The German Genius

reminiscing about their early days in India, was rapturously received. The opera’s success was due in part to the fact that its avowed Marxism was muted. As Brecht’s biographer Ronald Hayman put it, “It was not wholly insulting to the bourgeoisie to expatiate on what it had in common with ruthless criminals; the arson and the throat-cutting are mentioned only casually and melodically, while the well-dressed entrepreneurs in the stalls could feel comfortably superior to the robber gang that aped the social pretensions of the nouveau riches .” Another reason for the show’s success was the fashion in Germany at the time for Zeitoper, opera with a contemporary relevance. Other examples in 1929–30 were Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage (Daily News), a story of newspaper rivalry; Jonny spielt auf, by Ernst Krenek; Max Brandt’s Maschinist Hopkins; and Schoenberg’s Von Heute auf Morgen.
    Brecht and Weill repeated their success with Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny ( The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny )—like The Threepenny Opera, a parable of modern society. The responses of audiences and critics were extreme either way and, as Weill put it, “Mahagonny, like Sodom and Gomorrah, falls on account of the crimes, the licentiousness and the general confusion of its inhabitants.” 34 It was also epic theater, which for Brecht was central: “The premise for dramatic theatre was that human nature could not be changed; epic theatre assumed not only that it could but that it was already changing.” 35
    The Nazis took increasing interest in Brecht and Weill. When the latter attended one of their rallies out of mere curiosity in 1929, he was appalled to hear himself denounced “as a danger to the country,” together with Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. He left hurriedly, unrecognized.
    S ECOND O NLY TO H OLLYWOOD
     
    When Remarque arrived in America, in Hollywood in particular, he probably felt more at home than he might have expected. 36 This chapter began with a description of a film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , but although that was a seminal Expressionist work, it was a long way from being the only one. In fact, the 1920s, the years of the Weimar Republic, saw what was without question the golden age of German film, when German film rivaled Hollywood in its creativity and impact, when there was a golden generation of German film directors who have given us many of the most beautiful and important films ever made. Moreover, each of that generation—Fritz Lang (1890–1976), F. W. Murnau (1888–1931), Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947), Robert Siodmak (1900–73), Billy Wilder (1906–2002), Otto Preminger (1906–86) and Fred Zinnemann (1907–97)—ended up in America. All but Murnau were Jewish, and all left either before Hitler came to power or not long afterward. It is safe to say that among them they helped create the cinema as we know it today.
    Scholarship about Weimar cinema has been undergoing a certain amount of revision recently. Traditionally, film in the 1920s in Germany has been described as “Expressionist,” as an art form where the emotion generated is more important than the accurate depiction of reality, where distortion is a favorite technique, together with exotic effects and characters, with fantasy and (frequently) horror being a dominant motif. While no one denies that these features did characterize German films in the early years of the Weimar period (or the theater of Reinhardt and Brecht, come to that), the general feeling now is that film was more influenced by art nouveau or the more mechanical modernism of Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, and Fernand Léger, rather than Kirchner, Klee, or Nolde. As the twenties passed, montage became a dominant technique, as in Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1929), by Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zinnemann, and Kuhle Wampe , 1932, by Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht. 37
    This was also the period when talking pictures eclipsed silent movies (1929), when cinema audiences went up everywhere, but in Germany, it was claimed, there was something else, something fundamental that helped explain the success of German films. It was shown at its clearest in a book published in 1930 by Siegfried Kracauer. He too went to America and would later write a seminal book about German film in Weimar times ( From Caligari to Hitler ), but his 1930 book was Die Angestellten , literally “The Employees” or “Workers,” though it was more an