The Berlin Film Festival was not significantly shaped by the Nazi activities of Alfred Bauer, its first festival director, new research has found. But the festival will hold itself up for scrutiny, with a public discussion next month about Bauer and how he disguised his affiliations.
Revelations about Bauer’s past came to the surface in January 2020 due to reporting by Die Zeit newspaper.
Bauer, a film historian, was appointed to head the festival in 1951 following its inception by Oscar Martay, a film officer in the U.S. Army who worked in the Information Service Branch of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. Bauer oversaw the Berlinale until 1976. The festival introduced the Alfred Bauer Prize in his honor following his death in 1986.
The festival cancelled the award and commissioned the independent Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) to examine Bauer’s position in the Nazi film bureaucracy more closely.
The preliminary study published by the IfZ in September 2020 demonstrated that during his denazification proceedings from 1945–47, Bauer had deliberately concealed the gravity of his role during the Nazi era through false statements, half-truths and allegations. Bauer contributed to the stabilization and the legitimacy of the Nazi regime through his role in Nazi filmmaking.
Those discoveries pushed the festival into further introspection. It commissioned the IfZ to conduct a further study, examining how Bauer’s Nazi involvement might have affected the design of the festival.
The results of that second study are now available and will form the basis of the November 2, 2022, public discussion.
The Berlinale says that the IfZ’s second research paper comes to the following conclusions:
- A 1960 Berlin Senate Administration examined allegations against Bauer, but did not find sufficient evidence and few records remain.
- Before the first Berlinale, Bauer attempted to screen a film by Karl Ritter, one of the most prominent Nazi propaganda directors, while concealing the author. The screening was blocked by the Senate.
- Publicly, Bauer emphasized an apolitical attitude towards the medium of film. But he also wanted the Berlinale was supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the Western system as a “Showcase of the Free World.”
- In the early years of the Berlinale, Bauer was not the only person who had to be viewed as having a Nazi connection. However, the festival was not shaped by such “networks.”
- Ultimately, people who had been critical of the Nazi regime and, in some cases, had also been politically persecuted, also played an important role. Working under the observation of the British and American victorious powers the Berlinale was established as a “new front line of the Cold War.”
- Bauer’s relationship with the Berlin Senate Administration was repeatedly fraught with conflict and criticism of his “arbitrary working style.” Nevertheless, Bauer made a significant contribution to the success of the Berlinale by virtue of his organizational talent, his commitment to promoting high-quality films and his international networks.
The current study by the IfZ demonstrates [[..] that this did not lead to a Nazi ideological characterization of the festival program. The view of the festival’s history has been sharpened, and this confirms once again how essential it is to keep critically reflecting on one’s own history”, said the management duo of the Berlinale, Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian in a statement.
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