In the November 2 issue of the NYRB, Ian Buruma has a very nice piece, "Weimar Faces," on the history of the Weimar Republic as exemplified in its art. Buruma fails to do the Weimar period justice, however, because he fails adequately to recognize the central art form that defined the Weimar period -- viz., film.
Buruma mentions, of course, that the German Republic, though founded in 1919 in Weimar, the city that gave it its name, moved to Berlin soon after the establishment of the Republic. He fails to mention, however, that Berlin was not only the capital of the Republic, but also the seat of the Ufa, founded two years before the Weimar Republic. With two major film studios in Babelsberg and Tempelhof, the Ufa made greater Berlin the film capital of Germany; indeed, at the time, Berlin rivalled Hollywood as the film capital of the world.
This is not yet to say, of course, that film was the paradigmatic medium of the Weimar Republic. When one examines the films of Weimar Germany, however, and the way that contemporary cultural critics of the day saw their world through the lens of film, one sees that one could arrive at no other conclusion about the way in which the filmic worlds created at that period in Germany -- and primarily in Berlin and its immediate environs -- crystallized the tensions evident in Weimar society at large.
Buruma mentions, in passing, Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel. He fails to mention Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, released one year after the birth of the Republic, in which the paranoid story of an insane doctor -- the Dr. Caligari of the film's title -- who uses a sleep-walking psychic as a murder instrument reveals itself, in the end, as itself the deranged delusions of a patient in an insane asylum under the control of ... a Dr. Caligari. The film was banned when the Nazis gained power in 1933 and was a prime exhibit in the exhibition of "entartete Kunst" in 1937.
Nor does Buruma mention F. W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens in which the image of the rat-infested ship bearing the vampire, Count Orlok, to Bremen strangely prefigures Hitler's assumption of power, some 11 years after the film's premiere, borne on a rat-infested ship of state, or Fritz Lang's M - Mörder unter uns from 1931, in which Lang beautifully illustrates the blurring of the boundaries between the criminal underworld and the public sphere of early 1930's Weimar Germany.
Beyond the myriad ways in which one might find resonances between the contents of the films of the Weimar period and the sociopolitical situation in which those films were made, there is the way in which the film medium itself and the preoccupations of film-makers of the time may be seen to stand in for the larger cultural situation in 1920's and '30's Germany. Murnau and Lang were both painfully aware of the precarious relations between film as an artistic medium and the earlier artistic media that, through incorporation and transformation, film seeks to displace -- primarily literature and static visual art. Those who saw, in film, a new art form were sensitive not only to the excitement of standing at the birth of a new medium, but also to the dizzying sense of "Bodenlosigkeit" -- of lacking a secure foundation from which to proceed. This same sense was present at the creation of the Weimar Republic -- the first democracy on German soil -- and in the case of the Republic, that sense was realized with tragic results; any precariousness of foundation carries with it the threat of a fall.
Indeed, these parallels were evident to the most clear-sighted critics of the day -- like Siegfried Krakauer, whose 1947 work From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film drew on Krakauer's earlier critical writings as a journalist and film critic for the Berlin newspaper, Die Frankfurter Zeitung. Another such critic was Krakauer's friend and colleague at the Frankfurter Zeitung, Walter Benjamin, whose essay "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" (see the pretty solid entry here) identifies film as the primary mechanism through which the notion of the work of art as characterized by its posession of a mystical, cultic "aura" will be destroyed; the foundation of "true" works of art on the basis of ritual will then be replaced by a foundation of such works on the basis of politics. It is an irony not lost on Benjamin that this new foundation not only involves the demystification of the world but also the replacement of that magical world with potentially two competing forms of interpreting the world whose victory could only be seen as an utter fall from grace: Stalinism and Hitlerism.
It is thus no accident that Weimer Germany, and, more specifically, Weimar Berlin, in serving as a fulcrum for the fight against two of the most pernicious blots on the history of Western culture, also served as the locus of one of the first flowerings of film -- as an art-form and as a focus of critical inquiry.
[Update: I just discovered that there is a Walter Benjamin festival going on right now in Berlin.]
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