Weimar Cinema Aesthetics and Thematics: Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"

The pioneering Soviet Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, in the 1920s, once described the silent cinema of the Weimar Republic as a “barbaric carnival of the destruction of the healthy human infancy of our art.”[1] Equally harsh, in the 1983, the German expatriate Hollywood actress Marlene Dietrich dismissed the films of her native tongue and early career as “trashy” and “rubbish.”[2] These are just two disparaging and mordant remarks by two cinema-artists who, serendipitously, during the period of 1918 to 1933, had loose connections to the Weimar cinematic culture and industry. Regardless of being positive or negative, there has been much commentary, criticism and debate devoted to the cinematic milieu of this liminal historical period since its emergence in 1918. The first accounts were from those of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s, critiques by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Siegfried Kracauer among others, most of them revised and refortified their theses after the Second World War.[3] The most salient and renowned accounts of this cinema have been by Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner; Kracauer presents a psycho-sociological analysis in his From Caligari to Hitler (1947), meanwhile, Eisner provides an art historical perspective in her The Haunted Screen (1952). These two distinct post-WWII theses have become the two predominate grounds through which film historians have come to think and theorise about Weimar cinema. As a liberal framework and a rough timeline, the Weimar period can be divided into two halves, the first being from 1918 through to 1927 wherein Expressionism, as an avant-garde art movement, and the desolating aftermath of the First War World predominantly affected the aesthetics and thematics of the films, and the second half from 1928 to the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor in 1933 with the rise of New Objectivity and the growing popularity of the National Socialist ideology. This cinema, due to its unique historical context and placing, invites, more than any other, a socio-historical analysis. Moreover, what is also problematic is considering Weimar cinema within a German national cinema discourse, as most scholarly works have held the belief that German cinema is best defined and understood almost exclusively through an isolated engagement of the three milieux of Weimar, Nazi and New German Cinema.[4]

This essay, as it has begun to discursively do so, will investigate the ways in which the social, political, historical and cultural contexts of the Weimar period have come to shape the aesthetics and thematic concerns of its cinema through a reading of the diverse accounts and debates from differing historical vantage points and perspectives. Such an endeavour will inevitably draw consideration to the historiographical approaches of these film theorists, to a need of evaluating the assumptions, biases and limitations of their writings. In fact, one of the first commentators on the Weimar cinema and culture, Georg Lukács, writing in the 1930s, even warned his readers of the essentially subjective nature of historical writing, and implored them to inspect and scrutinise the discourses and ideologies at play, particularly with concern for the historian’s own normative commitments; it seems as though Lukács had foreshadowed the multifarious, and sometimes conflicting, debates that the Weimar cinema would come to bring.[5] Lukács’ warning suggests that any reading of Weimar cinema is fundamentally just one interpretation, one view of (art/film) history in an ocean of histories. Accordingly, not only Kracauer and Eisner’s, but also Thomas Elsaesser and Richard McCormick’s readings, from the 1990s, of Weimar aesthetics and thematics, will be entertained and tested against an analysis of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919) and Fritz Lange’s Metropolis (1927).

As mentioned above, Kracauer and Eisner’s critiques have received substantial amounts of esteem and any new reading of Weimar cinema is required to acknowledge their works. Kracauer’s thesis of Weimar cinema as proto-fascist cinema and the linkage of film Expressionism to National Socialism has its origins in Lukács’ work.[6] Lukács, in 1934, argued that “Expressionism was undoubtedly one of the diverse bourgeois ideological currents that would later result in fascism,” Petro elaborates on his reasoning and explains that “[Expressionism’s] tendency towards subjectivism and romanticism linked it ideologically to the irrational mysticism of Wilhelmian philosophy, … one of the central sources of Nazi beliefs.”[7] This proposition was then extended by Kracauer in 1947 with his From Caligari to Hitler, wherein he exclaims that these films reflected “the inner dispositions of the German people.”[8] Kracauer’s argument is based upon the theoretical premise that social tendencies are best revealed in cultural phenomenon, in popular culture; this relationship, however, is not an entirely neutral one either as he contends that Weimar cinema, comprised of Expressionism and Abstractionism, was also susceptible to fascist Nazi manipulation and control, and therefore incapable of fully revealing the visible social world.[9] Yet, the aesthetics and thematics of a large number of Weimar films did reveal an aura of gloom, fatalism and disorientation, which Kracauer clearly saw as psychological manifestations of the Germans’ predisposition for authoritarianism. Kracauer attributes this aura to Expressionism and consequently blames the movement for providing a means to Hitler’s accession; that Expressionist cinema with its preoccupation with the fantastic, the Gothic and the purely formal qualities of the film medium had diverted the German audience’s attention away from immediate social realities. He writes: “the bulk of German people could not help submitting to Hitler … [because] … it all was as it had been on the screen. The dark premonitions of a final doom were fulfilled.”[10] Thus German film Expressionism with its evocation of the Gothic, though traditionally considered a high point in cinema history, becomes an example of all that cinema must avoid; for Kracauer, instead of bringing about the redemption of German life, this cinema had brought about its regression due to being both inclined towards and manipulated by Nazism.[11]

In contrast, Eisner theorises Weimar cinema from an art historical perspective and sees it as a development, and evolution, of German Romanticism, wherein the “modern technique [of cinematography] … merely lends a visible form to Romantic fancies.”[12] She asserts that this period, strongly “stimulated” by dual influences of Max Reinhardt’s theatre and Expressionism, was the greatest period of German cinema. Eisner illustrates that the German attraction to the Gothic amplified during the First World War; that “mysticism and magic, the dark forces to which Germans have always been more than willing to commit themselves, [had] flourished in the face of death on the battlefields”[13] and consequently led to a revival of German Romanticism. This revival saw German artists tend to a new kind of brooding speculative reflection called ‘Grübelei,’ which eventually culminated in Expressionism.[14] Moreover, Eisner also notes that the social and economic conditions of poverty and constantly insecurity helped to fuel German enthusiasm in this “apocalyptic doctrine.”[15]

In her analysis of Dr. Caligari, Eisner informs that both the prologue and epilogue of the film were added as an afterthought in the face of objections from its authors Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz. The aim of these modifications was to falsify the action and ultimately reduce it to the ravings of a madman, when really, the intention of the authors was to unmask the absurdity of asocial authority as represented by Dr. Caligari, the superintendent of a lunatic asylum and proprietor of a fairground sideshow.[16] This structuring of the narrative, however, fits well with the artistic direction and style of the sets, which decidedly have a “gloomy hallucinatory atmosphere” to them.[17] These sets, though often criticised for being too flat, have visual and textural dimensionality; a depth, Eisner argues, that “comes from deliberately distorted perspectives[,] from narrow, slanting streets which cut across each other at unexpected angles … [and] the inclined cubes of dilapidated houses.”[18] The sets come to adopt aesthetic attributes of Expressionist paintings and sculptures and, through that, play a crucial role in affecting both the stylisation of the acting (as other figurations within the Expressionist tableau) and, thematically, the characters of Cesare and Caligari (the former as the somnambulist who kills without motive or logic and the latter who, lacking in human scruples, acts with the criminal insensibility and defiance of conventional morality, which the Expressionists foresaw as being pervasive in society).[19] For Eisner, it is the aesthetic qualities of the Expressionist German film, and the Gothic ideology already imbued within the aesthetic, that facilitates a reflection of German society.

Meanwhile, the critiques of Weimar cinema by historians writing in the 1990s seem to be less fatalistic and less inclined to narrativise the films in terms of only Nazism. This is possibly because with the advantage of time passing and the impartiality of hindsight, one is better able to see the underlying currents and trends of a society than when social-political events and tragedies are still current and prevailing. Thomas Elsaesser in his article ‘Social Mobility and the Fantastic’ (1990) perceptively argues a case for the thematic concern of economic success and social mobility, and how it gets encoded in fantastic forms, as evident in certain Weimar films. He notes that though it is not only pertinent to Germany, the possibility of improving one’s fortunes does have special prescience for the Weimar period.[20] Elsaesser links this theme back to the Germany of Bismarck, wherein small feudal courts and petty aristocratic principalities were superseded by an industrial bourgeois nation-state, yet still prevalent was an elitist feudal social mentality.[21] This social mobility seemed to be most achievable in the democratic Weimar period and so most German films utilised the Gothic Expressionist aesthetic to elucidate this. But this ideological message that the films conveyed did have a contradictory element to it, Elsaesser writes:

“On the one hand, it is the direct expression of the ambition and desire of that class who seeks refuge in cinema because their real prospects are so limited. On the other hand, being chosen by fate and chance for social success is itself a distorted version of class-struggle, insofar as a personal, individual solution is offered by the film, while the question of the whole class or group is blocked off and suppressed. [This form or representation of] Social rise is thus a version of the class struggle that denies the existence of this struggle.”[22]

Elsaesser pinpoints this in Dr. Caligari in the Gothic-fantastic figure of the sorcerer’s apprentice, whereby the personal struggle of Cesare in overcoming Caligari’s magic forces and regaining his agency comes to figuratively represent that of the working class, who are constantly overruled by the authoritarian military class and their decisions for the course of German history. Moreover, this figuration of Cesare also symbolises the fears of industrialisation, developed capitalism and modernity, of the workers’ divorcement from their product and the artist’s loss of control of his work of art.

Elsaesser recalls that after every failed revolution, in 1798, 1848, 1918, 1968, Germany experiences a revival of romantic art and fantastic Gothic literature; that Goethe’s Faust, Hoffmann’s Prague, Herzog’s Aguirre, Caligari and Metropolis’ Rotwang all have a kindred bond in that they come to help express Germany’s frustrated desire for change rather than resistance to it.[23] This concept is metaphorically expressed through Dr. Caligari’s multiple Oedipal scenarios as permitted by the film’s unique multi-perspectival framing. The sexual repression attached to the ‘Oedipalised’ father-daughter and father-son relations comes to stand as a substitution for social and political repression, for the younger generation’s inability to supersede the older generation’s authority.[24] Elsaesser recognises that it is the Gothic aesthetic and fantasy genre’s aptitude for representing current conflicts as well as disguising them that enables Weimar films to express such complex and deeply rooted social issues. This melding of the German past with the present suggests a sense of historical continuity and a way of working through contemporary class relations, sexuality and authoritarianism inoffensively.[25]

There is, however, an aspect of Elsaesser’s article that is perplexing and problematic. He criticises Kracauer’s “double reduction” methodology, Kracauer’s narrativising of German (film) history wherein all events are seen to lead up to Hitler and fascism, and instead calls for a more organic interpretation of Weimar cinema.[26] Yet, strangely, he coerces the films in his analysis to his reading of social mobility and consequently makes the two paragraphs written prior redundant.[27] Possibly, Elsaesser is suggesting that Weimar cinema can be viewed beyond the Nazi discourse.

McCormick in his essay ‘From Caligari to Dietrich’ (1993) theorises Weimar cinema in terms of Feminism, women’s social liberation and the male anxiety attached to this. He, like Elsaesser with social mobility, acknowledges that though this is a universal theme pertinent to all modern societies, it has special relevance with the cinema of the Weimar Republic.[28] This is because historically the Weimar Republic was the first democratic constitution to offer women the promise of legal equality. Both Weimar society and its films saw the emergence of a ‘new woman’ who exercised unprecedented forms of both social and sexual autonomy.[29] This proto-Feminist mentality was further perpetuated by the exponential visibility of gay and lesbian subcultures coexisting in Berlin, as well as the progressive political struggles of repealing abortion and homosexuality.[30] These changes to the German mentality and patriarchal authoritarian status quo inescapably led to mass male anxiety over castration. McCormick notes that this mass anxiety was manipulated by the Weimar cinema, and overtly enacted out and thematised.[31]

Lang’s Metropolis, the last Weimar Expressionist film, is an interesting film to test the argument that McCormick presents on Weimar cinema. In considering Metropolis’ narrative and characterisation, it almost seems as though Lang and his screenwriter, Thea von Harbou, were presciently aware of the masses’ fear of women’s liberation and the media’s (and other films’) victimisation of women and other minority groups as the source of society’s instability. In the film, the human Maria is kidnapped by the inventor-sorcerer Rotwang, as ordered by the city’s authoritarian ruler Joh Fredersen, and her image is replicated into the robot Maria. It is the robot Maria who, under the control and order of her kidnapper and Fredersen, incites and inspires a workers’ revolt, which eventually leads to a near destruction of Metropolis. After initially having the workers on her side, her destructive (sexual) potential is then realised and she becomes the scapegoat through which society redeems itself, returning back to the patriarchal status quo. Appropriately, robot Maria is burnt at the stake like the witch she is perceived as. Yet when retracing the narrative’s causal origin, it is evident that the true destructor of Metropolis is its ruler. Lang seems to be suggesting that real social and political changes still remain at the hands of men in positions of authoritative power. The machinic Maria comes to be a martyr figure; she is subjected to all the shame that a typical Pandora attracts, but is not the source for man’s downfall or castration.

Moreover, even though the film is set in the future, it evokes plenty of Gothic themes and aesthetics. Metropolis seems to be fascinated by death with the most blatant case being the personification of the seven deadly sins and the Grim Reaper. Death is aligned with the machines, first the Moloch machine that feeds off the workers’ flesh and second the robot Maria. With its second connection to Maria, there seems to resurface a notion that anything that renders men redundant or castrated is deathly.

In conclusion, this essay has attempted to explicate the various interpretations of Weimar cinema and, in particular, account for the ways in which they see Weimar cinema aesthetics and thematics to be affected by the historical context of the period. The theories of Kracauer, Eisner, Elsaesser and McCormick were considered against a textual reading of Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Lang’s Metropolis, revealing that any interpretation of a text is still just one interpretation, likewise, any reading of the Weimar cinema is ultimately still just one reading of film history, with the historiographical approach being half the story. Kracauer argues a case for Weimar cinema as proto-fascist cinema, meanwhile, Eisner sees it as an extension of German Romanticism. Both post-war authors seem to suggest that the Expressionist aesthetic, with its implicit Gothic ideology, has the capacity to reflect the German psychology felt during the Weimar period. In contrast, the two 1990s theorists, Elsaesser and McCormick view the Gothic motif as a means of connecting present events to the past and critiquing contemporary German society via its past; both Elsaesser and McCormick, in formulating their theses, attempt to shift discussion on Weimar cinema away from Nazism, and lead it towards other sociological phenomena of social mobility and women’s liberation.

Bibliography

Bergfelder, Tim. ‘Part One: Popular Cinema’. In Tim Bergfelder. Erica Carter. Deniz Gokturk. Eds. The German Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute. 2002.

Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘Griffith, Dickens, and the Film Today’. Reprinted in Thomas Elsaesser. Ed. Space, Frame, Narrative: An Early Cinema Reader. Norwich: University of East Anglia. 1986.

Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Trans. Roger Greaves. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1969.

Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Social Mobility and the Fantastic: German Silent Cinema’. In Mike Budd. Ed.. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. 1990.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1947.

McCormick, Richard W. ‘From Caligari to Dietrich: Sexual, Social, and Cinematic Discourses in Weimar Film’. In Signs. Vol. 18. No. 3. Spring 1993. 640-668.

Petro, Patrice. ‘From Lukács to Kracauer and beyond: Social Film Histories and the German Cinema’. In Cinema Journal. Vol. 22. No. 3. Spring 1983. 47-70.

Petro, Patrice. ‘The Woman, the Monster and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’. In Mike Budd. Ed. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. 1990.

Filmography

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1919)

Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

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[1] Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Griffith, Dickens, and the Film Today’, reprinted in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Space, Frame, Narrative: An Early Cinema Reader, Norwich: University of East Anglia, 1986, p. 260.

[2] Patrice Petro, ‘The Woman, the Monster and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’, in Mike Budd, ed., The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990, p. 164.

[3] Tim Bergfelder, ‘Part One: Popular Cinema’, in Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, Deniz Gokturk, eds., The German Cinema Book, London: British Film Institute, 2002, p. 3.

[4] Tim Bergfelder, p. 1.

[5] Patrice Petro, ‘From Lukács to Kracauer and beyond: Social Film Histories and the German Cinema’, in Cinema Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3, Spring 1983, p. 47.

[6] Patrice Petro, op. cit.

[7] Patrice Petro, p. 48-49.

[8] Patrice Petro, p. 51.

[9] Patrice Petro, p. 52.

[10] Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, p. 272.

[11] Patrice Petro, p. 52.

[12] Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969, p. 113.

[13] Lotte Eisner, p. 9.

[14] Lotte Eisner, op. cit.

[15] Lotte Eisner, op. cit.

[16] Lotte Eisner, p. 18.

[17] Lotte Eisner, op. cit.

[18] Lotte Eisner, p. 21.

[19] Lotte Eisner, p. 25-27.

[20] Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Social Mobility and the Fantastic: German Silent Cinema’, in Mike Budd, ed., The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990, p. 174.

[21] Thomas Elsaesser, p. 172.

[22] Thomas Elsaesser, p. 174.

[23] Thomas Elsaesser, p. 172-3.

[24] Thomas Elsaesser, p. 186.

[25] Thomas Elsaesser, p. 172.

[26] Thomas Elsaesser, p. 173.

[27] Thomas Elsaesser, p. 174.

[28] Richard W. McCormick, ‘From Caligari to Dietrich: Sexual, Social, and Cinematic Discourses in Weimar Film’, in Signs, Vol. 18, No. 3, Spring 1993, p. 641.

[29] Richard W. McCormick, op. cit.

[30] Richard W. McCormick, p. 642.

[31] Richard W. McCormick, op. cit.