Cinema: A Nation & Its Movies

Does a nation subconsciously reveal itself through the movies it turns out? An expert who thinks so, and has written a book to prove his point, is German-born Dr. Siegfried Kracauer, who apparently knows a good bit about both psychology and German movies. As sociology, Dr. Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton University Press; $5) depends pretty heavily on historical hindsight. As movie lore, it may fascinate cinemagoers who know little about German films except that they gave the world Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Emil Jannings and Director Fritz Lang.

Dr. Kracauer looks at German films for the answer to a hard historical question: Why did the Germans so readily accept Hitler? “Their strange preparedness for the Nazi creed,” Dr. Kracauer has concluded, “must have originated in psychological dispositions stronger than any ideological scruples. The films of the pre-Hitler period shed no small light on the psychological situation.”

Kracauer divides German film history into three main periods. The first (1918-24) was a period of fierce mental ferment; during those years, the German film attained its highest artistic maturity (Variety, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and the screen was a battleground for most of the conflicting anxieties and desires of the German mind.

The second period (1924-29), thanks to the Dawes plan, was one of relative stabilization. But by the evidence of the films, stabilization meant an avoidance of intellectual and spiritual issues. Movies about adolescence were significantly popular (Children of No Importance); the Germans looked back nostalgically, Dr. Kracauer says, to an era when the immaturity they had never outgrown was charming and legitimate.

The third period began with the crash of 1929 and the return of chaos. The German mind—and the German screen—once more became a battleground. But most of the battling was equivocal, half-blind, halfhearted—or forbidden by censors. And none of it stopped Hitler.

The postwar years were the Golden Age of German films, and it is of the wild, queer, charming, sometimes great, sometimes outrageously arty films of those years that Dr. Kracauer writes most entertainingly.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was originally, a weird, ferocious melodrama about a power-mad hypnotist (Werner Krauss) and his tool, a murderous somnambulist (Conrad Veidt). It was intended as an attack on authoritarianism. But the director cooked up a story “frame” (i.e., he had the main story told by an asylum inmate) which made the heroes (and the authors) seem mad. Authority emerged as a benign force, and the whole point of the original story was sidetracked. The popular device of the “framing story,” Dr. Kracauer explains, shows the German mind introversively withdrawing into a shell.

Caligari was followed by many imitations. The picture’s “basic theme—the soul faced with the seemingly unavoidable alternative of tyranny or chaos-exerted extraordinary fascination.” A long procession of tyrants crossed the screen; Dr. Kracauer wonders whether their cruelties and excesses were expressions of a premonitory fear of what lay in the depths of the German soul.

Some pre-Hitler films sought out some tenable pattern for existence. Some escaped into serenely playful romantic comedies. Others advised submission and Christlike love (Dostoevsky was very popular in middle-class Germany). Still others—which were to furnish the Nazis with a theme—”combined passions and precipices,” and celebrated the heroic but adolescent cult of mountain climbing.

Dr. Kracauer’s is a big, impressive, careful piece of work. The book will appeal most to those who remember such German films as The Last Laugh, Variety, The Blue Angel, The Beggars’ Opera—some of the most glamorous and exciting movies of their time. But Dr. Kracauer’s prose is pretty heavy; and his argument, though persuasive, is not always proved with scientific finality. Like some other psyche-interpreters—professional and amateur—he tends to overinterpret. It is interesting to speculate on what the same sort of intense look at Hollywood films would tell the doctor about the U.S. mind and heart.