Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships | 117‘Radio Paris’ in 1933, and in Argentina radio was put under the auspices of the
Naval Ministry in 1929 and the allocation of licenses more strictly monitored.
Yet in Germany this upheaval was especially drastic: here radio was nation-
alised in 1932 under Chancellor von Papen, and in the same year the cabinet
was allotted one hour of broadcast time between 6.30 and 7.30 p.m. with the
‘Hour of the Government’. During his short term of office, Chancellor Franz
von Papen spoke on radio eighteen times but not once in the Reichstag (Lerg
1980: 453). Thus the way was paved for state radio propaganda, even before
the National Socialist (NS) takeover.
German Films and the Rise of Hollywood
The film industry also evinced great changes during the 1920s, including the
triumph of the American cinema. After international sales of European films
had already suffered during the war, the European film industry now com-
pletely broke down due to lack of capital. This meant that European producers
had no financial resources to make lavish films at precisely the time of the
movie boom that had begun after 1910 (Bakker 2005: 313, 342f.). Now the
United States could chalk up successes because its smaller production com-
panies had combined to form a few large, wealthy studios. There were many
other reasons for Hollywood’s success: a large domestic market and films made
to please the public’s taste, with directors and actors who had immigrated thus
making it easier to adapt to diverse markets. In the same manner the deliberate
promotion of stars and the construction of genres and trademarks fostered the
success of Hollywood, which sold itself as a name brand (Cousins 2006: 42f.).
While the proportion of American films rose significantly on the European
market, the share of European films shown in the United States since 1915
declined to less than 7 per cent. The big French film companies Pathé and
Gaumont sold their international business and concentrated entirely on the
domestic market, and the same holds true for Denmark. Others, like Éclair
and Cecil Hepworth in Great Britain, went bankrupt, as did a large segment
of the Italian film studios that had previously been strong exporters. Yet Amer-
ican film studios based in New York and Florida were also among the losers.
However, Hollywood could not reach every country. Japan was one of the
nations with a remarkable independent film tradition where Hollywood could
hardly succeed. In 1926 a cinema attendance of 150 million was counted in
Japan, and ten years later this had risen to over 230 million (Miyao 2013:
97, note 60). However, 90 per cent of the films were domestic productions,
making Japan an important producer of films. In the Soviet Union, about
one million people visited the cinema each day in the 1920s (Youngblood
1992: 25). In the early 1920s, the majority of those films came abroad, and