Postwar

Protestant leaders in 1945 half-conceded. But the main problem, in West Germany as elsewhere, was that Protestant churches did not offer an alternative to the modern world but rather a way to live in harmony with it.

The spiritual authority of the Protestant pastor or the Anglican vicar was by convention offered not as a competitor to the state, but rather as its junior partner—which is one reason why the Protestant churches of central Europe were unable to withstand the pressure of the Communist state in these years. But at a time when the West European state was embarking on a much enhanced role as the spiritual and material guardian of its citizens, the distinction between church and state as arbiters of public manners and morals became rather blurred. The late forties and early fifties thus appear as a transitional age, in which conventions of social deference and claims of rank and authority still held sway, but where the modern state was beginning to displace church and even class as the arbiter of collective behavior.

The character of the age is nicely encapsulated in an instruction booklet (BBC Variety Programmes. Policy Guide for Writers and Producers, 1948) prepared by the BBC for internal use in 1948. The sense of moral responsibility that the public broadcasting corporation chose to place upon itself is quite explicit: ‘The influence that [the BBC] can exert upon its listeners is immense and the responsibility for a high standard of taste correspondingly high.’ Jokes about religion were forbidden, as was the description of old-fashioned musical taste as ‘B.C.’—‘Before Crosby’.[76] There were to be no references to ‘lavatories’ and no jokes about ‘effeminacy in men’. Writers were forbidden to use jokes that had become popular in the relaxed ambiance of the war, or make suggestive double- entendre allusions to ladies’ underwear as in ‘winter draws on’. Sexual allusions of any kind were banned—there was to be no talk of ‘rabbits’, or suchlike ‘animal habits’.[77]

Furthermore: Members of Parliament were not to appear on radio programs that might be ‘undignified or unsuitable’ for public figures, nor were there to be any jokes or references that might encourage ‘Strikes or industrial disputes. The Black Market, Spivs and drones.’ These terms—‘spivs’ and ‘drones’ for louche types and minor criminals, the ‘black market’ as an all-purpose term for traders and customers circumventing rationing and other restrictions—show how much Britain at least lived for some years in the shadow of the war. Well into the 1950s the BBC could reprimand one producer, Peter Eton of the popular radio comedy The Goon Show, for allowing ‘Major Dennis Bloodnok’ (played by Peter Sellers) to be awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for ‘emptying dustbins in the heat of battle’ (and for permitting an actor to ‘imitate the Queen’s voice trying to shoo away pigeons at Trafalgar Square’).

Such strictures, and their accompanying note of high-collared, Edwardian-era reformism, were perhaps distinctive to Britain. But their tone would have been familiar all across the continent. In school, in church, on state-run radio, in the confident, patronizing style of the broadsheet and even the tabloid press, and in the speech and dress of public figures, Europeans were still very much subject to the habits and regulations of an earlier time. We have already noted how many of the political leaders of the age were men of another time—Britain’s Clement Attlee would not have been out of place in a Victorian mission to the industrial slums, and it was altogether fitting that the prime minister who oversaw Britain’s transition to a modern welfare state should have begun his public career performing good works in the East End of pre-World War One London.

Against this image of an older Europe—moving at the pace of earlier days, at once changed by the war and restrained by pre-war routines and habits—we must set the unmistakably modern form of its primary source of entertainment. This was the golden age of the cinema. In Britain, cinema attendance peaked quite soon after the end of the war, with 1,700 million seats sold in the country’s five thousand cinemas in 1946. In that year one person in three went every week to the local cinema. Even in 1950, when attendance had already started to decline, the average English man or woman went to the cinema twenty-eight times a year, a figure that was nearly 40 percent higher than in the last year before the war.

Whereas the British cinema audience was to slip steadily through the fifties, in continental Europe it continued to grow. One thousand new picture houses opened in France during the first half of the 1950s, about the same number in West Germany; in Italy three thousand new cinemas appeared, bringing the national total to some 10,000 by 1956. The previous year cinema attendance in Italy peaked at around 800 million seats sold (half the UK figure for about the same size population). French audiences, which were at their largest at the end of the 1940s, were nowhere near as large as those of Britain or even Italy.[78] Nor were those of West Germany, although in the Federal Republic cinema attendance did not peak until 1959. But by any other measure audiences were large indeed; as they were even in Spain, where cinema attendance per head of the adult population in 1947 was among the highest in Europe.

Part of the reason for this post-war enthusiasm for films was the pent-up wartime demand, especially for American films—stoked by the ban on most US films imposed by the Nazis, by Mussolini (after 1938) and by the Petain regime in France, and more generally by wartime shortages. In 1946, 87 percent of box-office receipts in Italy were for foreign (mostly American) films; of about 5,000 films shown in Madrid between 1939 and the end of the 1950s, 4,200 were foreign (again, mostly American). In 1947 the French film industry produced 40 films, in contrast with 340 that were imported from the United States. And American films were not just available in overwhelming numbers, they were also popular: the most commercially successful films in post-war Berlin were Chaplin’s Gold Rush and The Maltese Falcon (made in 1941 but not available in Europe until the end of the war).

American domination of post-war European cinema did not come about through the vagaries of popular taste alone, however. There was a political context: ‘positive’ American films flooded into Italy in time for the pivotal 1948 elections; Paramount was encouraged by the State Department to re-issue Ninotchka (1939) that year to help get out the anti-Communist vote. Conversely, Washington requested that John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath (made in 1940) be held back from distribution in France: its unfavorable portrayal of Depression-era America might be exploited by the French Communist Party. In general, American films were part of America’s appeal, and as such significant assets in the cultural Cold War. Only intellectuals were likely to be sufficiently moved by Sergei Eisenstein’s depiction of Odessa in the Battleship Potemkin to translate their aesthetic appreciation into political affinity; but everyone—intellectuals included—could appreciate Humphrey Bogart.

However, American cinema’s drive into Europe was above all prompted by economic considerations. US films had always been exported to Europe and made money there. But after World War Two American producers, squeezed between falling domestic cinema attendance and the rising cost of film-making, pressed especially hard for access to European markets. European governments, by contrast, were more than ever reluctant to open up their home market to American products: the local film industry, still a significant factor in Britain and Italy especially, needed protection against American ‘dumping’; and dollars were too scarce and valuable to be spent on importing American films.

As early as 1927 the UK Parliament had passed a law instituting a quota system, under which 20 percent of all films released in Britain by 1936 had to be British made. After World War Two the British Government’s goal was to set this quota at 30 percent for 1948. The French, Italians and Spanish all pursued similar or even more ambitious objectives (the German film industry, of course, was in no position to demand such protection). But heavy lobbying by Hollywood kept State Department pressure on European negotiators, and agreement to allow entry for US films was part of every major bipartite trade deal or loan agreement reached by the US and its European allies in the first post-war decade.

Thus, under the terms of the Blum-Byrnes accords of May 1946, the French government very reluctantly reduced its protectionist quota from 55 percent French-made films per annum to 30 percent—with the result that within a year domestic film production was halved. The British Labour Government similarly failed to keep out US imports. Only Franco succeeded in restricting US film imports into Spain (despite an attempted ‘boycott’ of the Spanish market by US producers from 1955 to 1958), in large measure because he had no need to respond to public opinion or anticipate the political fall-out of his decisions. But even in Spain, as we have seen, American movies vastly outnumbered home-grown products.

The Americans knew what they were doing: when European governments after 1949 took to taxing cinema receipts in order to subsidize domestic film producers, American producers began investing directly in foreign productions, their choice of European venue for the making of a film or group of films often depending on the level of local ‘domestic’ subsidy then available. In time, then, European governments found themselves indirectly