The German Genius

the wit and cynicism of Berlin.) The Weimar Republic lasted for fourteen years, until Hitler came to power in 1933, “a tumultuous interregnum between disasters” which nevertheless managed to produce a distinctive culture both brilliant and singular, and despite the steady decay of the state’s monopoly on violence during those years and which, as Norbert Elias has highlighted, was as much a part of Weimar culture as anything else. 1
    The period is conventionally divided into three clear phases. From the end of 1918 to 1924, “with its revolution, civil war, foreign occupation, and fantastic inflation, [there] was a time of experimentation in the arts.” Expressionism dominated politics as much as it dominated painting or the stage. This was followed, from 1924 to 1929, by a period of economic stability, a relief from political violence, and increasing prosperity reflected in the arts by the Neue Sachlichkeit, the “new objectivity,” a movement whose aims were “matter-of-factness,” sobriety. 2 Finally, the period 1929–1933 saw a return to political violence, rising unemployment, and authoritarian government by decree; the arts were cowed into silence and replaced by propagandistic Kitsch.
    After painting, the art form most influenced by Expressionism was film. In February 1920 a horror film was released in Berlin that was, in the words of one critic, “uncanny, demonic, cruel, ‘Gothic,’ a Frankenstein-type story filled with bizarre lighting and dark, distorted sets. Considered by many to be the first “art-film,” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a huge success, so popular in Paris that it played in the same theater every day between 1920 and 1927. But the film was more than a record breaker.
    Caligari was a collaboration between two men, Hans Janowitz, a Czech, and Carl Meyer, an Austrian, who had met in Berlin in 1919. The film features the mad Dr. Caligari, a fairground vaudeville actor who entertains with his somnambulist, Cesare. Outside the fair, however, there is a second string to the story that is far darker. Wherever Caligari goes, death is never far behind—anyone who crosses him ends up dead. The darkest part of the story starts after Caligari kills two students—or thinks he has. In fact, one survives, and it is the survivor, Francis, who discovers that the sleepwalking Cesare is unconsciously obeying Caligari’s instructions, killing on his behalf without understanding what he has done. Realizing he has been discovered, Caligari flees into an insane asylum, where Francis finds out that Caligari is also the director of the institute. Still, there is no escape for Caligari when his double life is exposed, he loses all self-control and ends up in a straitjacket.
    This was the original plotline of Caligari , but before the film appeared it went through a drastic metamorphosis. Erich Pommer, one of the most successful producers of the day, and the director, Robert Wiene, actually turned the story inside out, rearranging it so that it is Francis and his girlfriend who are mad. 3 The ideas of abduction and murder are now no more than their delusions, and the director of the asylum is in reality a benign doctor who cures Francis of his evil thoughts.
    Janowitz and Meyer were furious. In Pommer’s version, the criticism of blind obedience had disappeared and, even worse, authority was shown as kindly, even safe. The irony was that Pommer’s version was a great success, commercially and artistically, and film historians have often wondered whether the original version would have done as well. Perhaps there is a fundamental point here. Though the plot was changed, the style of telling the story was not—it was still expressionistic, a new genre. 4 Expressionism was a force, an impulse to revolution and change. But, like the psychoanalytic theory on which it was based, it was not fully worked out. The Expressionist Novembergruppe, founded in December 1918, was a revolutionary alliance of all artists who wanted to see change—Emil Nolde, Walter Gropius, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Alban Berg, and Paul Hindemith, among others. But revolution needed more than an engine; it needed direction. Expressionism never provided that. And perhaps in the end its lack of direction was one of those factors that enabled Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
    It would be wrong, however, to see Weimar only as a temporary way station on the path to Hitler—it boasted many solid achievements. Not the least of