Staying Afloat: Risk and Uncertainty in Spanish Atlantic World Trade, 1760–1820

TLDR: In this paper, Urwand attaches copious amounts of evidence from German and US sources that implicate other industry leaders in appeasing Nazism, showing that the moguls of three studios followed the directives of censors who, themselves, were under the influence of Nazis.

Abstract: films in Hollywood, and the antiNazism with which Hollywood eventually engaged. Collectively, they do not reveal an industry-wide “pact with Hitler,” as the book’s subtitle suggests; instead, they show that the moguls of three studios followed the directives of censors who, themselves, were under the influence of Nazis. To this, Urwand attaches copious amounts of evidence from German and US sources that implicate other industry leaders in appeasing Nazism. The result is a provocative, significant, and highly readable attack on the idea that 1930s Hollywood was synonymous with antifascism. There are many villains throughout Urwand’s book. At times, Urwand’s attacks on Louis B. Mayer seem partially based on hearsay found in the archives, but he augments this hearsay with astute speculation about the historical record. Of all the studio heads, Urwand targets none more than Mayer. Urwand also skillfully portrays how Nazis fixated on the studio system to the point of using Consul Georg Gyssling as their censor. Hollywood accepted him; Gyssling’s relationships are reconstructed as Urwand masterfully dissects his censorship, film by film. Will Hays’s acquiescence to Gyssling surprises; the persistence of the notoriously antisemitic Joseph Breen, interjecting himself on behalf of Gyssling’s agenda, stupefies. The concluding chapter introduces the book’s hero: screenwriter-turnedactivist Ben Hecht. In many ways, Urwand has channeled the tenacity and worldview of the man who, in the 1940s, condemned American Jews he deemed too timid in their anti-Nazism. According to Urwand, Hecht “saw Hollywood as one of the great Jewish achievements. The only problem, in his view, was that the studio heads did not share his pride. In fact, they had removed all images of Jews from the screen” (245), Urwand argues that this removal occurred off-lot by German censors and in-house by studios editing with their ears and eyes focused on preserving the German market. With no sympathetic images of Jews onscreen, audiences never would learn to accept them offscreen, an idea that played into the Nazis’ hands. Indeed, Germans allowed American films to be shown in their theatres every year of the decade, because they felt Hollywood promoted many values they wanted modeled for their audiences— Nazi values. Urwand reveals that appeasing German anti-Semitism had even graver consequences than subjecting American audiences to essentially Nazified movies. Forced to keep their local profits in Germany, Fox and Paramount used their revenue to create nationalistic newsreels: propaganda furthering Nazi aims. Worse, Urwand portrays MGM (in the month after Kristallnacht) discovering it could smuggle money by laundering it through the armaments industry that enabled Hitler’s war machine to conquer Europe and kill its Jews. These three studios used the term collaboration in their German correspondence, and Urwand indignantly pillories them for kowtowing and remaining in Germany when most studios left the market. Should all of Hollywood be accused? Urwand musters compelling evidence that, over time, all studio heads tried to comply with the culture of censorship and erased Judaism from the screen in the 1930s. His own evidence, however, suggests that a more nuanced interpretation of negotiation could have been highlighted. Regardless, with its focus on moguls and their profit motive, his thesis holds, even if his title aggrandizes. Thomas Doherty’s 2013 book Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (Columbia University Press) competes with Urwand’s. Some films appear in both, and each author includes significant films the other avoided, but they have written different histories. Doherty defines Hollywood broadly, so as to look beyond the titans and write sympathetically about Urwand’s antithesis: how Hollywood developed its antifascist politics. Urwand’s focus, informed by Neal Gabler’s An Empire of their Own (Anchor, 1988), laments that Hollywood’s studio heads wished “to see themselves as Americans rather than Jews” and lambasts them for having “had no desire to defend their Jewish heritage. They preferred . . . to let the people hate Jews” (218), and hate led to death. For Urwand, the depths of archives around the world revealed that every major studio head either essentially or actively collaborated with Nazis to contribute to the Holocaust’s rise, protraction, and (as argued in a short epilogue) long absence in postwar Hollywood cinema. Only in 1959 did Hollywood revisit the Holocaust with an inescapably Jewish subject: Anne Frank (315). For Urwand, Hollywood never turned truly antifascist in its golden age.