Abstract
This paper presents findings from archive research recently undertaken in Berlin and Wiesbaden into the scoring of early German sound films from the period 1928-1933. Music’s role in delineating the feminine persona will be examined in Leni Riefenstahl's Bergfilm Das blaue Licht (1932, music by Giuseppe Becce), revealing characterizations and cultural representations at odds with prevailing escapist fare depicting women as little more than fashion mannequins. This film and its scoring suggest that there was considerable tension between the demands of mass media, ideas expressed in contemporary literature on the ‘New Woman’ and the workplace (Siegfried Kracauer, Max Brod, Elsa Herrmann), the role of women’s movements in the Weimar Republic, and the historical reality of women’s societal conditions in post-First-World-War Germany, over which hung the spectre of Paragraph 218.