Abstract
When writing of ‘Weimar Culture’ cultural historians tend to describe the period as ‘a golden age for the German cinema’,2 and certainly the German films produced between 1918 and 1933 bear comparison with the best produced in the world. However those looking in the German cinema for the range, diversity and vitality of the theatrical activity of that period, miss the differentiated attempts to produce a drama which could persuade thinking men and women to change their attitudes to society. No period of German literary history had seen such a plethora of dramatic and theatrical experimentation in the cause of socio-political drama, with film playing a crucial role in the work of Piscator, but it is perhaps one of the disappointments of ‘Weimar culture’ that the cinema for the most part remained ‘Traumfabrik’ (a dream factory) — escapist, trivial and sometimes, if we follow Kracauer’s thesis,3 sinister, in so far as it pandered to the worst elements of the German psyche.
Film today is a pure instrument of profit. Those who control it are interested not in creating things of value but in making huge profits … For us socialists the film would be a weapon of incalculable value.
(Ernst Toiler, 1924)1
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Notes
From ‘Film und Staat’, Berliner Volkszeitung, 5 February 1924. reprinted in John M. Spalek and Wolfgang Fruhwald (eds) Ernst Toller Gesammelte Werke 1 (Munich, 1978) pp. 114–16.
Gordon Craig, Germany 1866–1945 (Oxford, 1978) p. 495.
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, 1947)
Axel Eggebrecht, ‘Die bürgerliche Filmgefahr’, Die Rote Fahne, 14 June 1922.
Friedrich Wolf, ‘Film im Westen’, Internationale Literatur 8 (1938). Reprinted in Friedrich Wolf Gesammelte Werke 15 (Berlin, 1967) pp. 509–30.
Many examples can be found in G. Kühn, K. Tümmler and W. Wimmer (eds) Film und revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland 1918–1932, 2 vols (Berlin, 1975)
Interesting accounts are to be found in Kühn et. al, op. cit., and in Helmut Korte (ed.), Film und Realität in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt/Main, 1980) pp. 84–102.
For an account of censorship during the Weimar period see D. Welch, ‘The Proletarian cinema and the Weimar Republic’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 1 (1981) pp. 3–18.
A useful compendium is Fritz Mierau (ed.), Russen in Berlin — Literatur, Malerei, Theater, Film 1918–1933 (Leipzig, 1987).
Korte has an excellent section on montage in the Russian film and its influence on the German cinema (op. cit., pp. 33–50). Eisenstein’s ideas are to be found in two excerpts in G. Mast and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism (New York, 1979) pp. 85–122. His article ‘A collision of ideas’ is reprinted in translation in R. D. MacCann (ed.) Film — a Montage of Theories (New York, 1960).
D. Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1983) p. 17.
R. Arnheim, ‘Die Weber’, Kritiken und Aufsätze zum Film (Munich, 1977) pp. 191–3.
Cf. W. Gersch, Film bei Brecht, (Berlin, 1975)
J. Willett, ‘Brecht and film’ in Brecht in context (London, 1984).
The essay, published in Versuche 3 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1975), deserves to be read alongside Walter Benjamin’s more famous analysis Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt/ Main, 1963)
W. Gersch and W. Hecht (eds), Bertolt Brecht Kuhle Wampe. Protokoll des Films und Materialien (Frankfurt a. M., 1969) p. 103.
cf. Amheim ‘Flucht in die Kulisse’ (1932), Arnheim, op. cit., p. 259ff., for an account of the situation amongst film makers. For a general account of the situation in Berlin during the early thirties see Annemarie Langer, Berlin in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1987)
J. Dyck, ‘Ideologische Korrektur der Wirklichkeit — Brechts Filmasthetik am Beispiel seiner Erzahlung Die Bestie’, J. Dyck et al. (eds) Brechtdiskussion (Kronberg/Ts, 1974) p. 236.
Cf. G. Bateson, ‘An Analysis of the Nazi film Hitlerjunge Quex’ in M. Mead and R. Metraux (eds), The Story of Culture at a Distance (Chicago, 1953) pp. 302–14.
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© 1992 Richard Dove and Stephen Lamb
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Warren, J. (1992). Weimar and the Political Film: From Die Weber to Kuhle Wampe . In: Dove, R., Lamb, S. (eds) German Writers and Politics 1918–39. Warwick Studies in the European Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11815-1_6
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