Depending then upon the particular interests and inclinations of the observer Parufamet became analogous either to the Versailles Treaty or to the Dawes Plan. Versailles, to Germans a dictated, vengeful peace, signified Germany’s defeat, war guilt and obligation to pay reparations. The Dawes Plan of 1924, while perpetuating the Versailles system, provided massive foreign loans to Germany, chiefly from the United States, to stabilize the economy. It thereby facilitated Germany’s readmission to the international community through the multilateral Treaty of Locarno (1925) and membership in the League of Nations. Against this backdrop Herbert Ihering noted with bitter irony that a company established to propagandize Germanness abroad now served the interests of Amerikanismus in Germany. Instead of fruitful cross-fertilization, German-American film ties resulted in the triumph of one national type. Parufamet symbolized not Locarno but Versailles, the imposition by one cinema culture of its values and methods on another.^[86] By contrast, the business editor of Berliner Tageblatt assumed UFA had been fortunate to gain a partnership with two leading American companies and endorsed the pact, artistically as well as commercially, for insuring Hollywood’s participation in UFA’s production. Parufamet resembled the Dawes Plan more than Versailles.^[87]

With hindsight it is possible to appreciate the logic in both perspectives. The former parallel is apt inasmuch as UFA’s recourse to American aid was equivalent to surrender in the film war projected early in the decade. Like Versailles, Parufamet outlined the meaning of defeat. At the same time Parufamet resembled the Dawes Plan in its extension of funding to a capital-hungry sector of the German economy. As a business transaction it exhibited advantages and disadvantages which could be isolated and discussed. Between the extremes of UFA’s platitudes about cooperation and the cultural pessimism about Americanization lay a realism appropriate to the new sobriety of the period. Yet Parufamet also symbolized the American phase in postwar German cinema. Like the Dawes Plan it stood for more than the sum of its individual parts, namely, German dependence on the United States and American influence in German affairs.^[88]

The attention drawn by Parufamet has obscured, both then and since, the extent to which alliances with American companies became the norm. At the beginning of 1925 National Film concluded a pact with Paramount to distribute American films in Germany and made no secret of plans to establish cooperative production or the appointment of an American representative to the board of directors.^[89] Later that year Bruckmann entered a distribution partnership with Universal, albeit with sharp denials that the latter had acquired any corporate control. The following year it signed a cooperative agreement with Warner Bros. covering production and distribution which effectively made it an American branch office.^[90] In 1926 Fox-Europa released its first productions, among them Der Trödler von Amsterdam and Die Mühle von Sanssouci, and later produced Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Sinfonie der Großstadt as well as Béla Balázs’s Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheins.^[91] United Artists extended its field of operations first with Phoebus-Film—here cooperation included appointment of Joseph Schenck to the Phoebus board—and then with Rex-Film under the directorship of Lupu Pick.^[92] First National enlisted prominent German personnel, initially Friedrich Zelnik and then Wilhelm Dieterle, for its production company. Deutsche Universal began to produce in Germany in 1927. Warner Bros. also signed an agreement with National Film for joint production.^[93] In all of these the trade press generally continued to find the promise of both respectable domestic production and export to America. Hollywood’s funding of German artistic, technical and business talent was preferable to paralysis of it through lack of domestic capital or loss of it altogether to the emigration.^[94]

Despite mixed responses to the Parufamet agreement, UFA also openly hitched its fortunes to the American market. Its new director, Ferdinand Bausback, appointed in the aftermath of Parufamet to restore financial accountability, announced that the age of expansion and bold experiments was over. That did not, however, mean eschewing the American market. Bausback publicly endorsed a policy of courting America, declaring that henceforth all UFA features would be suited for release in the United States. Even his assurance that the company would produce German rather than American motion pictures was qualified by the need to take “the mentality of the American public” into account.^[95] His plan was clearly to introduce rational business calculation on behalf of American sales. Hugenberg’s UFA followed a similar strategy. With eyes fixed squarely on the American market, in 1927 it rehired Erich Pommer, who had left the company and the country for Hollywood in 1926, as head of its world-class production team. Pommer was on contract from an American firm (Producers’ Service Corporation) with a specific mandate to create UFA films suitable for American release.^[96] Having demonstrated in the United States his skill at creation of “international” features, he was hired to duplicate the feat in Germany. His round trip from Berlin to Hollywood and back again parallels the larger circle of competition, defeat and cooperation experienced by Weimar cinema as a whole.

In the second half of the 1920s not only did America’s motion picture and corporate presence become the norm, but experts also favored, albeit with some reservations, Americanization of domestic production and promotional techniques in the interests of sales to the United States. German artists, technicians and executives routinely served the American market, if not American-backed domestic companies, and despite all the stigma attached to Hollywood generally congratulated each other for doing so. Without achieving full reciprocity they also had the satisfaction of seeing an increasing number of German features released in the United States. Thus a modus vivendi was reached—regularization of German-American film relations analogous to the relative stabilization of the period.

None of this denies the multiple grievances aired against American films or business methods. Theater owners repeatedly lamented not only the quality of the American product but the unfair practices by which it was foisted on them, particularly the blind and block booking system which obliged them to accept numerous unknown and unpopular pictures at inflated prices. Nor does it suggest that the American presence did not have other deleterious side effects. The most notorious of these was the temptation to produce cheaply in order to earn import certificates, thus depressing domestic standards while opening the market further to American imports.^[97] The more pervasive pressure, one met with considerable ambivalence, was to Americanize production to suit the American moviegoer.

Nevertheless, a one-dimensional model of outrage at American industrial inroads is clearly inadequate. The American phase in the German cinema, particularly the period of crisis following signing of Parufamet, also had positive features. UFA’s liaison with Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn meant American influence over the type of movies Germans would produce and consume but also a breathing space for Germany’s most important film concern. The desire to gain a foothold in the United States, the most potent single factor in Americanization of German production, recommended collaboration with American counterparts. Therefore, despite multiple sources of friction, partnerships with Hollywood were accepted as a fact of German cinematic life. On balance, the 1920s witnessed as much or more cooperation as competition between parties in opposite national camps.