumption over artistic expressivity as a step into a realm of inauthenticity, a step that destroys the foundation of what people require in order to position themselves in time, history, and society. In addition, it renders melodramatic sensibilities as catalysts for acts of spiritual purification and elevation: melodrama seems to yield the power to redeem the individual from the respective excesses of both the popular regime of distraction and the elite's hypocritical discourse of aesthetic refinement.

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Zu neuen Ufern, then, with its final images of religious redemption, seems to articulate a utopian vision that leads beyond the instrumentalization of the aesthetic in modern industrial society in general and German fascism in particular. Sirk's melodramatic reunification of high and low, of aura and distraction, surely seems to point at what transcends the progressive organization of pleasure and desire in twentieth-century modernity. Does it really, though? For Adorno and Horkheimer, we may recall, this melodramatic vision of cultural homogenization constituted nothing other than the signature and ideology of industrial culture itself. Sirk's moral occult was Adorno and Horkheimer's nightmare. When analyzing the fate of cultural modernization under the sign of twentieth-century capitalism, Adorno and Horkheimer came to the conclusion that the culture industry collapsed former divisions between aesthetic modernism and commodified popular culture into a "ruthless unity" (Horkheimer and Adorno 123). Symptomatic for a postliberal market society in which all aspects of production and consumption were controlled through bureaucratic organizations, the culture industry provided everyone with something; it forged into a false unity what no longer could add up to a whole: "Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of its social premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. The division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious art, or vice versa" (Horkheimer and Adorno 135). But that is, they conclude, what the culture industry precisely attempts to do-and the same, one might add here, goes for Sirk and his 1930's melodramas. What may be seen as the utopian element of Zu neuen Ufern's final images at the same time directly served Goebbels's quest to establish an American-style, yet nationally independent mass culture. Sirk's theological Utopia of reconciliation may express a drive toward unhampered forms of collectivity, but it also performs an urgent ideological function providing imaginary solutions to real social conflicts. Like the culture industry in Adorno and Horkheimer's reading, Zu neuen Ufern orchestrates what was also at the top of Goebbels's cinematic agenda, namely the mutual absorption of high and low, of artistic merit and popular appeal. The film's moral occult, its invention of a post-sacred transcendence, reconciles cultural binaries into an imaginary and organic whole, a false but ruthless unity that ensures something is provided for all and none may escape. Rearticulating Wagner's total work of art by means of mechanical production, the film's final shots forge contradictory experiences into an affective spectacle of first rank, a spectacle that engineers emotions and colonizes sentience so as to outrule dissident views and autonomous thought.

Eric Rentschler has recently argued that Sirk's melodramas "fit well into Nazi constellations, both as ideological affirmations and as the sites of what appeared to be transgressive designs. Aesthetic resistance was part of the system; it provided a crucial function in a larger gestalt" (Rentschler 144). My reading of Zu neuen Ufern confirms and in fact expands this proposition. A composite of Sirk's melodramatic craftsmanship and Leander's star presence, the film highlights the often contradictory, albeit no doubt effective ways in which the National Socialists in their pursuit of a homogenous community of the folk made concessions to both cosmopolitan distractions and the demand for "the warmth of a private sphere of life" (Schafer 214). On the one hand, Zu neuen Ufern illustrates the Nazis' hope to redefine and exploit mass culture as a political tool, a crucible of fantasy production powerful enough to permit a restricted revolt against Nazi ideology while at the same time breaking older bonds of solidarity and fragmenting the body politic into a multitude of pleasure-seeking monads. Part of a project that hoped to establish an economically viable alternative to Hollywood, the film draws our attention to the way in which Nazi leisure culture entertained the poachers of industrial culture with the illusion that within this highly politicized society certain spaces remained beyond control, beyond politics, beyond the effects of coordination. On the other hand, Zu neuen Ufern and its moral occult inform about the curious paradox of fascist cultural politics at large, the fact that cosmopolitan narratives and the outright imitation of American patterns often went hand in hand with the intention to organize national consent within an autonomous yet marketable German mass culture. Zu neuen Ufern evidences how Goebbels's ministry of illusion provided a stage for what Adomo and Horkheimer in their analysis of American mass culture considered the regime of pseudo-individualization-the "halo of free choice" on the basis of industrial standardization itself (Adorno, 1990, 308). Sirk's moral occult in Zu neuen Ufern not only played a crucial role in bringing Hollywood home, in doing so it also makes us wonder whether the film encodes a curious preview of coming attractions, authored by a director on the brink of departing from Nazi Germany for America itself.

III

"I was in love with America, and I often have a great nostalgia for it," Sirk recalled in 1971. "I think I was one of the few German émigrés who came to America with a certain background of reading about the country and a great interest in it-and I was about the only one who got around and about" (Halliday, 1997, 69-70). It has become commonplace to say that Sirk was at his best in Hollywood whenever he openly avowed the commercial bases of the modern popular in trying to reconcile his European aesthetic sensibilities with the logic of the studio system. Sirk, the argument goes, was continuously "challenged and his work enriched by the demands and limitations of commercial cinema, which required that his subjects be more common and his iconography more recognizable" (Stern 69). It was at Universal that Sirk finally reached the peak of his craftsmanship and developed a melodramatic folklore that transformed the dialectics of modern culture into a viable source of inspiration and experimentation.

Sirk's Americanist work of the 1930s calls into question such facile teleological readings. Produced for a dream factory that was eager to capture minds and discipline emotions, Zu neuen Ufern reveals Sirk's preoccupation with things American even prior to his exile. A tale set in the nineteenth century, the film is deeply enmeshed in the cultural vocabulary of Nazi Americanism. It bears testimony to how Nazi mass culture emulated what was considered American patterns of perception and identification. As it simultaneously enacts and probes the often ambivalent fascination of Nazi society with American mass culture, Zu neuen Ufern at the same time anticipates the unease of many German emigrants vis-à-vis the organization of pleasure and fantasy in Hollywood itself. As a result of a curious exercise in crosscultural exchange and displacement, the film predates the acerbic criticism that many of Sirk's fellow German exiles directed at the ways in which the Hollywood studios sought to administer all aspects of perceptual possibility, the spectators' waking as much as their dreaming.

But Zu neuen Ufern, in exploring the possibilities of a "Germanified Americanism" (Witte 106), at the same time allows us to see crucial blind spots within the later Hollywood critique of many German emigrants, including Adorno and Horkheimer's famous culture industry thesis. Horkheimer and Adorno, by presenting the transition from liberal to organized capitalism as the primary cause of cultural transformation, insisted on fundamental distinctions between America's and Germany's paths into the twentieth century. Europe, they argued, to some degree escaped the trend toward the commodification and monopoly of culture; it was spared from the logic of the culture industry. In Germany in particular, state interventions during the nineteenth century created lasting conditions under which cultural activities remained largely exempt from market forces.3 Sirk's melodramatic theology of the 1930s brings into focus what has a romantic ring to Adorno and Horkheimer's juxtaposition of German and American cultural modernization. While the Dialectic of Enlightenment emphasized the manipulation of the masses by the institutions of private capital, the relation of industrial culture to the state was almost lost out of sight.4 By drawing our attention to the mass cultural elements of Nazi society itself, Sirk by contrast urges us to take into consideration that from their very inception various formations of industrial cultureunlike the American model-were shot through with variegated political or administrative agendas. Sirk's work of the 1930s, then, on the one hand enables us to think through the extent to which the implementation of the popular in Nazi Germany was often based on fragile syntheses, repressed tensions, and glossed-over faultlines, on gestures which-as David Bathrick has argued in a different context"left the government caught in ludicrous forms of self-redress and strategic withdrawal before the commodity fetish" (48). Working under the condition of a media dictatorship that was simultaneously movie made and movie mad, Sirk draws our attention to the contradictory ways in which the Nazi state sought to employ and shape mass cultural practice for its political ends. On the other hand, however, when read in tandem with his later Hollywood productions, films such as Zu neuen Ufern also raise important questions about Sirk's position under the studio system and our critical understanding of American mass culture during the 1940s and 1950s. How American, we must ask, was Sirk's America? Did Sirk sail to old shores when moving to Hollywood, to the locus classicus of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the culture industry? To what extent did Sirk ferry his eschatological visions of cultural unification from a state-run to a capital-driven formation of industrial culture?

I would like to address these questions in the remaining pages of this essay by means of an examination of Sirk's The First Legion. Filmed entirely on location at Mission Inn, Riverside, The First Legion was originally shot as an independent production in 1950. It was Sirk's first film after a major confrontation with Harry Zohn at Columbia and an extended visit to postwar Germany, a country in shambles yet eager to shed off any memory of the past. "I went back to Hollywood," Sirk recalled later, "feeling very depressed, and feeling it was impossible to do movies anywhere, either in Germany or in America" (Halliday, 1997, 93). The First Legion emerges against the backdrop of this critical moment in Sirk's career. Immediately preceding his breakthrough at Universal, the film marks a crucial point at which we see the exile Sirk becoming an expatriate and building a home in a world of interminable displacement. Although the film has remained at the margins of what film critics have constructed as the classical canon of Sirk's American work, it can be seen as a cinematic crossroad at which we behold Sirk hesitating for a moment as he recalls past endeavors and envisions coming attractions.

A film that explicitly dwells on Sirk's continuous preoccupation with religion, the narrative of The First Legion inquires into the place of the sacred in present-day America. It presents the viewer with a number of rather unlikely Jesuits-a former criminal attorney, an exconcert pianist, an India traveler cum film director-who find themselves forced to revise their standards of belief after experiencing first a makeshift and later a "real" miracle.5 Aesthetically, The First Legion stages this concern with the issue of faith, redemption, and the absurd by interrogating the vicissitudes of seeing in modern culture, of competing regimes of vision and visuality. Reminiscent of Zu neuen Ufern, Sirk in this later production is at pains to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic modes of looking. While the fake miracle and its initial mass popularity correspond to forms of visuality skewered by the logic of the market, by desire and mass consumption, the true miracle in the end represents the work of an introspective, contemplative gaze, one that resists the spell of surfaces so as to envisage the signatures of the invisible.

Sequestered from the itineraries of industrialized time, the Jesuit seminary is shown as a space of artistic refinement, expressive authenticity, and high cultural distinction. An enthusiast of classical music, Father Fulton responds to the first miracle not with words of prayer but by playing Edvard Grieg's piano sonata in A minor. In a curiously disembodied shot, Sirk's camera shows us the labor of Fulton's hands on the keyboard as if to underscore the work that is true art. Attracted to the alleged site of salvation, the masses outside the seminary, on the other hand, hope to consume the miracle as distraction and cultural commodity, a thing they can stick in their pocket and take home. The crowd pictured as gathered in front of the seminary's gate is a lonely crowd. Transformed into a media spectacle, the miracle here generates a delusory experience of social harmony and charismatic wholeness. In the masses' intoxicated desire for cultural consumption, repression and wish-fulfillment, fantasy and symbolic containment join together in the unity of a single mechanism.

Installed on the roof of the seminary, Father Fulton compares the masses outside the gate with the crowds at a symphonic concert, with the one exception that the boundaries between spectacle and audience have broken down and the crowd has become its own object of delight. Voyeuristically looking at the masses and cameras looking at the seminary, Father Fulton reads the Jesuit's specularization as a welcome process of spiritual rejuvenation. Being looked at reinvigorates Fulton's faith and mission; it overcomes the Jesuits' progressive isolation in a secularized and accelerated world. Father Arnoux, by way of contrast, otherwise concerned with reconnecting the Jesuits to the timetables and topographies of the modern world, makes no secret of his disdain for the crowd outside. The author of controversial tractates on theology, Arnoux may argue against Catholicism's monopoly on faith and thus call for a liberalization of church doctrine. But his agenda is to bring the Jesuits to the world, not the world to the Jesuits. Media stardom, for Arnoux, bereaves the Jesuits' of what is at the core of their mission. The specularization of the seminary outrules the precondition of human reciprocity, of communicative rationality and emotional authenticity. It renders impossible the experience of a return of the gaze, the resurrection of contemplative spaces in which true healing might be possible. For Arnoux, the seminary's sudden iconicity distracts from any contents. In their sensationalist preoccupation with the here and now, populist attitudes efface what transcends the given moment and thus divert from the exertion necessary to achieve salvation and partake of a plentitude of meaning.

"All right, I am out of joint like the rest of the world," Doctor Morrell, the forger of the first miracle, confesses in a climactic moment to Father Arnoux. "Nothing adds up to anything anymore." Like Zu neuen Ufern, The First Legion offers an image of modern culture torn into hostile halves, halves that long to add up to something again and reconcile themselves within a higher organic totality. While the crowd outside the seminary desires for the priests' alleged bliss of auratic experience, some of the fathers inside emphatically endorse the leveling of former boundaries as they hope to reconnect their esoteric practice to the popular dimension. In contrast to the final images of Sirk's earlier film, however, The First Legion leaves little doubt that such a mutual integration of high and low cannot result in anything but a false unity, in delusion rather than insight or redemption. The division of modern culture is its truth, and the task of any authentic cultural practice is to work through, not to gloss over, the split that marks the modern condition. It is important to note, in this context, that the first-the fake-miracle happens precisely when the priests assemble in the seminary's meeting room in order to watch one of Father Quaterman's films shot during his travels in India. Holy people in India, Quarterman lectures, "capture the soul by capturing the imagination." And so does this film within the film, transforming the sacred into a direct effect of mechanical reproduction. Suddenly appearing from behind the space of projection, Father Sierra's presence on the staircase-his miraculous recovery of walking-coincides with the image of a consecrated elephant strolling triumphantly across the screen. Captured by the cinematic images, the fathers' imagination eclipses their critical reason; it urges them to believe in visual surfaces without asking any further questions. Their fetishistic desire to see what cannot be seen, to take home the sacred in the form of mechanical reproduction, thus results in a kind of collective hypnosis. What they take as a charismatic intervention in fact constitutes a mere simulation of screen reality.

Father Quarterman's cinema aspires to open the enclosed world of the seminary toward the popular. It induces the priests to reshape the real as an imaginary space of wish-fulfillment and plentitude. At the same time, however, it replicates within the seminary itself the very separation and false wholeness that structure social relations and cultural practices at large. Transforming spiritual values into flat surfaces, Quarterman's projector and screen literally cut the meeting room in half (Grosz 108-109). They fragment the assembled group of priests into voyeuristic monads while reintegrating them as visual consumers into a new kind of homogenous, imaginary community. Poaching the popular, Quarterman's cinema-of-attractions refracts traditional modes of integration and reconstructs the esoteric sphere of cultural refinement from the vantage point of public, commodified space. Thus, the spectacle on screen and on the stairs, to use Guy Debord's phrase, "reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate" (29). Driven by the desire to see what remains unrepresentable and hoping to escape their progressive segregation, the priests reinvent reality as film only to become themselves a cinema-of-attraction.

Propelled by instrumental reason, the priests-like the masses outside-sacrifice the bliss of auratic experience on the altar of their regime of commodified visuality. Their very desire to behold redemption in the form of an image causes them to lose their vision. What they consider a miracle is a hoax: synthetic aura effected by modern technologies. Sirk's mise-èn-scene and editing captures this loss of authentic vision as a loss of successful scopic reciprocity. The film's diegetic network of looks remains disjointed, punctured by mismatched eye line shots and diverging perspectives. The characters' gazes frequently wander into the off-screen as they fail to find a corresponding eye within the frame. A multitude of shots picture awkward three-character constellations, human triangles thatdispersed onto conflicting visual planes-fail to establish any kind of meaningful, fulfilling exchange. Unlike Zu neuen Ufern, which either reveled in well-orchestrated two-shots or froze the image of the star into spectacular vignettes of to-be-looked-at-ness, the scopic field of The First Legion thus remains incoherent and uncontained, as if to bespeak the logic of separation that resides under the popular's veneer of wholeness, community, and salvation.

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It is only in the film's final shots-picturing the real miracle in which Dr. Morrell's patient Terry Gilmartin learns how to use her legs again-that Sirk seems to renounce the film's logic of skewered visual triangulation. The second miracle's place is neither the privatized publicness of the street in front of the compound nor the publicized private sphere of the seminary's meeting room. Rather, it occurs in the enclosed space of the compound's chapel, the seminary's arcanum normally barred to any outside visitors. As one might expect, Sirk stages this second miracle as a drama of visuality resulting in the reassertion of authentic, noninstrumental seeing. Once Terry has entered the chapel, Sirk intercuts between shots showing Terry looking intently at the altar, the altar itself rendered in blurry soft-focus, and Arnoux and Morrell silently looking at Terry looking, rising out of her wheelchair and finally falling toward the altar.6 Yet while Sirk in this final sequence seems to revel in the restoration of true vision as enabled by the enclosure of the chapel, he nevertheless withholds any images that would rejoice in the foundation of a new, unified community. The final montage, rather than situating Terry, Arnoux, and Morrell in a congruous triangular constellation, splinters the group into separated individuals shown in isolating close-ups. Terry's miracle may thus undo the regime of inauthentic images and reified looks. It may restore to vision the power of aesthetic refinement, of auratic introspection and mimetic experience, the ability to yield to and become other. But in its failure to restore an operative community, this miracle also reminds the viewer of the very condition of separation and seclusion that makes it possible in the first place. Sirk's second miracle delivers a utopian image of individual redemption and reconciliation, but it also demonstrates the fact that this image is achieved only as a result of systematic acts of exclusion. Contrary to the earlier images of the mass spectacle, Sirk's representation of Terry's vision refuses to gloss over social fragmentation and the dialectical split of modern culture. Instead of hypostatizing itself as a world of unlimited freedom and false universality, the true miracle actively works over and acts out the division of modern culture. Utopian and dystopian alike, it suggests that the false wonders of commodified culture are not the radical other but the shadow of serious aesthetic practice, the social bad conscience of autonomous art.

Commenting on one of his later Universal productions, Sirk remarked to Jon Halliday: "There is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art" (Halliday, 1997, 110). Unlike the final images of Zu neuen Ufern, which collapse competing cultural practices into the vision of a unified, homogeneous culture, The First Legion insists on the boundaries between high art and trash, aesthetic cultivation and mass culture. More ambivalent than it may seem at first, the film's final montage sequence not only valorizes aesthetic self-expression over mass cultural kitsch, the bliss of mimesis over the popular's reinvention of aura as commodity and consumer choice. In doing so, it also focuses our attention on the fact that we need to think of autonomous art and mass culture as opposite sides, as it were, of one and the same coin, that we must understand them as cultural responses to one and the same process of social transformation. In The First Legion, then, Sirk maps melodrama's logic of the excluded middle, its aesthetics of astonishment and Manichean polarization, onto the topographies of modern culture itself, and it is this gesture of "craziness" that keeps the film's melodramatic intensity from slipping into the domain of trash and kitsch. Unlike the ending of Zu neuen Ufern, The First Legion resists any image of social and cultural reconciliation; high and low remain locked in a melodramatic dialectic of good and evil, light and dark.

To the extent, then, to which The First Legion stages the dialectics of modern culture within its own diegesis, the film at once affirms and renders problematic the theory of twentieth-century industrial culture as outlined by Sirk's former fellow-exiles Adorno and Horkheimer. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Sirk endorses aesthetic autonomy as an enigmatic niche of meaning and resistance to the logic of cultural commodification, as an esoteric-and often no doubt elitist-site of determined negation. In accord with Dialectic of Enlightenment, Sirk wants us to think about the course of modern culture in dialectical terms and to resist the ways in which industrial culture levels difference and homogenizes competing cultural practices. In his attempt to make American mass culture speak about itself, however, Sirk's The First Legion at the same time invites us to reconsider how Adorno, Horkheimer, and subsequent generations of cultural critics have taught us to look at American culture circa 1950. Sirk in The First Legion alerts us to the fact that Hollywood during the studio era was more heterogeneous and diverse than Dialectic of Enlightenment suggested. Renouncing his earlier eschatology of cultural unification, Sirk aspires to articulate within the bounds of Hollywood itself the possibility of what one might call with Miriam Hansen an expression of popular modernism (Hansen, 1996, 307). The film simultaneously envisions and rehearses a mass cultural vernacular powerful enough to address and work over the popular's location in twentieth-century industrial culture.

IV

It was one of Adorno's central contentions that any kind of aesthetic compromise, the less than radical employment of artistic means, would lead to mass culture and what he considered its feats of standardization and manipulation. In this respect, as Peter Uwe Hohendahl has argued, for Adorno "Hollywood's proximity to Hitler's Germany was not accidental. It followed from the logic of aesthetic instrumentalization" (1995, 148). Although Adorno insisted on crucial distinctions between their respective historical developments, he understood Nazi Germany and the American culture industry as uncanny soul brothers. Both aspired in their very own ways to halt the dialectics of modern culture so as to engineer consent and warrant conformity. Though representing antithetical and nationally discrete models of cultural transformation, both converted modern technologies into instruments of mass deception.

Sirk's The First Legion provokes us to question Adorno's apocalyptic equation, both in historical and theoretical terms. Shot at a curious point in Sirk's career indeed, the film underscores that Sirk's name change signified neither a mere act of symbolic redress nor a radical converting of identity, but rather a foray into a hybrid existence. Looking back at earlier Ufa productions such as Zu neuen Ufern from the vantage point of The First Legion, Sirk's Germany during the 1930s, in some respects, appears much more like Adorno's America while Sirk's America circa 1950 exhibits traces of what Adorno understood as European residues of aesthetic negation. Instead of simply reaffirming Adorno's equation of Hollywood mass culture and Nazi politics, the imbrication of things American and German in Sirk's work in fact encourages us to revise the very parameters according to which Adorno theorized the specificity of national traditions and evaluated the political effects of modern culture. While drawing our attention to the Americanist predilections of Nazi culture itself, some of Sirk's work at the same time modifies the German image of American mass culture as a crucible of seamless homogenization. Unlike Adorno, who saw little reason to contemplate the role of Americanism or the rise of industrial culture in Germany, Sirk's transatlantic productions remind us to call into question critical models that compare national cultures or envisage cross-cultural transactions yet do little to challenge assumptions about national or cultural fixity.

It is highly questionable, though, whether Sirk's later melodramas for Universal really lived up to the program spelled out by The First Legion. For Sirk's academic critics of the 1970s, films such as Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life clearly continued and in fact exceeded the critical aspirations of his earlier production. These critics celebrated in particular Sirk's work of the 1950s as an exercise in subversion that turned Hollywood against itself and thus rearticulated the possibility of artistic authorship within the heart of standardized mass culture. Strangely enough, though, this scholarship, while proposing extremely sophisticated strategies of formal exegesis, often relied on highly conventional notions of cultural and national identity. Rather than understanding Sirk's work as a site of cultural syncretism, it valorized Sirk as a European art director who succeeded in smuggling his aesthetic refinement into the camp of the enemy, as a secret agent who crossed borders yet did not unfix given identities. More recent scholarship has often rightly called into question this image of Sirk as an undercover artist simply dismantling American culture and identity. In linking Sink's extravagant mise-èn-scene to the demands of 1950s consumer society, scholars such as Barbara Klinger read Sirk's style not in terms of subversion but of unbridled commodification: "[T]he production of films with lush visuals was strongly influenced by publicity considerations in the 1950s which sought to exploit the contemporary decor and fashions showcased in certain films as a means of advancing Hollywood's relation to consumer society. The rich mise-èn-scene of family melodramas . . . did not result simply from directorial decision, but from socially influenced industry demands to render style consumable" (66-67). Seen against the backdrop of industry dictates and other extratextual imperatives, Sirk's melodramatic spectacles of the 1950s-similar to Zu neuen Uferndirectly catered to the audience's fantasies of consumption. Sirk's allegedly dissident style, according to this newer generation of critics, provided images of plentitude for a bourgeois society deeply submerged in hegemonic ideologies of domesticity and affluence.

What is important to note in closing is that Sirk's American work after The First Legion continually replays in the form of a pastiche the earlier film's juxtaposition of high and low, of authentic expressiveness and commodified cultural practice. Whatever their actual effects on historical spectators, even Sirk's most extravagant pageants made at Universal invoke Sirk's 1950 critique of aesthetic instrumentalization and standardized universality. In often paradoxical and selfcontradictory ways Sirk's aesthetic resistance and cultural elitism thus became the stuff of mass cultural entertainment itself, a strategy to encompass divergent constituencies and satisfy conflicting spectatorial agendas. Nowhere does this become more evident and instructive than in Sirk's second to last Hollywood film, A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1957). In one particular sequence, Sirk leads the viewer into the villa of the Nazi official Oscar Binding. We see the villa's walls cluttered with confiscated artworks that are arranged like trophies. While a concentration camp officer plays Beethoven on the piano in the posture of a nineteenth-century genius artist, we view Binding and some prostitutes indulging in unsublimated, animalistic desire. In another important sequence, opposed to this scenario of aesthetic instrumentalization and coordination, we follow the protagonist Ernst Graeber wandering through the rubble of his hometown. Suddenly, his attention is drawn to the grotesque sound of atonal music, produced by a wire scraping over the strings of a broken piano. Heard against the decadent uses of Beethoven, the piano's dissonant, unauthored chords emerge as an idiom of authentic, non-instrumental articulation. They intone a language of suffering and negativity, a cryptogram of despair whose puzzling modernity lies in its mimetic relation to a world of material desolation, petrified experience, and political subordination. Authentic art not only has become literally homeless, it also needs to do without the organizing power of the artist, the bourgeois genius so popular in the iconography of twentieth-century mass culture. As a mimesis of destruction, art in this sequence challenges the attempt to unify high and low in spectacles of false reconciliation. No longer defined as a work, it punctures the reshaping of modern culture as religion and cult of standardization. In its very negativity and dissonance, the piano's enigmatic sounds thus encrypt the Utopian idea of aesthetic experience as a yielding to and becoming other; it recaptures a sense of spontaneity that points beyond the scenes of cultural reification. Forsaking all magic, Sirk in this chilling sequence actualizes it and plays it out against the magic spell of cultural leveling. He endorses a form of aesthetic experience and autonomy that, in Adorno's words, "renounces happiness for the sake of happiness, thus enabling desire to survive in art" (1984, 18).

Similar to many West German films shot during the Adenauer era, A Time to Love and a Time to Die presents Nazi warfare as a fiasco of operatic dimensions. While it recasts the past as fate and natural disaster, Sirk's film suggests that modern art has no choice but to bear scars of havoc and disruption. Art's esoteric task is to express the impossibility of expression. Its truth and authenticity lies in articulating that authentic experience has become untenable. For Sirk as much as for Adorno, the role of modern art is thus that of a camera obscura belaboring the fact that nothing concerning art goes without saying anymore, including its own right to exist. Genuine art reflects the desolate, reified landscapes of modern life, yet only through acts of self-conscious negation, by radically separating itself from being and the logic of industrial culture. It is the remaining paradox, challenge, and scandal of Sirk's American work that it sought to examine these propositions with the means of industrial culture itself, that it aspired to elevate mass culture to a laboratory of aesthetic reflection.

A small portion of this article has been published previously as part of my essay, "En-Gendering Mass Culture: The case of Zarah Leander," Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation, eds. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997) 161-175. I am grateful to the publisher for allowing me to make use of these materials here.