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We must cover the city with a network of informers.

Each square meter must be under our permanent control.

No child in this city must take a step without our knowledge.

“Germany, where does it lie? I cannot seem to find this country.”

Weimar, the city of Goethe and Schiller,

gave Germany’s first republic its name.

Weimar Republic.

What a radiant beginning,

yet what a miserable end.

This first German republic has vanished,

degraded to a mere precursor even in our memories.

And yet, it was so much more.

1920s Germany was young and modern,

like these two girls on the left.

Brigitte and Christel, we shall meet them again later.

From Caligari to Hitler

German Cinema in the Age of the Masses

The Weimar Republic was a mass society on the move.

Berlin was its flitting metropolis,

a boomtown full of contradictions

that fascinated people across the globe.

How strange they seem, these people,

yet how similar they are to us.

What have those eyes seen?

Is there such a thing as a German glance?

What is the face of the Weimar Republic?

Wartime experiences, authoritarian thought?

Misery?

Hope?

Pride?

Happiness?

Maybe this country can be traced by its cinema?

Maybe it survived in its movies?

How strange those images look.

My father was born in this era. My grandfathers experienced it.

They were the same age as the young men in the films.

Gustaf Grundgens, for example.

This beast has no right to exist, it must be exterminated,

mercilessly, without any compassion.

A great actor, not at all one-dimensional.

Dazzling, ambiguous, just like his character and his times.

The safecracker in Fritz Lang’s M.

Grundgens’s black-gloved hand hovering over the city

is a symbol of violence, an eminently modern symbol,

representing connectivity, domination,

control and cybernetics.

The film is a symphony of horror in light and shadow.

The shadow of the future.

What does cinema know, that we don’t?

10,000 REICHSMARK REWARD! WHO IS THE MURDERER?

That’s a nice ball you have there.

What’s your name?

Light and shadow.

An actress and her audience.

Expressionism and sobriety.

A cool bath.

A kiss in the countryside.

Volatile images.

The Weimar cinema was mythical and modern,

portraying strict fathers,

wild daughters and beautiful women.

It created heroes...

and special effects.

It evoked fear and happiness,

it showed horrors and utopias.

It was playing — With utopias and transgressions,

with doppelgangers and loners.

People were laughing in German films. They were happy.

And they were in love.

Falling in love again Never wanted to

Which isn’t the same thing.

What arn I to do?

I can't help it

Their directors constructed surrealist images

of longing and romance.

I’m your new secretary.

Cinema was captivating by way of magic and mystery.

It made the hearts beat faster.

Let’s remember: All this is the history of German cinema.

All this lives on in our collective memory.

Again: hands over the city.

This time, from Mabuse.

| only discovered German silent films when I went to Paris.

Filmmaker

That’s where I saw films by Fritz Lang, Murnau

and others for the first time.

And l was instantly hooked.

And more than that,

these were finally fathers we could identify with.

The 1920s were all about discovering oneself

and trying things out.

Filmmaker

You can see this approach when you look at the actual films.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

From the very start, cinema was aware of its power.

It depicted this power,

suspending the boundaries between image and viewer.

Mysterious unearthly creatures. Stepping off the screen

and into the world of the audience.

Here, the audience is faced with their own astonishment.

The Golem Cinema’s earth-shattering power.

Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler Part II: lnferno

Also Fritz Lang’s Mabuse shows us a cinema situation.

Again, the audience is completely transfixed.

But this time, cinema literally comes to life and seizes power.

The screen seems to be unleashed.

Again, there is a seductive magician by the side of the screen.

Art and life seem to have merged completely.

It’s almost a miracle... Film Historian

that in a country so seriously damaged by the war,

we saw the reemergence of such an influential output

in culture and film.

Historian

Cinema was the art form of the emerging 20th century.

Within a few years, it became a mass medium,

with Germany as one of its centers.

Erich Pommer was one of German cinema’s first geniuses at UFA,

a producer who created cinema history.

Pommer intuitively grasped the mechanisms

of the international film business.

Furthermore, Erich Pommer did not so much invest in stars,

but in directors and scripts.

His masterpiece is Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

The mysterious magician Caligari appears at amusement parks.

He has turned his somnambulist creature Cesare

into a murder weapon.

He creeps into the bourgeoisie’s bedrooms,

committing his vicious deeds.

Caligari was born out of the “storm of steel,”

the mayhem of the First World War.

The film is about the war and its consequences,

about upheavals within society, the decay of values and of order,

about nothing remaining as it was,

about valuation and identity not being valid anymore.

Is the seemingly omnipotent manipulator himself a driven character?

Is he a mad scientist or curing the insane?

The film is deliberately vague about it.

It blurs the lines between authority and insanity.

All of society is in need of a straitjacket.

Film critic Siegfried Kracauer saw the film

as a subconscious anticipation of Fascism,

with Caligari as tyrant and society losing its sanity.

The dictator is already present

within the collective psyche.

Over the next few years,

tyrants would march across German cinema screens.

Villains and mass murderers emerged

from the subliminal German consciousness.

Manipulators and magicians, omniscient and omnipotent,

aspiring world rulers with infectious seductive powers.

And on the other hand their creations:

somnambulist, possessed,

only too willing to carry out their masters’ orders.

Why were there so many of them?

Where did they come from?

Anyone wishing to explain the history of German film

will have to answer these questions.

What does cinema know, that we don’t?

How can any of you know what goes on inside me,

how my innermost is shouting and screaming to me

forcing me to do it against my will,

I must do it, I don’t want to,

I must do it,

and then a voice is screaming.

I can’t stand it anymore! Help!

I would certainly agree with Kracauer when he says

that these are conceptualizations,

trying to make the world comprehensible,

which have a long tradition in Germany...

Cultural Scientist

and which are remarkably frequent in Weimar cinema,

much more so than in Hollywood at the time.

Born 1889 in Frankfurt, and raised there,

Siegfried Kracauer studied architecture and philosophy.

The free city of Frankfurt was the secret center of the Left-liberal.

It combined money and intellect,

and in the 1920s, became a center of the left-leaning avant-garde.

From the start, Kracauer thought more about the mundane than the abstract,

following his mentor, Georg Simmel.

In 1920, Kracauerjoined the Frankfurter Zeitung,

then the country’s leading paper for the educated middle classes,

where he quickly rose to become

one of the most renowned journalists of the republic.

Frankfurt was also home to the Marxist democratic Frankfurt School,

the “Institut fur Sozialforschung,” to which Kracauer associated himself.

The institute absorbed the cultural-revolutionary ideas

of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud,

amalgamating them into a new worldview,

no longer under the name “philosophy,” but “critical theory.”

Even the capital was taking on a new shape.

The new headquarters of lG Farben was a sensational building.

It had been designed by Hans Poelzig,

the set designer of Paul Wegener’s expressionist Golem.

Kracauer avoided peer pressure and university,

preferring to immerse himself in the thriving life of the new republic.

Like his friends Adorno, Benjamin and Lowenthal,

he was enthusiastic about the phenomena of the new mass society.

Kracauer wrote about anything, including theoretic works and novels,

but he focused on film criticism.

The volatility of cinema, always in motion,

appealed to Kracauer who was always on the move

and loved everything elusive.

It began with a revolution.

With the emperor ousted, the empire became a democracy.

But its foundation was weak.

The loss and financial debt of the war burdened the new first republic.

Pure chaos reigned, people were hunted in the streets.

Revolts, hundreds killed, mainly among liberals and the Left,

a civil war which kept flaring up.

Robert Reinert’s traumatic ronde Nerven,

with its hysteric mass scenes,

depicts the revolts that took place in Munich

after the end of the war,

portraying a deeply unsettled society trying to find its own identity.

The film is a torrent of shock and catastrophe.

It shows a bourgeois family descending

into a maelstrom of guilt and redemption.

Industrialists and prophets,

well-to-do female communists and psychiatrists.

A melodrama with expressive gestures and colors.

Nerven constitutes a different form of expressionism:

three-dimensional, without any spikes or lopsided walls.

Not set in a fairyland, but part of the real world.

Nerven is without doubt more modern than Caligari.

It is less influential, because it can’t be used as decor.

The film is a never-ending riot, in a constant state of flux.

Its star, Erna Morena,

was one of the great divas of the silent era.

Director Robert Reinert, a forgotten talent,

exemplifies the advent of the unconscious on German screens.

And he tells of the future,

the masses, crisis,

ideology.

The nervousness of the characters, and also the political upheaval,

is a reaction to the mass deaths of the First World War.

And you actually see all the dead,

haunting the cinema screen like apparitions in people’s minds.

So you could say the screen

becomes the collective thought process of an entire nation.

Who still remembers Robert Reinert,

Manfred Noa,

Karlheinz Martin,

Werner Hochbaum,

Henrik Galeen,

Richard Oswald, Reinhold Schunzel,

Marie Harder?

Great talents all of them,

they are among hundreds of forgotten directors of the Weimar era.

The new star directors were others:

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau,

Ernst Lubitsch,

Fritz Lang.

Destiny Cinema also always meant spectacle.

This was probably best understood by Fritz Lang,

whose stunning career coincided with the birth of the republic.

Destiny was an episodic film, delivering pure escapism,

such as the flying carpet in this scene.

Lang was a virtuoso, combining suspense and profoundness

with Lubitsch-like elements.

The Spiders

Lang’s trademark was combining cliched plots with formal imagination.

Lang turns the viewers into detectives,

showing them evidence, describing cognitive processes,

thus observing the mind at work.

Enlightenment as suspense.

Lang seems almost obsessed by certain archetypal scenes.

Spies Manhunt, wide-spread hysteria,

order versus chaos, system versus freedom,

and their confrontation.

A sick brain which is also independent.

The most modern film tyrant is Dr. Mabuse,

Mabuse is a hero of crime.

A faceless man wearing an ever-changing array of masks.

He wants power and money, but he’s also obsessed.

On some days, his behavior is entirely alogical,

and it is the alogical that constitutes Mabuse’s terror.

We don’t know him, but he knows everything about us.

He’s everyone and no one,

manipulating the masses as an invisible conductor

in a symphony of crime.

Mabuse symbolizes mass hysteria and the panic of the 20th century.

He personifies the unknown, the ungraspable,

absolute modernity,

dreams, visions, delirium and the abyss.

He is more volatile than all those who are on his trail.

Mabuse is impossible to catch.

This modern volatility likens him to ourselves.

Mabuse is the most contemporary hero of Weimar cinema.

The first Mabuse films are a product of the inflation period,

of its fears and insecurity,

but also of its speed and permanent time pressure.

Fritz Lang depicted a certain kind of German

who is almost soulless.

Filmmaker

It’s very much about power relations,

with matters of the heart or feelings

hardly ever making an impact.

This also relates to a specific kind of architecture,

to a kind of objectivity that may...

almost preclude any feelings,

or at least restrain them.

The Doll

The director as world-constructor.

This is Lubitsch in the opening scene of The Doll.

He stages himself, lovingly, vain and full of passion.

What a confident performance!

Lubitsch was a director of comedy

and of the comedic recesses of human existence.

| Don’t Want to Be a Man

But he did produce other works.

While German streets still saw revolts,

he directed a distanced and ironic take on the French Revolution.

What he loved most, however, was the choreography of masses.

Here, he already depicts what Kracauer would later term

“The Mass Ornament.”

The Oyster Princess

It’s easy to see

why Lubitsch left for Hollywood shortly afterwards, in 1922.

Slowly, the republic was consolidating.

Free and progressive laws came in.

The new president was Friedrich Ebert,

the first Social Democrat in this position.

But the old authoritarian society still overshadowed anything new.

The military was a state within a state.

Many on the right were merely waiting to show their true face.

They did so on June 22, 1922.

The Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, a liberal Jew,

was murdered in broad daylight.

What Chancellor Wirth had shouted

in his speech against passionate opposition

was now obvious to all: “The enemy stands on the right.”

ASSASSINS IDENTIFIED AS MEMBERS OF “ORGANISATION CONSUL”

Foreign Minister

The biggest memorial service in German history.

The streets of Berlin.

Twenty-year-old Christel personifies the young generation,

putting all their hope into the new republic.

Freedom,

departure...

curiosity.

Christel wants to become an actress and starts as an extra.

The volatile, strolling movement typifies this period,

when everything was constantly changing.

But what is the flaneur’s worldview?

Kracauer still gives a good account of this.

“Reality is a mosaic, a construction.

Surely, life must be observed for it to appear.”

Kracauer was perhaps the most typical flaneur of his age,

compounding the modern experiences of the metropolis

to portraits of reality that were both dense and fragmentary.

A metropolitan writing about advertising, public transport,

anonymous passersby,

the cult of divertissement or just sauntering along.

His random perceptions combined to paint an overall picture of the age.

His friend Walter Benjamin called him

“a ragpicker on the eve of the revolution.”

Cinema was now also representing the lower working class,

although still from the perspective

of decent citizens looking down on them.

You can sense the alienation and cliched bias of these images.

Reinhold Schunzel’s adaptation of the novel

Das Madchen aus der AckerstraB e.

A lonely older man takes in a working-class girl

and teaches her manners and etiquette...

Pygmalion in Berlin.

It will be his downfall.

Nevertheless, these films show an unusually naturalistic

and realistic perspective.

But it tends to be the bourgeois characters of such melodramas

who are falling victim to the lower classes,

motivated not by misery, but by greed.

At least those films reflected reality.

Many were worse off during the first Weimar years.

For many people, the ’20s, with the inflation,

were anything but golden.

1923 — the Great lnflation.

500 BILLION MARKS Journey into the Night

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau repeatedly focused on men.

Men on the verge of nervous breakdowns,

men under pressure, stressed men,

established bourgeois men in crisis.

Murnau’s naturalism is one of landscapes, of wind and waves,

but not of feelings.

Everything is exaggerated in silent films.

It’s hard to take this entirely seriously.

Women are a threat to these men. They lead them astray.

They signify imposition and importunity.

The Haunted Castle

The Burning Soil

Murnau is a director of society,

but also a director of landscapes and a creator of myths,

a romanticist, whose work unifies melancholy and longing.

No film by Murnau is more famous than Nosferatu.

Yet again, it tells of a man overestimating his powers,

thinking he can take on a vampire, a countervvorld.

A naive German who encounters horror.

He is lost from the very outset.

His nightmarish journey into darkness is a journey into nature.

How often we see Murnau opening and closing doors.

They represent entry points to the closed-off realms of our soul.

The young man overstepping his limits

causes evil to come to Germany:

the terror,

the death, the rats.

A terrifying stranger,

an intruder stealing the wife of the brave German.

Is Murnau playing here with anti-Semitic stereotypes?

Like Caligari’s Cesare, Nosferatu is a murderous somnambulist.

But he is a different kind of sleepwalker,

he is master and slave combined.

Likewise, Nosferatu is as well a film about the German psyche,

about nightmares and creatures of the night.

Modern mythology infused with mysterious symbols.

It is also pure cinema, attempting to translate emotions into images,

to bring psychological processes to the surface of the cinema screen.

THE HAUNTED SCREEN

Lotte Eisner, an exiled German in Paris,

described expressionist Weimar cinema as “The Haunted Screen.”

The hauntedness is mainly inherent in the metaphysical designs.

Set designers Hans Poelzig, Otto Hunte and Walter Reimann

were the alchemists of these realms.

They created magical atmospheres and surreal worlds.

The unsettling takes shape.

Objects become strangely animated, they become landscapes of the soul.

Abyssal scenarios unfolded on German cinema screens.

The objects themselves are set in motion.

The train travels into the unconscious.

Psychopathological nightmares, directorial calculation

and neo-Gothic yearning.

Lotte Eisner with her colleagues of the Cinematheque Francaise

“The Haunted Screen” meant extreme artificiality,

hocus-pocus, crumbling idylls, catastrophic moods,

lust for destruction.

Cinema had only just been invented.

It was a fairground attraction,

part of Berlin’s “Luna” amusement park.

And then people like Fritz Lang

returned from the war in1918, 1919,

and proclaimed, “No, film is actually an art form.”

The Spiders

The return of illusion was reflected on the screen

by the popular adventure film genre.

Fritz Lang’s The Spiders features crossing the Cordillera,

and preventing Aztec-like human sacrifices.

The intended four-part series was a physical action film.

A German precursor to the Indiana Jones adventures.

Desert sands and Indian elephants in German studios.

The films reflect an increased demand for escapism and the exotic.

Joe May’s The Indian Tomb is a typical example.

The Indian Tomb

The script was by Fritz Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou.

The Flute Concert of Sans-Souci

Prussia represented a different kind

of longing for the Germans.

A longing for the good old days, for order,

and also for grand politics or what was perceived as such.

Audiences loved Otto Gebuhr in the role of the Prussian King.

The actor played Frederick the Great 11 times

before Hitler came to power.

Germany no longer had an emperor, but it had Fridericus,

who was taking on all of Europe in the cinema

in a war of trenches, gun smoke and suffering

which looked uncannily like the World War that had just been lost.

There was one difference, though: Fridericus won his war.

Strangely, two generations earlier, most Germans had hated Prussia.

Now many of them were longing for this style of authoritarian rule.

Only 10 years later, in March 1933, Adolf Hitler celebrated Potsdam Day,

thus putting a fatal end to any dreams of a new Prussia.

A pact with the devil.

“German man is demonic man personified,”

according to Lotte Eisner.

Murnau innocently wanted to show cinema’s possibilities

by adapting a classic theme.

He turns Faust into circus-like magic and decor.

The flight with Mephisto’s magic cloak

demonstrates the effects the camera can achieve.

Murnau presents the cinema as an alchemical process,

but also as an evil pact between director and politics,

between myth and method.

For not only are images reinvented,

but books are being burned, as are people.

Watching the film today, we sense there is no way back

to this German mythology.

Another director, Fritz Lang,

knew full well that myths are never innocent.

The Americans would later ask: Chaplin or Keaton?

The French: Godard or Truffaut?

The Italians: Antonioni or Fellini?

We Germans must ask: Lang or Murnau?

Murnau depicts phantoms and phantasms,

his heroes are driven, possessed,

not of this world — Just like he himself.

By contrast, Lang is more reserved, more rational,

he doesn’t believe everything he shows,

doesn’t give himself over to it.

Fritz Lang basically invented everything, all the genres,

and always...

Always postulating

that film was the “seventh art,”

it was an art form, but it was art for the masses.

It was accessible to all.

As a director, Lang is out-and-out modern.

While Murnau is a romantic,

Lang constantly tells us viewers, “Stop your romantic gawking!”

Or doesn’t he?

At first glance, Lang’s two-part epic Die Nibelungen

is just a sensational milestone in the history of film.

While its story and design are still expressionist,

it’s also hyper-modern and pure fantasy.

German nebulous dreams.

The biggest blockbuster of German cinema,

with special effects that were truly innovative.

Die Nibelungen Part |: Siegfried

A sea of flames,

a magic hood making the hero invisible.

Or the lindworm that Siegfried fights and that spews real fire.

Siegfried, a blond German superman who will succeed at anything.

Aided by magic, if necessary.

He can only be defeated by an act of treason.

SO SPOKE GRIM HAGEN: THE HUNT IS OVER!

Die Nibelungen Part II: Kriemhild’s Revenge

Die Nibelungen is fantasy,

New Mythology and at the same time its deconstruction.

They are part of the political fantasy:

the dirty, barbaric Huns from the East,

bringing the downfall to the noble Germans.

German audiences loved this...

The fruit of relishing their own fear.

Die Nibelungen is an entirely grown-up revenge drama,

bloodthirsty gothic horror

including a showdown in the burning palace of Etzel, King of the Huns.

Kriemhild, vengeful queen and femme fatale.

Hagen, the German psyche’s Dark Knight,

a murderer out of national interest.

Gunther, a cunctator on the throne,

a weak ruler, personifying the 1920s’ contempt for politics.

YOU DON’T KNOW THE GERMAN SOUL, ETZEL!

Something must have been lurking in the German forests

which eventually ended up on the screen.

Filmmaker

It must be the forests.

Ultimately, it always comes down to flora and fauna.

By the mid-’20s, the republic had consolidated.

Things were on the up, the factories were busy.

There was money, there were more liberties...

and occasionally sensations.

The director Gerhard Lamprecht remained down-to-earth.

An old hand, he was amongst those filming in the courtyards of Berlin.

Using nonprofessional actors,

his film titles speak for themselves:

Slums of Berlin, Children of No Importance,

People to Each Other.

A clever way of sensitive enlightenment.

Slums of Berlin

I’d say the experiences of young people during the 1920s

were shaped by inflation on the one hand.

But on the other hand, the enormous acceleration of life...

Both the economic upsurge and fast-growing big city life...

Also brought about a certain febrility and instability

which, in a positive way,

constituted a rather explosive mixture.

And it was this exact explosive mixture

that then went on to influence all that which followed.

There was a new style, called “New Sobriety.”

Expressionism went out of fashion.

The demeanor was post-expressionist,

cool, critical and unaffected.

New Sobriety was about facts rather than feelings,

types instead of personalities.

One of them is Brigitte.

She just started herjob in a Berlin record store.

She’s the typical example of the new class of employee.

The filmmakers wanted to take in all of society objectively,

producing “cross-movies.”

Weimar cinema now was practically anti-expressionist.

Fritz Lang walked through the Weimar Republic

like a political somnambulist.

His most outwardly political film became Metropolis.

A science-fiction Babylon,

which is both a technological Utopia in the style of New Sobriety

and a social metaphor.

Brutally enslaved, soulless workers

are worked to death in subterranean factories

while their masters rule above.

Using a visual telephone,

the industrialist patriarch controls his foremen — a pioneering method.

Metropolis is both politically and aesthetically schizophrenic.

Time and again, Lang shows dual concepts and dual characters.

Economic power is complemented by scientific power.

Two fathers, two tyrants, patriarchs.

Together, they strive to create a new human.

The robot woman is meant

to function even better than the underground workers

who, yet again, are like somnambulists.

Brigitte Helm plays the dual role of saint and femme fatale...

innocent and amoral,

serious and playful.

The mechanical, seductive Eve also represents the “new woman,”

no longer conforming to the stereotypical meek character,

surrounded by children,

sacrificing herself for husband and nation.

Instead, she asserts herself as an erotic female

who could potentially act against the male and the family.

What can be clearly observed in Weimar era films

and expressionist films,

and Kracauer described this brilliantly,

is the sons rebelling against their fathers.

Although paradoxically, or rather, typically,

the fathers remain victorious.

In other words, what, in the language of psychoanalysis,

would constitute an oedipal revolt, a rebellion,

did take place in German film in this way,

but it was the fathers who benefited.

It wasn’t easy for the sons of Weimar.

But revolution is possible.

The masses of the underworld rise to revolt.

With hindsight, this is a documentary about the republic’s inner turmoil,

a bombastic insight into the unconscious mind of the 1920s.

A vision of the future, which anticipates aesthetically

what was to happen politically not long after.

Kracauer farsightedly observed early on:

“ln Metropolis, the paralyzed collective consciousness

seemed to talk in its sleep with unusual clarity.

Metropolis was full of subterraneous content

which crossed the boundaries of the conscious mind

like contraband.”

The aesthetics of social partnership,

a New Deal, with a hint of Riefenstahl.

Historian

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

While Metropolis takes place away from the surface

in the bowels of the city,

Walter Ruttmann’s film of the same year

shows us the reality above the surface.

Ruttmann had been working in early broadcasting

while also making a name for himself as an avant-garde filmmaker.

Soon he was employed by the UFA to carry out specialist tasks.

He filmed the near-abstract falcon dream scene in Die Nibelungen,

a highlight of 1920s animated film.

Walter Ruttmann is one of the most important directors or personalities

of Weimar cinema who are yet to be discovered, for different reasons.

He is definitely a member of the cinematic avant-garde.

But at the same time, many of his avant-garde films

were commissioned by others.

He demonstrates to what extent the industry and advertising

shaped and influenced the stylistic possibilities of the cinema.

Ruttmann’s film, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City,

depicts the city in a realistic way,

while elevating it to a different kind of mythology.

He emphasizes the structures of mass society.

His editing style creates coherence, it links and compacts.

This was the “cross-movie” the New Sobriety had dreamt of.

Ruttmann shows how the systems are linked.

This seems more important than observing the fleeting.

Fast-paced, rhythmic montages of the city in its own right,

a symphony of mass society.

A beguiling journey into past realities.

In a newspaper serial turned book,

Kracauer discovered a new

and highly modern class of society in 1929:

the employees.

Young, modern citizens are now working

behind desks or shop counters,

with regular working hours.

“Berlin today is a city with a pronounced employee culture.

A culture created by employees for employees,

and perceived as culture by the majority of employees.

They fill the cities, but they do not belong anywhere.

The monthly salary,

the so-called mental work and other meaningless features,

are currently founding the existence of large parts of the population.

The building of bourgeois values has collapsed,

its foundations having been eroded.

The salaried masses are spiritually homeless.

Along with health, transport and gifts,

the employees’ cultural needs include, amongst other things,

tobacco products, bars and intellectual or social events.

Many employees’ lives escape from their wretchedness into distraction,

dissolving into the nocturnal void.”

A weekend at the Wannsee. Four young people are having a picnic.

They hardly know each other, but spend the day swimming,

listening to music, flirting and lazing around.

It all ends in the evening, as does the film,

but the day belongs to them,

etched into our memories with the film’s images.

Its title mirrors its content: People on Sunday.

People on Sunday

We’ve already met Christel and Brigitte earlier on.

They are typical of the new class of employees Kracauer describes:

young, female, urbane and poorly paid,

but at least they have Sundays off.

On the previous day, Christel met a man.

The way this is initiated is one of the masterstrokes of Weimar cinema.

As if by accident, the camera strolls across the crowd.

Seemingly randomly, it rests on the couple, moves on, comes back...

moves on and comes back again.

Now we watch the approach — A hunter and his prey.

At first, the camera keeps its distance,

even retreating to a panoramic view as we recognize the couple,

as if not to disturb them.

An ethnological perspective, ancient gestures and rituals.

As the couple sit in the cafe, the camera moves in closely,

similar to Soviet style photography.

Getting closer.

How do you impress a woman?

By doing something special, affectionate, exciting.

And she likes it.

A different couple:

Erwin is a cab driver, his girlfriend Annie is a model.

Soon they are arguing, about nothing, just the daily battle of the sexes,

the baseless annoyance of long-term relationships, little rivalries.

Here, they attack substitute photographs,

fetish objects of the cinema.

But it’s not just any stars being mauled by shaving cream and curling tongs.

They are Willy Fritsch and Lilian Harvey, the era’s dream film couple.

Only a few minutes in, the film ironically mocks

the celebrity cinema culture of its time...

A programmatic statement.

People on Sunday tells us about itself:

“I am different.”

What kind of film is this? Starting in such an unusual manner?

It is the work of a collective.

It was created not by one, but several young film enthusiasts.

The most prominent was cinematographer Eugen Schufftan.

He had worked on Metropolis as part of Fritz Lang’s team.

His agile camerawork delves into the light of the summer,

on the meadow, in the water.

The other creators would become even more famous.

The film was co-directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer.

The script was by Billy Wilder.

This young man from Vienna made a living as a reporter in Berlin.

Full of drive and curiosity, and under eight different pseudonyms,

he wrote about daily life, a chronicler of the urbane,

and an example of the new type of “roving reporter.”

His first script already reveals Wilder

as the genius storyteller later celebrated by Hollywood...

Both funny and cool at the same time.

The film’s concept is obvious: spontaneity, fragmentation.

Particles of reality and inventions merge into one.

The found supports the invented.

Found were as well the protagonists, discovered on the streets,

all four of them amateurs, all four playing themselves.

People on Sunday is nouvelle vague avant la lettre...

30 years before Godard and Truffaut,

a feast of the casual.

A critic mentions the “magical effortlessness of the flowing images,

more musical than any film with sound.”

It’s also the film of a generation.

Its creators are almost the same age as their protagonists,

young urbanites of the moment,

prosaic, yet carefree,

hopeful, yet skeptical,

humorous and ironic.

Contemporaries called it a “generation without temper,”

without the pathos or the religious zeal of a youth movement.

The coolness of the New Sobriety is also a freshness.

People living in a postwar era, which is not aware it is also a prewar era.

It sometimes seems as iftheir faces already show a premonition of the future.

Male bonding.

Where would these young men be in 10 or 15 years’ time?

Who would be in London or Mexico?

Who at the Eastern Front?

Looking for His Murderer

Robert Siodmak went on to direct two more films.

What’s this?

A few years later, he, like all of the film’s creators,

went into exile in Hollywood.

It was an import of the art of storytelling.

Paul Czinner shot Arthur Schnitzler’s Fraulein Else.

He transferred the plot to the elegant ski resort of Sankt Moritz

and happened to shoot during the Winter Olympics

and in a luxury hotel.

Dark days at the stock market, again. Fictitious, for the time being.

Catastrophic plunge at the stock market!

Else, from a good family, spoiled, but neither dim nor bigheaded,

is fed to the creditors by her parents.

She is supposed to seduce a rich man to ensure continuous credit,

a very mundane, and therefore immense, sacrifice.

The well-bred Else is expected to turn into a whore.

She has many talents, but this is beyond her.

Czinner’s direction of the magnificent Elisabeth Bergner is a masterpiece.

The film owes it all to cinematographer Karl Freund

who had worked with Wegener, Murnau and with Lang.

Once again an unleashed camera totally unbound in terms ofthis era,

yet also calm, as if lying in ambush.

This long, continuous shot shows Else’s hesitating, and its overcoming,

and the ancient interplay of the sexes.

A ballet of looks and movements, perfectly choreographed.

Almost abstract as if shot by Antonioni.

Let’s focus entirely on the timing of the era for a moment.

And then, desperation.

Let’s just focus on her hands.

Using them, Elisabeth Bergner tells the entire story.

Fraulein Else is psychological realism

and a portrait of society in a nutshell — full of foreboding,

and ahead of its time also in artistic terms.

A generation of morally corrupt parents gambles away their children’s future.

The problem lies not with the heirs, but with the current owners.

At the same time, Bergner’s Else is an example of the new modern woman,

a variant of Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks.

In Fraulein Else and Mabuse, the market crash is fictitious,

but ominously prescient.

These are films about a growing discontent in culture.

Lang depicts the stock exchange

as delusional incarnation of a hysterical society.

The advent of crime and of panic in bourgeois society.

Bear market!

In the Great Depression the world of Mabuse became commonplace.

Bull market!

In 1929, society was torn, in a turmoil,

longing for both freedom and order,

more guessing than sensing that the earth beneath their feet started to shake.

A dance on the volcano.

Maybe it’s this sarcastic existence, the lust for life in the here and now,

that we mean when we refer to the “roaring ’20s” today.

When we, somewhat naively, long for the era to return,

when we consume its art and fashion,

we connect with both the utopias and the decadence,

liberties and modernity.

The freedom also extended to sexuality. Berlin was a hotbed of sensuality

with an abundance of possibilities and not many taboos.

All of society was excited by sports and a new-found physicality,

sporting events became mass entertainment,

distraction, but also a way of publicly disciplining the body.

A new, totally modern order.

Revue shows like the one by the Tiller Girls were booming,

celebrating the mechanics of the human body.

In 1927, Kracauer wrote an essay on this “Mass Ornament”:

“These products of distraction factories are no longer individual girls,

but indissoluble girl clusters,

ornaments composed of thousands of bodies.

The structure of the mass ornament reflects the contemporary situation.

Like the pattern in the stadium, the organization stands above the masses,

a monstrous figure.

The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality

to which the prevailing economic system aspires.”

Diary of a Lost Girl depicts this girl ornament in everyday life.

In the reformatory for wayward girls, gymnastics is a means of drilling them.

Diary of a Lost Girl

Jolly uniformity becomes tyrannical synchronization.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst is one of the few unforgotten Weimar directors.

Nevertheless, he is yet to be discovered properly.

A master of thematic and stylistic variety.

He does not follow his own agenda like Lang or Murnau.

Instead, he observes closely and unapologetically.

This makes him the quintessential director of New Sobriety.

But he clearly prefers certain motifs:

the inextricable entanglements of power, passion and money,

the unadorned depiction of universal desires.

A fetishist.

Diary of a Lost Girl recounts the way of passion of a well-raised daughter.

She passes through all institutions of societal imprint...

Reformatory, brothel, inheritance and marriage.

The star is Louise Brooks.

Discovered by Pabst and fresh offthe steamer from America,

she becomes the shimmering sylph and ghost light of Weimar cinema.

An androgynous companion,

a childlike femme fatale.

Pure innocence, pure sex, pure pragmatism...

She typifies the new woman.

It’s a purely cinematic performance.

Brooks doesn’t have to act, she only has to be herself.

But Brooks also shines as a great actress.

Her versatility enables her to handle the director’s sharp-witted psychology.

Brooks repeatedly comes across as a blank sheet.

An intuitive creature with alert intelligence.

Brooks is far from being cunning, she’s beyond good and evil.

Intellect and hedonism do not exclude each other.

Nothing about her was truly mysterious,

and this is what scared the Germans of her time.

Lulu’s presence held up a mirror to them reflecting their own vices.

If Louise Brooks is international, Marlene Dietrich is truly German.

An earthy being,

a woman of the people, seemingly tangible to all.

Physicality and voice,

the body as language.

Acting replaced by presence and psyche,

down-to-earth glamour.

Even the harlot is ruled by the eroticism of the housewife.

One of the first talkies, von Sternberg’s and Pommer’s The Blue Angel,

marked the birth of a second global film star.

My dear Miss Lola,

l have something for you.

Would you accept this as a gift from me?

This marriage proposal has proved unique in the history of German film.

And with it, may I ask for your hand in marriage?

- You wanna marry me? - Yes.

The Blue Angel

God, how cute you are.

Sternberg discovered Marlene Dietrich and in a way created her.

On the night of the premiere, she left for Hollywood with the director,

lost several pounds and turned ethereal Venus of the screen.

Falling in love again Never wanted to

What am I to do?

Can't help it

Love's always been my game Play it as I may

In many ways, the new world meets the old in The Blue Angel,

the 20th century meets the 19th,

bourgeois society egalitarian republic,

romantic expressionism once again meets the cool surfaces of the New Sobriety,

silent movie meets sound.

ALMOST 4.5 MILLION UNEMPLOYED

OVER 5 MILLION UNEMPLOYED OR ON SHORT HOURS

The crisis had arrived.

Following Black Friday, unemployment figures rose sharply,

inflation returned, and with it, misery.

There was more to Weimar cinema than expressionism.

Wage Clerk Kremke

Alongside escapist adventure, gangster and revue films

there had already been a leftist social cinema

that actively targeted poverty and the crisis.

The famous Kuhle Wampe and Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness

unjustly overshadow Wage Clerk Kremke.

Marie Harder was one of very few female directors during the 1920s.

This was to remain the only film by this forgotten artist.

She was head of the SPD’s film service when she went into exile in 1933.

She died two years later while carrying out research in Mexico.

It’s the story of an old man

being steamrolled by the new era and its machines.

At some point he feels let down by everyone

and cannot cope with the disappointment.

I really liked Brothers, it was a new discovery for me.

One reason was the wonderful, magical footage of Hamburg,

which also features in Raid in St. Pauli,

but Brothers takes it a little further, into the world of the workers.

Brothers I like the harsh lighting

in the German films of the 1920s.

The theme of Brothers, the summoning of the proletariat,

the effects of the Russian Revolution,

the waves this made go all the way into this film.

You don’t find anything like this today,

a political idealization such as this.

It’s a film emerging from a political vacuum.

This is what really appealed to me in Brothers.

A proletarian manifesto,

the story of a harbor strike, heavily influenced by Soviet cinema.

Strike!

The term “class struggle” still meant something then.

The film also serves as a reminder of the lives of the proletarians,

of their poverty and their pride.

How do these people live,

the frugally furnished workers’ houses.

It was more than just watching and consuming a film.

It was a journey in time, an anthropological experience.

Raid in St. Pauli

Hochbaum was also able to create an intricate cinema of motion.

A burglar and a prostitute fall in love.

The boundaries between misery and crime,

gangsters and proletarians are dissolving.

They are after me.

Excuse me, we need to search the room.

What do you want?

He is one of the few directors sympathetic to breaking the law,

a German filmmaker depicting the police not as protectors, but as a threat,

and rebuffing them completely.

Come.

Are they gone?

Hochbaum focuses on the nightlife’s demimonde,

but very differently compared to Pabst’s fascination or Sternberg’s cliches,

showing sympathy for the mundane, not the sensational.

While we do see the fascination

with the thriving high life of the roaring ’20s,

Hochbaum never forgets where he stands.

17th Precinct here. Suicide? Unemployed. All right, we’ll come.

I don’t understand why they throw in the towel so easily.

How are the likes of us coping with the banking situation?

Hochbaum is one of the most modern of his era,

his films are German Neorealism.

In the end, the brittle status quo is restored.

But the workers’ struggle continues.

This is how some of them are living.

Others, however...

Crossing the city at dawn

Rained on by dust, not dew

The great, gray army of workers It marches on

Money is calling them to the machines

Master, give us our daily bread

Hochbaum’s films aren’t far away from the so-called “asphalt films.”

On more than one level, cinema discovered the streets.

Joe May’s Asphalt is the very last silent film

to come out of the Weimar Republic.

Accident

Accident unleashes a succession of randomly dealt blows.

Everybody is after money,

but whoever owns it is cursed by bad luck.

Escapism and genre combine even more tellingly

in Lang’s entertainment films following Metropolis.

The Germans had already made it to the moon.

Wernher von Braun, who went on to invent “reprisal weapons” for the Nazis

and later designed the US Apollo program,

making the actual moon landing possible,

worked as expert advisor on Lang’s Woman in the Moon.

“Six seconds left!”

NOW

There is a countdown and discarded rocket stages,

just like Apollo 1140 years later.

Woman in the Moon

And there is, even more magically, zero gravity.

Spies

For decades, Spies was unjustly overshadowed

by the masterpieces Mabuse, M and Metropolis.

It’s a tremendously thrilling, aesthetically innovative espionage film,

a modern action movie.

It features a secret agent, a femme fatale,

murders, sabotage,

and a bank as a criminal organization.

A prescient film, inventive, logical and gripping.

The Holy Mountain

With the exploration of the Alps by tourists,

“mountain films” became a popular genre

that was unique to Germany.

German westerns portraying nature as massive, dangerous

and clearly superior to man.

Luis Trenker and the later Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl,

became the stars of this genre.

A German must always scale the highest peaks,

in these films as well, in which there were no stuntmen

and almost everything was authentic.

Director Arnold Fanck made mountain films his speciality.

With great skill and physical effort, he made them as authentic as possible

and repeatedly showed desperate Germans pitted against the unforgiving elements.

They are surrounded by romantic backdrops of ice and rocks, blue light or sunshine.

Fanck’s mountain world, presenting nature as fateful entity,

both dangerous and idyllic,

also serves as an alternate world to the conflicts,

rifts and class struggles of the modern era.

Alienation is replaced by innocence.

An extension of the youth movement’s desires.

Anti-urbanism and nature kitsch,

often nature mythology, and always escapism.

The Great Leap Writes Kracauer:

“Lyrical heroes with boisterous instincts,

deification of glaciers and rocks.

A heroic idealism expressing itself as touristic feats

due to its ignorance towards more substantial ideas.”

This strange idolization of nature,

the connection with nature and people’s own impulses and desires,

is like the counterpart of a different side...

Cultural Scientist

namely, the interest in the metropolis,

all the movement of the metropolis, the cars, the trams,

as well as all that makes the metropolis possible,

not just the workers, but also prostitution,

bars and a variety of escapism options.

The Three from the Filling Station

Men in uniform, albeit still nonmilitary,

and marching music, albeit still entertainment,

this was The Three from the Filling Station,

a German-French evergreen in both language versions.

It set off a whole series of German musical films.

Early sound films found songs easier to do than dialogue.

But they are mainly remembered due to Willy Fritsch

and especially Lilian Harvey.

They were the dream couple of the early ’30s.

Lilian Harvey, half-English,

born in London and raised in Switzerland,

became one of the most German of German stars, despite her internationality.

Congress Dances

The mass media termed her “the cutest girl in the whole world.”

Harvey personified the ordinary girl’s dreams

of the big world and its fairy-tale princes.

Happiness and easy life at the height of the crisis.

This only happens but once in life

Tomorrow it may all be gone

UFA films, particularly the comedies and revue films...

Film Historian

did indeed create a new sense of life

which was quite complex and partly accompanied by a certain sordidness,

but could also carry a new and positive outlook,

especially in terms of sexuality, sensuality and consumption.

The most accomplished of these films is A Blonde Dream,

which was written by Billy Wilder.

It’s a conservative Germanic variation of surrealist fantasticism.

Truth is revealed in a dream.

A Blonde Dream

A Blonde Dream is also the most revealing of its kind.

The old dream of becoming a princess has now changed to Hollywood film star.

The film pursues this dream with its protagonist, but also against her,

as it all turns into a nightmare,

from which the star awakes to a German idyll.

Don’t dream, girl, stay humble.

Show us what you can do.

Is that all?

For I just want to find

Love and happiness with you

What’s happened here?

I was in Hollywood.

Are you still dreaming of becoming a film star?

I think the Weimar cinema was not as ideological

as it was always portrayed.

Starting in 1919 and until the invention of the talkies in 1930,

essentially all of the genres had been invented

and put into practice.

And that, for me, is the Weimar era.

Chaplin in Berlin.

In March 1931, the genius Hollywood comedian visits the capital.

In Germany too, he is loved like no other film star.

Everyone can relate to his “tramp” character.

Chaplin stayed for seven days,

met Marlene Dietrich, Hans Albers and Albert Einstein.

Only the Nazis agitated against him.

Uncle!

A child killer causes horror and hysteria amongst Berlin’s population.

He is chased not only by police, but also by the stirred-up criminal underworld.

- Uncle. - What is it?

You got a white stain there.

- Where? - There, on your shoulder.

Come, let’s go.

He is soon driven into a corner.

M features a manhunt.

It is a portrait of a city, a film noir of

the nightly streets and questionable morals,

ambiguous and unfathomable.

Humans as beasts and cogs in the system.

The murderers are among us.

Fritz Lang’s masterpiece would become an allegory for the rising totalitarianism.

Lang’s view is more distanced than ever, sociologically precise,

and yet socially committed...

A psychopathological insight into violence.

Peter Lorre embodies terrifying human abysses.

The camera captures the murderous gaze

and appropriates it as the child becomes an object...

The perverse nature of the consumer world.

Stop going on about engaging the public.

The mere thought of it makes me want to puke.

Pardon my language, Mr. President.

But when you really need some useful information from the public,

then all of a sudden they can’t for the life of them remember a thing.

The scenes interspersing the police briefings with the gangsters are famous.

Although the police are also shown to uphold morality and safety,

the lines between state and crime become increasingly blurred.

We see two competing systems and their managers.

We must catch him.

Ourselves.

In the end, the more effective police are the gangsters.

This efficiency is accompanied by latent, unscrupulous brutality

which still today can be identified as Lang’s anticipation of future developments.

Grundgens as gangster boss, a glittering angel of brutality

leading the gangsters’ charge against the captured perpetrator,

exposes the true face of the era.

The accused maintains

that he has no choice.

In other words, he is compelled to kill.

By this, he confirmed his own death sentence.

Bravo! Very true!

A man who admits that he compulsively annihilates other lives,

this man must be exterminated like a damaging fire.

This man must be eradicated, he must disappear!

M comes across as a caustic commentary on the Republic’s turmoil

between the emergency decrees and the emerging National Socialism.

Since the outbreak of the economic crisis, governments changed continuously.

The Nazi Party became stronger and stronger

and the Democrats were failing.

The films were beginning to summarize.

Once again, Fritz Lang confronts order with chaos.

Weimar cinema begins and ends with a lunatic asylum.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

One final appearance by Mabuse,

now sitting in his cell, manically filling page after page.

What is he writing there, behind bars?

It’s in Dr. Mabuse, isn’t it? He’s writing a book in prison.

That’s it, he’s writing Mein Kampf, isn’t he?

Dr. Mabuse is really writing Mein Kampf.

Wasn’t that why the Nazis banned the film?

For the ultimate goal of crime

is to establish the absolute reign of crime.

The interiors in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse are fantastical,

compulsive deceptions and psychic illusions.

The return of the “haunted screen.”

The therapist is turned into a psychopath.

The circle closes.

The dazzling director of a mental hospital,

oscillating between sanity and madness, postulates the “reign of crime.”

And so the film ends in a long, frantic drive into the night.

The Germans too were to embark on a journey into the dark evils of the abyss.

Psychopaths and criminals took over the steering wheel.

Nevertheless, the story could also be told differently.

Hello, gentlemen, would you like to come along?

For the last time.

Into the Blue

A few years earlier, just after People on Sunday and Black Friday,

cinematographer Eugen Schufftan shot his only film as director.

It depicts four young people from the heart of the city,

children of the crisis.

They get together and drive off on a whim, Into the Blue.

It’s a film of motion, of changing positions.

The automobile, now affordable for the new class of employees,

also represents a place of freedom, of privacy and intimacy,

a substitute home.

Hello! A car journey!

They are driving out to the Wannsee.

It’s a film full of happiness, full of high spirits and human solidarity.

Once again, Schufftan shows the best of the Weimar Republic:

departure, youth,

freedom,

irony,

curiosity.

What does cinema know, that we don’t?

Brigitte married and survived the war.

She lived to over 100 years old and died in Hamburg in 2011.

Christel went into exile in the spring of 1933.

She died in 1960, at age 48, in a plane crash in New Mexico.

Siegfried Kracauer went into exile in Paris in February 1933.

After the occupation of France by the German Wehrmacht,

he managed to flee to the USA in 1941, where he wrote his most significant books.

He only saw Germany again on short visits.

Siegfried Kracauer died in 1965 in New York.

Fritz Lang emigrated to Paris in March 1933.

His last Weimar film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,

was banned in Germany prior to release.

From 1934 on, Lang worked in Hollywood.

He filmed his last three films in West Germany in 1959 and 1960.

In 1963, he played himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt.

Fritz Lang died in 1976 in Los Angeles.

The following filmmakers left Germany after Hitler came to power.

Most of them never returned and died in exile.

Edited at https://subtitletools.com

Edited at https://subtitletools.com corrections ~ Vultural