National Socialism and literary adaptation: Gustaf Grundgens's Der 'Schritt vom Wege' and Helmut Kautner's 'Kleider Machen Leute'

Eric Rentschler argues that 'film production in the Third Reich offers a st rikingly concrete example' of the theoretical construct of 'the dominant ci nema' ('Hollywood') devised by film theorists. But is the era of 'Germany's Hollywood' ideological in the same way as Hollywood, or in a different way ? Consideration of National Socialist adaptations of non-Nazi texts may hel p one determine the specific meaning of the ideological in the Nazi context . The admittedly small area of National Socialist literary adaptation acqui res a disproportionately revelatory potential due to the clearly perceptibl e disparities between the original, pre-Nazi texts and their Nazi-era rewor kings. The adaptations considered here are Gustaf Grundgens's Der Schritt v om Wege (1939), based on Fontane's Effi Briest--a particularly problematic work for National Socialist ideology--and Helmut Kautner's version of Gottf ried Keller's Kleider machen Leute (1940), whose admission of its own appro ximate relationship with the original narrative seems to dismiss the probab ly irresoluble problem of fidelity to the original, but which is also probl ematic.