Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), was a German writer , journalist , sociologist , cultural critic, and film theorist. In his book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), he discovered a latent diabolic strain in the German soul that emerged after World War I.
The book proposed a link between the apolitical and escapist orientation of Weimar-era cinema and the totalitarianism that followed. The Weimar films presaged the coming of the Nazi state’s hell on earth. They were reminiscent of Pandora’s box—out of which flew a multitude of unforeseen evils and travails—and as in Greek tragedy, prophetic visions of doom and calamity announced in the first act came to their horrifying, devastating culmination in the final act, the Nazi state.
Introduction
Kracauer was a stern critic of Germany; he saw that defeat in World War I had utterly unmoored its people from reality. His book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film,1 is a painful, vivid, first-hand commentary on the tortured German soul, staggering between diabolic tyranny and chaos, a struggle that culminated in the rise and triumph of Nazism. The title implies that the apparitions, insanity, terror, and dread of impending disaster so prevalent on the German screen during the Weimar Republic were fully realized in the Nazi regime. The argument proceeds in four well-defined acts: the Archaic Period (1895–1918), when a national cinema began to emerge, the Postwar Period (1918–1924), when diabolic characters in the movies announced the birth of terrible, antic portents in the German soul; the Stabilized Period (1924–1929), when German society was in a state of paralysis and proved unable to work out its problems; and the Pre-Hitler Period (1929–1933), marked by unmistakable signs of widespread despair, and paving the way for the Nazi revolution and the Nazi state. Prophetic visions of doom and devastation that first appeared on the postwar screen became real under the Nazis. Kracauer’s analysis exposes the psychological dispositions predominant in Germany from 1918 to 1933 that influenced the course of events during the Weimar Republic. The author proposes an inextricable connection between history and the movies and vice versa.It is my contention that through an analysis of the German films deep psychological dispositions predominant in Germany from 1918 to 1933 can be exposed – dispositions which influenced the course of events and which will have to be reckoned with in the post-Hitler era. (Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), li)
From Caligari to Hitler resembles Dante’s Inferno : an author’s long, painful wandering into the abyss. However, in Dante, the epic journey to the very bottom of hell precedes ascent and victory, while Kracauer sees no triumph, only defeat and calamity. The poet Virgil guides Dante out of hell; in Kracauer’s rendering, the Germans themselves have created their Inferno on earth, and rather than leading them out of it, Hitler drew them deeper and deeper into the darkest abyss. Kracauer’s study also resembles John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan, the fallen Angel, becomes a hero; but Kracauer can envision no Paradise Regained, no redemption for Germany’s fall into the hands of Hitler. Above all, Kracauer’s book resembles Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus , which identifies the Nazi state with hell, yet Kracauer identifies the rise of the diabolic element latent in the German soul at a far earlier time, directly after World War I. From Caligari to Hitler may rightly be seen as a preface or an introduction to Doctor Faustus .
Along with film critic Harry Alan Potamkin (1900–1933), Kracauer firmly believed that German film constituted a historical “German document” (228). From The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse (1933), cinema embodied the satanic and demonic themes ingrained in the German soul and imagination; Kracauer saw these films as “anticipations of the spell that Hitler was to cast on the German people.”2 Given the great influence of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Kracauer characterized the entire period between 1918 to 1933 as a journey from the horrors of Caligari to the terrors of Hitler, and his book echoes the film’s intense foreboding and sense of determinism. In sociological terms, he emphasized the rule of the middle class during the Weimar Republic; the screen, he argued, opened a window onto the soul of the people who would eventually succumb to Nazism. Other contemporary works that focused on the crucial role of the middle class in facilitating Hitler’s rise to power include Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) and Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler considers the history and psychology of the Nazi regime writ large. The book reads like a horror movie, portraying a series of German films in which the boundaries between the real and the unreal are abolished; shock, panic, sadism, depravity, tyranny, authoritarianism , lawlessness, anarchy, and insanity reign; a dread of ever-impending doom, ominous foreboding, and terror of judgment and punishment haunt everyone; disaster hovers; and all these elements reflect the “German imagination,” the “German mind,” or the “German soul” in its flight from reason and reality. Replete with horror and dread of frightening omens, Kracauer’s book clearly recalls the words inscribed above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno : “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Kracauer saw no hope of derailing the impending triumph of Nazism. He had lived in Germany long enough to understand the signs:
Nazism taught the Germans to see themselves as a beleaguered nation, constantly set upon by enemies external and internal. Metaphors of infection and disease, of betrayal and stabs in the back, were central to Nazi discourse. The concentration camp became the place where those metaphorical evils could be rendered concrete and visible. Here, behind the barbed wire, were the traitors, Bolsheviks, parasites, and Jews who were intent on destroying the Fatherland.3
In face of the horrifying phenomenon of Nazism, Kracauer developed his own prophetic, apocalyptic, and eschatological mode of historical thought and exegesis, precisely like Mann’s in Doctor Faustus.4 Kracauer focuses on the characters and events in the Weimar films that prefigured real historical characters and events under Nazism. In the Nazi regime, “Caligaris hypnotized innumerable Cesares into murder” (272); in the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in “Nuremberg, the ornamental patterns of Nibelungen appeared on gigantic scale” (272); and in The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Fritz Lang “resuscitated his super criminal to mirror the obvious … traits of Hitler” (84). The Nazi regime fully incarnated and facilitated the horror and terror portrayed on the Weimar screen; omens in the films were realized in the Nazi state.
A book about Dr. Caligari must bear his mark. Like these movies, Kracauer depicted “[t]he German soul, haunted by the alternative images of tyrannic rule and instinct-governed chaos, threatened by doom on either side, tossed about in gloomy space like the phantom ship in Nosferatu ” (107). However, he traces the satanic, demonic dimension in the German soul only to the trauma of defeat in World War I. Nowhere in the book does he allude to its earlier sources and origins. Mann found these in the old legend of Faustus, and his novel Doctor Faustus traces a direct path from “Luther and the Reformation to the smoking ruins of the German cities and the gates of the concentration camps.”5 Georg Lukács saw the “danger of a barbaric underworld latent in German civilization as its necessary complementary product.”6 Ernst Cassirer identified the twentieth-century myths of the race, the hero, and the state. He remarked: “In politics we are always living on a volcanic soil and must be prepared for sudden convulsions and eruptions.”7
In Kracauer’s interpretation, Germans increasingly turned to the movies after World War I because they gratified their psychological urge to escape from reality. They did not escape into the Keystone Cops or Buster Keaton or the Little Tramp; Caligari’s dark themes struck a deep chord; it was the “archetype of all forthcoming postwar film” (3). Kracauer lived in W...