Controversy over a scholarly book about Hollywood’s ties to Hitler has hit a new pitch with a prominent critic asking whether a flawed peer-review process led Harvard University Press to publish it.
In the book, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, Ben Urwand alleges that Hollywood’s Jewish studio heads colluded with Nazi Germany to suppress films, scenes, and stars it deemed objectionable.
A number of reviewers have questioned the evidence and reasoning behind the book’s assertions, but the battle escalated when David Denby, a film critic at The New Yorker, bashed the book in a September review and then in more detail in an ensuing blog post. That post widened the critique of the scholarship to a critique of the publisher: “How Could Harvard Have Published Ben Urwand’s ‘The Collaboration?’”
Mr. Urwand, who is a junior fellow at Harvard, has responded to Mr. Denby in a letter to The New Yorker’s editor that Mr. Urwand shared with The Chronicle. And Harvard University Press’s director, William P. Sisler, says in an e-mail via the publisher’s publicity department that “we expected controversy” and that the press has “no second thoughts” and “no plans for revisions (at this time).”
No one disputes that the major film studios—Columbia, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, United Artists, Universal, Warner Bros.—all tailored their 1930s products in response to the Motion Picture Production Code, to myriad municipal film-review boards, to a public often antagonistic to Jews, and to motion-picture business interests abroad.
But Mr. Urwand found evidence suggesting that the studios were not merely self-censoring in an effort to satisfy shareholders, audiences, and industry and government monitors. He asserts that the studios worked in detailed coordination with Nazi officials, putting profits above principles.
‘Slanderous and Ahistorical’
Largely through the Third Reich’s vice consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, the Nazi-Hollywood relationship gave Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, effectual power over what films got made, what scenes got cut, which stars and filmmakers were blacklisted, and which Jewish studio employees in Germany were fired, Mr. Urwand writes. The Germans demanded a say not just over American films screened in Germany but over those shown worldwide.
Mr. Urwand writes that Germany wouldn’t allow the studios to take their profits out of the country. Paramount and 20th Century Fox circumvented that restriction by shooting newsreel footage in Germany that they could sell worldwide. However, the Nazis determined what footage those newsreel crews could film and how that footage would be used for studio-produced Nazi propaganda shorts, the book says.
Mr. Urwand also asserts that MGM, trying to retrieve some of its revenue frozen by the Nazi government, lent money to firms that manufactured Nazi armaments in Austria and the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia taken over by Germany in 1938), received bonds in exchange for those loans, then sold the bonds to an American bank. “In other words—the largest American motion-picture company helped to finance the German war machine,” Mr. Urwand writes.
The book follows the spring publication of Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press), by Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University. Mr. Doherty’s book argues that the studio heads were guilty of nothing more than being hardheaded businessmen during a time of ethical, political, and economic complexity.
Goldberg McDuffie, a New York publicity firm hired by Harvard University Press, denigrated Mr. Doherty’s book as relying on “flawed, superficial accounts in domestic trade papers.” Mr. Doherty, an occasional contributor to The Chronicle Review, fired back in The New York Times, The Chronicle, and The Hollywood Reporter, where he wrote: “I consider Urwand’s charges slanderous and ahistorical—slanderous because they smear an industry that struggled to alert America to the menace brewing in Germany and ahistorical because they read the past through the eyes of the present.”
A ‘Convoluted Fairy Tale’
Mr. Urwand’s book was endorsed, among others, by Greil Marcus, a cultural critic and journalist who was on Mr. Urwand’s dissertation committee at the University of California at Berkeley, and by the University of Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, who in jacket copy called it “full of startling and surprising revelations, presented in exemplary fashion, without any moralizing or sensationalism.”
But in The Chronicle and elsewhere, Mr. Doherty’s doubts have been echoed by other scholars. For instance, Steven Carr, a communications professor at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne and co-director of its Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, thinks that audiences of the 1930s were able to decode the Production Code-scrambled political meanings of films they saw and that the studios might have been guided by the State Department to keep a hand in Germany as long as possible.
Mike Greco, a journalist and film historian, slammed Mr. Urwand’s book in a publication of the American Film Institute as a “convoluted fairy tale.” Merve Emre, a doctoral student in English at Yale, called Mr. Urwand’s book “the dark magic of a historian’s misreadings across otherwise fascinating archives.” She writes that, “at its worst, The Collaboration proceeds by insinuation rather than proof, clumsily contorting its archival findings to fit Urwand’s agenda of character assassination.”
But it was Mr. Denby’s critiques in The New Yorker that elevated the controversy’s profile and pitch. Not only does he amplify the misgivings of Mr. Doherty and others. He also takes issue with myriad details, including some chronologies in Mr. Urwand’s account. He criticizes Mr. Urwand for not providing more evidence of studio heads’ motives and of the balance sheets that would have driven them to dance greedily with the fascist devils.
And though Mr. Denby says he was initially impressed by Mr. Urwand’s point on studio news crews’ compliance with Nazi mandates on news-footage edits, he says Mr. Urwand undermined that assertion himself in a radio interview in which he explained that the raw footage had actually been sent back to the States for editing and distribution—in other words, reporting, not Nazi propaganda.
5 Peer Reviewers
While the History News Network excerpted in June an enthusiastic review of Mr. Urwand’s book in the Webzine Tablet, last week the network was, in reference to Mr. Denby’s critique, conducting a poll on the question “Should Harvard University Press conduct a review of ‘The Collaboration’?”
Mr. Urwand’s letter to The New Yorker’s editor addresses, yet again, points about his use of the term “collaboration,” what the studio heads knew about Nazi persecution of Jews in the mid-1930s, the financing of the newsreels, the role of the Production Code in relation to the studios, and the timing of the studios’ exits from Germany.
By telephone, Mr. Denby says that he read the letter and that it simply restates points already refuted.
Harvard University Press’s Mr. Sisler writes: “We don’t know why Denby has been so critical of the book, but there is a concerted effort by Alicia Mayer, great-niece of [the MGM boss] Louis B. Mayer, to undermine the book. We don’t know whether this affected Denby.” Mr. Sisler is referring to posts by Ms. Mayer at a site called Hollywood Essays.
Mr. Denby counters that Ms. Mayer wasn’t manipulating anyone into writing anything, and that he hadn’t heard of her until the middle of last week.
Mr. Sisler also writes that “the manuscript was recommended to us by a Harvard faculty member, and seconded by another. It was read for us by five readers, and revised by the author in response to the reviews.”
So what?, says Mr. Denby. He doesn’t care who read it or how many of them there were. “They couldn’t have read it closely,” he says. There are “basic things that do not make sense ... failures of scholarship, of logic, of reason, and of relevance” in a book that got past a Berkeley dissertation committee and a Harvard publisher, he says. “Something’s screwy.”
