Karl Ritter's personal clippings album for

                       Capriccio (D; 1938)

During the filming of the comedy Capriccio, starring Lillian Harvey, Ritter had his first dispute with  Dr. Joseph Goebbels. (see Goebbels’ diary entries for 1938, Chapter 9). The film was assigned to Ritter by Ufa in August ’37 based on an idea proposed by Harvey to the film studio in 1935. By the time filming was to commence, Harvey had fallen foul of Goebbels due to her intervention on behalf of persecuted individuals and her reported anti–NS comments.

After filming began, Ritter was summoned to the Propaganda Ministry on 13 January ’38 and spent an hour convincing Goebbels that the film was now too far advanced to be cancelled. Ritter’s diary entry stated:

I have to go to Goebbels. At one o’clock!  In the midst of preparations, he wants to stop. Is against the film material. I fall almost to my knees in front of him; entreat him, that it was not possible to make a state political film with Lillian Harvey. I at least knew how not to tell him how far we are with expenses etc. I must have spoken with the tongues of angels because after an hour he picked up the order of discontinuance. But he warned me! Urgently! I left his study with trembling knees.

On May 5th Ritter was summoned again to the Propaganda Ministry, where Goebbels’ State Secretary Hanke confronted him. Ritter’s diary reads:

Hanke appeared with other gentlemen....a terrible bit followed…Hanke had some scenes from Capriccio shown. Then broke off and read a scathing letter from his minister, Goebbels...Main thrust: the films in the Third Reich should not look like that! He wished to see no more such -etc.

Excerpt from:
Karl Ritter – His Life and ‘Zeitfilms’ under National Socialism, pp.24–25  Available to purchase in our Book & Poster Store.

On August 16, 2010 we won at auction the personal newspaper article and film review clippings  Capriccio album of director Karl Ritter. This was at a time when we were still researching and about to compose the first edition of the Karl Ritter biography.  We paid US$100 plus postage to the seller in Argentina.  We also bought afterwards his only other Ritter items, a few snapshots of the young future Director as a soldier in WWI.

We presume that Karl Ritter kept a clippings album for all his films. We have never seen another such album either in archives or museums. In July 2014 Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld published the book THE PLACE OF POLITICS IN GERMAN FILM,  with a chapter on Karl Ritter's Capriccio (1938) using information from the Collection, drawing on the personal film clipping Capriccio album of Karl Ritter and other materials. (Chapter 4, by Valerie Weinstein, "Third Reich Film Comedy as a Place of Politics: Masculinity, Marriage, and Mayhem in Karl Ritter's Capriccio," pp. 85–104). 

BELOW we show some images form the album, including Ritter's business card at the time he and his family migrated to Argentina after WWII.  The album has forty full album pages crammed with newspaper articles on the film, and film reviews from all over the Reich, from other European capital cities, from Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere.