Tekenfilm als gids voor Duitsers. Hugo Marshall Plan Filmpjes

Abstract

The Marshall Plan is mostly remembered for its allegedly stimulating impact on the economic recovery of Western Europe. While scholars have questioned this aspect, the effects of soft power, however, cannot be overestimated for a young generation of Europeans. If we agree with David Ellwood that “nothing like culture adds value—and values—to power”, then travelling exhibitions, photographic stories, poster competitions, radio reports and documentary films represent a powerful arsenal of multimedia productions persuading European audiences to a) embrace ideas of democracy, b) foster intra-European collaboration, and c) recognize the benefits of a free-market consumer society via modern productivity American-style. Transnational studies have long emphasized processes of mediation, migration, hybridization, and circulation as key elements of international and transcultural encounters and confrontations. European complicity in producing, disseminating, and circulating iconic images helped to create the myth of the Marshall Plan whose repercussions are still evident today. Renewed calls for new Marshall Plans to solve major crises from Covid to climate change and most recently the recovery of war-torn Ukraine abound. What is missing in the socio-cultural discourse about a kind of Marshall Plan 2.0 Reloaded is the question of how to translate abstract concepts into a framework of easy-to-understand signs and symbols to reach citizens and a new generation of Europeans: children. In the following article, I will take a close look at a special dimension of the Marshall Plan propaganda that has often been pushed to the margins: the visual grammar of animation films. Rather than turning to the American term “animation” or the Dutch “tekenfilm”, I am using the German expression for animation films, “Zeichentrick.” It reveals a crucial feature of the medium, namely a tricky (sic) combination of signs and symbols. How can we map the transnational grammar of “Zeichentrick” in Marshall Plan propaganda? Why were these films not produced in Germany? The US information staff of the Marshall Plan headquarters were doubtful to what degree German artists in the film industry could be reliable collaborators. As the head of the Documentary Film Unit, Information Services Division, OMGUS, Berlin, Stuart Schulberg explained that Germans lacked both the skill and the mindset to actively engage in democratic educational films. Schulberg located the reason in the “long isolation and ... their unfamiliarity with the basic idea that we are trying to put across, not to mention the spirit and technique.” Germany represented a special case for the film program. Therefore, as Schulberg argued, the German artists needed “more guidance than in any other country.” The six short, animated films collectively called “Hugo at the Circus” by Toonder Studios about the German caricature Hugo with a self-inflated ego consisted of Hugo am Trapez (Hugo in the Circus), Hugo macht Musik (Hugo and the Harp), Hugo baut auf (Hugo and the House of Europe), Hugo als Kleingärtner (Hugo`s Garden), Hugo als Kraftmax and Hugo als Dompteur. I will investigate the grammar of graphics employed in the films by creating interpictorial clusters (Hebel, Mitchell) based on the rich corpus of visual sources of the Marshall Plan information campaigns between 1948 and 1952. Contrary to the assumption that Marshall Plan film makers in the 18 ERP countries had a lot of freedom in framing their stories of intra-European collaboration, the case of the Hugo films shows how Americans intervened and shaped the animation sequences in the Dutch animation studio. By uncovering the strategies behind the animation program and mapping the European-American imagery to educate West German audiences, this article will reveal the carefully constructed use of soft-power across different media to exert influence on and redirect German self-interests towards transnational goals. Today, Germany is by far the largest European trading partner of the Netherlands. Who would have thought that Hugo was a transnational Trojan Marshall Plan horse from the Netherlands to educate German children about their future role in a United States of Europe?