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From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton Classic Editions)

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Here it is: probably the most insightful, psychologically brilliant and well researched study of the great early German films (1910-1940) ever written. The author's thesis is this: popular films are popular because they are the dreams shared by a people at any given time. If we study films as if they were keys to the subconscious of the audience, we gain tremendous insight into the culture and mass psychology of the time. The author builds a very convincing case for his thesis that the whole build up to Hitler can be found in the fims that preceded him. I am convinced. This book is also an excellent history of German film as the author is a very good film scholar. Now, if only we had someone around who could interpret the current films of the USA so that we could find out what the future holds in store for us! I loved this book. It was stimulating and I had seen most of the films that he writes about. One advantage todays readers have is that many of these films are no! w out on video.

This book shows how the cinema paralleled and sometimes helped form the German psyche. Yet it is more than just a documentary. This brings you from the beginning of the industry to show what Hitler inherited. However the information caries far beyond the political dimension.

I use it more for information on the film industry as a whole for that time and the basis of what we inherited today. It is interesting that from the beginning people complained that the film was to long and inclusive or too short and excluded characters form history or books.

Two good parallel and overlapping timeline books for the era are "Cagliari's Children: The Film As Tale of Terror" ISBN: 030680347X which is a different view on the same subject and "The UFA Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 23)"

They tried to capture the feel of the time and of the German actors' attitude toward film, in the movie "Shadow of the Vampire" (2001)

The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 23)

Not that any book can be impartial, but Kracauer's generally socialist reading of films should not be viewed as definitive.

With this point taken into account, this book does offer an imcomparable survey of early German film, its symbolism, and also, the early careers of such actors as Peter Lorre and Marlene Dietrich.

This book is a very entertaining study of these films, and a must for any student of modern Germany, or early film. It does perhaps reflect generally on the modern German society, and WWII in particular.

Having owned the previous edition of this flawed classic, written by Siegfried Kracauer, the brilliant Weimar era critic, during his American exile in World War II, I hesitated to buy this new edition. Now I am glad I did. The Italian film scholar Leonardo Quaresima is one of the major authorities on Weimar era cinema, but unfortunately little of his work has been translated into English. His "Introduction to the 2004 edition" is more than that--it is a major essay on Kracauer as a film critic, indispensable for anyone with more than a casual interest in the period. Abundantly footnoted, it offers a sober critical assessment of CALIGARI TO HITLER, discussing its gestation, its sources, its relationship to Kracauer's earlier film criticism, and its methodological premises, indebted to fellow German Jewish exile Erwin Panofsky's iconology.

This book has a tremendous reputation and is widely regarded as a classic, but it is a flawed classic. Siegfried Kracauer claims that we can see the political and mass-psychological development of Weimar Germany in its films. It is an interesting thesis. So, what's the problem?

Kracauer's political viewpoint heavily informs his analysis of German cinema during the Weimar Republic. He was a out-and-out Marxist and a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany. Needless to say, he was extremely bitter about the development of German history when he wrote this book in 1946/47 -- and with good reason. But his analysis is very politicized and snidely anti-German. Kracauer decries the lack of engagement with the social question, particularly along "Marxist" lines.* Throughout the book, Kracauer repeats quotes from and cites the opinions of the far-left-wing (quasi-communist?) film critic Harry Potamkin.

Moreover, much of the book is an indictment of the German people -- not for overtly supporting Hitler, but for their passivity. He consistently depicts Germans as obedient slaves to authoritarianism. As such, they were incapable of producing any truly great films (until 1930) and were even unable to produce good detective movies, he writes. In writing about Germany during the mid-1920s, when democracy was stable and the economy flourished, he writes that the German public was actually in a psychological "state of paralysis. Cynicism, resignation, disillusionment." Apparently, at the time, Germans should have been creating a new, anti-authoritarian, left-wing society. They should not have been making technically innovative, popularly entertaining films.

Serious historians of Germany do not depict the German people as a nation of war-mongering, boot-licking toadies who need orders to follow at all times and who then slavishly, unreflectively follow those orders. Scholars no longer believe in the from-Luther-to-Hitler thesis, and many historians dispute the "Sonderweg" theory of German history. So, why do they still use this book in their courses? Because there is nothing else so encyclopedic and because this book stands like a giant standing astride the field of German cultural studies. Kracauer seems to explicate virtually every film made in this era. It is not a popular opinion to express, but perhaps it is time to move beyond "From Caligari to Hitler" and time to seek more modern, more nuanced analyses of early German film.


*Kracauer prefers the term "Marxist" to "communist" or "socialist." He also seems to share the post-1945 view common among members of the Left that the communists and socialists should have opposed Hitler in a broad-based Marxist front. He doesn't mention the fact that Stalin's "social fascism" policy precluded such an alliance. Nor does he mention that the communist-socialist party alliances of 1945-1949 led to the communist dictatorship regimes throughout eastern Europe.