In Douglas Sirk's last UFA studios film, La Habanera (1937), the island of Tenerife poses as Puerto Rico, Caribbean culture translates as vague Hispanic pastiche, and Nazi propaganda speaks through Zarah Leander's trance performances in the course of the Spanish Civil War. Taking Sirk's singularly perverse visual text as a starting point, this article addresses the function of island spaces in Nazi melodrama, and explores how gendered bodies and family arrangements figure at critical moments in ideologically charged representations of insular Atlantic environments. The film's strategic inscription of insular stereotypes comments on fantasies of the defunct Spanish Empire and on the besieged Second Spanish Republic, as an indirect means of reflecting on colonialist desires in Nazi Germany.
