GERMAN CINEMA AND GERMAN SOCIETY
The German cinema of the 1920s, with its morbid subject matter and extreme stylization, has encouraged film researchers to treat the films as reflecting larger social trends. In a controversial study, Siegfried Kracauer has argued that the films of the era after World War I reflect the German people’s collective psychological desire to submit themselves to a tyrannical leader. Using this argument, Kracauer interprets many German films as prefiguring Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s. See his From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). In his study, however, Kracauer ignores all the imported films German audiences were seeing in the 1920s. Moreover, he gives equal interpretive emphasis to popular films and to films that few people saw.
Nod Carroll criticizes Kracauer and offers an alternative view of German Expressionism in his “The Cabinet of Dr. Kracauer,” Millennium Film Journal 1/2 (spring/ summer 1978): 77-85. Paul Monaco attempts to improve on Kracauer by employing the criterion of popularity; see his Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the Twenties (New York: Elsevier, 1976). Tom Levin provides material for a further study of Kracauer’s work in “Siegfried Kracauer in English: A Bibliography,” New German Critique 41 (spring/summer 1987): 140-50.
EXPRESSIONISM, NEW OBJECTIVITY,
AND THE OTHER ARTS
German culture of this era has received an enormous amount of attention. John Willett has written several overviews. His Art and Politics in the Weimar Period, 1917-33 (New York: Pantheon, 1978) relates German culture to the international scene. Willett offers an excellent introduction in Expressionism (New York: World University Library, 1970); The Theatre of the Weimar Republic (New York: Holmes & Meier,
1988), also by Willett, deals with late Expressionism, political theater, and the rise of Naziism.
Other overviews of the arts of this period are Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) and an anthology edited by Paul Raabe, The Era of German Expressionism (London: Calder & Boyars, 1974). Calder & Boyars has also published a series of translations of German Expressionist plays. For an introduction to both Expressionist and New Objectivity theater, see H. R Garten, Modern German Drama (New York: Grove Press, 1959). Several representative German Expressionist plays are available in An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama: A Prelude to the Absurd, ed. Walter H. Sokel (New York: Doubleday, 1963).
For an English-language introduction to New Objectivity, see Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979).
REFERENCES
1. Quoted in Rudolf Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film (1926; reprint, Zurich: Hans Rohr, 1965), p. 66.
2. “Faut-il supprimer les sous-titres?” Comoedia 4297 (27 September 1924): 3.
FURTHER READING
Barlow, John D. German Expressionist Film. Boston: Twayne, 1987.
Budd, Mike, ed. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Courtade, Francis. Cinema expressioniste. Paris: Beyrier,
1984.
Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, tr. Roger Greaves. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Jung, Uli, and Walter Schatzberg. “The Invisible Man Behind Caligari: The Life of Robert Wiene.” Film History 5, no. 1 (March 1993): 22-35.
Kasten, Jiirgen. Carl Mayer: Filmpoet: Ein Drehbuchautor schreibt Filmgeschichte. Berlin: VISTAS, 1994.
Kreimeier, Klaus. The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945. Robert and Rita Kimber, tr. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.
Saunders, Thomas J. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
World History
