Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects

Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s

Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, Kristin McGuire, Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, Kristin McGuire

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845458461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In spite of having been short-lived, "Weimar" has never lost its fascination. Until recently the Weimar Republic's place in German history was primarily defined by its catastrophic beginning and end - Germany's defeat in 1918 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933; its history seen mainly in terms of politics and as an arena of flawed decisions and failed compromises. However, a flourishing of interdisciplinary scholarship on Weimar political culture is uncovering arenas of conflict and change that had not been studied closely before, such as gender, body politics, masculinity, citizenship, empire and borderlands, visual culture, popular culture and consumption. This collection offers new perspectives from leading scholars in the disciplines of history, art history, film studies, and German studies on the vibrant political culture of Germany in the 1920s. From the traumatic ruptures of defeat, revolution, and collapse of the Kaiser's state, the visionaries of Weimar went on to invent a republic, calling forth new citizens and cultural innovations that shaped the republic far beyond the realms of parliaments and political parties.

PART I

Defeat and
the Legacy of War

CHAPTER 1

The Return of the Undead

Weimar Cinema and the Great War

ANTON KAES

It’s not enough to die; you still have to disappear.
—Jean Baudrillard

German cinema in the wake of the First World War is haunted by images of ghosts, monsters, and comatose creatures. It appears as if the movies themselves are looking for ways to cope with the experience of death on a massive scale—the central experience of the First World War when two million young German men were killed in the span of four years. The trauma of “accelerated dying,” as Rilke put it in 1914, had a profound impact on all cultural production after the war, but especially on cinema, which, barely twenty years old, was still in the process of legitimizing itself as an art form. Could the movies, long criticized for their mindless and immoral fare, gain respectability by depicting such serious subject matter as death and dying? Could films perhaps even provide a space for mourning? I would like to argue that a number of films in the Weimar Republic aspired to engage with the traumatic experience of the First World War. They did so, however, not as war films with heroic soldiers in trenches, special-effects bombardment, and folkloric humor and melodrama of “men under stress”—the domain of films like Westfront 1918 (1930) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

The shock experienced in the immediate postwar years did not lend itself to noisy mimicking of men fighting. Instead, the films of the early Weimar period tend to focus on the victims of war on the home front or on more abstract scenarios involving madness and murder. Such was the psychological toll of those who did return from the battlefield that they fell silent, as Walter Benjamin famously observed. Their experience of killing and facing death was so horrific that words could not express it. I claim that the suppressed memories of this experience instead reemerged in the dark space of the movie theater. Film’s uncertain status between documenting and inventing reality made it especially suitable for the task of revisiting the traumatic event. Mute madmen and monsters, barren settings and stories of fatal encounters restaged the unspoken and unspeakable trauma. The very technology of film projection allowed the dead to reappear as moving images and phantoms, thus rendering cinema the ultimate realm of the undead, the privileged site of what can be imagined but has no life outside of film. Cinema itself created a realm of phantoms where the boundaries between life and death are unstable.

I would like to use Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror) to help think through these issues. The first filmic adaptation of Dracula,¹ Bram Stoker’s popular novel of 1897, Nosferatu opened in Berlin on 5 March 1922. I argue that Murnau’s film represents a radical reworking of Stoker’s novel through the lens of World War I.

Overwhelming Death

Let me begin by introducing some statistics to convey a sense of the enormity of the war’s human cost. Nine million young men from France, England, Russia, Germany, and many other countries were killed, and about six million more were maimed and wounded. Over 13 million German men had been called up for military service—all of them potential victims. In the first major battle in September 1914, half a million men were killed within five days. The Battle of the Marne wiped out most of the German Youth Movement, whose members had been especially enthusiastic about enlisting and going to the front. In 1916, in the Battle of Verdun, 700,000 soldiers died. In the Battle of the Somme, which lasted five months, over 1 million fell, 200,000 casualties each month. In addition, hundreds of thousands more died in the civil and ethnic wars and revolutions that grew out of the World War and infected all combatant countries.

There were few families in Europe that did not suffer the loss of a father, son, husband, or brother. Reacting to the first bloody battles, Sigmund Freud published his essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” in the journal Imago in 1915. He speaks of a “disturbance that has taken place in the attitude which we have hitherto adopted towards death.”² This new awareness of death and dying, writes Freud, “strips us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us” (299). Freud is deeply pessimistic about the chances of eliminating war and poses the rhetorical question, “Would it not be better to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due, and to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed?” (299) I claim that Murnau’s film Nosferatu answers Freud’s question. Cinema in the early Weimar period gave death its due.

There is no better space than the movie theater to confront death because it lets us—vicariously and therefore safely—experience the unimaginable: one’s own death. In his “Thoughts on War and Death,” Freud maintains that the world of fiction—that of literature, theater, and, we might add, cinema—provides compensation for the impoverishment of life. Life without the risk of death becomes, in his words, “flat, superficial, and boring. Thus we are torn: while we crave security for ourselves and our loved ones and forego many things simply because they are too dangerous, we are secretly fascinated by what we have suppressed: adventure, risk, death” (290). Here, according to Freud, fiction acts as a substitute for life-threatening dangers:

There [in fiction] we still find people who know how to die—who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else. There alone, too, the condition can be fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death: namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be able to preserve a life intact. For it is really too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no return-match. In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero. (291)

Freud offers here a theory of the status and function of fiction in the modern age that is characterized by increased security, monotony, and predictability, an age in which death is banned from sight and safety is preferred to risk taking. “How can you write a tragedy in the age of life insurance?” Ivan Goll asked in 1920. It is fiction—literature and, even more so, the movies—that provides the ultimate thrill of confronting death and dying without consequences. However, in Freud’s view of 1915, the war has changed all that:

It is evident that the war is bound to sweep away this conventional treatment of death. Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of thousands, in a single day. And death is no longer a chance event. To be sure, it still seems a matter of chance whether a bullet hits this man or that; but a second bullet may well hit the survivor; and the accumulation of deaths puts an end to the impression of chance. Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content. (291)

In this remarkable passage, Freud captured the duality of danger and risk taking, as it no doubt pertained to the mindset of millions of young Germans in August 1914. No longer dependent upon literary and filmic simulations of an exciting life, they had a chance to experience it firsthand in a war that involved millions and expanded across continents. They became soldiers not necessarily because of their patriotic and nationalistic beliefs but because of the war’s promise of adventure. War seemed the surest way to escape the staid and secure life that had become unbearable for German youth. Georg Heym confides in a diary entry, dated 6 July 1910: “I’d wish something were to happen. If only barricades would again be built, I would be the first one to stand on them and, with a bullet in my heart, feel the delirium of enthusiasm. If only a war broke out, even an unjust one. This peace is so foul, greasy and dull as polish on old furniture.”³

The common experience of summer 1914—leaving home to experience adventure and risk death—has inscribed itself in Murnau’s Nosferatu. Young Hutter, a real estate agent, is eager to travel to the East to do business with Count Orlok, aka the mythical figure Nosferatu, the Undead. Hutter’s rushed leave-taking is encoded as the scene of a young man leaving his fiancée and his friends behind to head to the Eastern Front. In an earlier scene replete with forebodings, he is told that the visit will yield a nice sum of money but also a bit of sweat—and a little bit of blood. It is an allusion innocent Hutter does not understand, but it was not lost on the spectator in 1922. Millions went to the Eastern or Western Front as if embarking on a mere journey. Many did not come back from this journey, and those who did were changed for life. Murnau’s film is a record of such a journey.

The Shadow of Life

Nosferatu begins with three title cards that mimic a handwritten diary by an anonymous author (identified by three crosses). The first title gives the exact location and date—“Account of the great death in Wisborg in the year 1838”—while the third reads:

I have thought long about the beginning and the end of the great death [das grosse Sterben] in my hometown Wisborg. Here is its history: There lived in Wisborg Hutter and his young wife Ellen.

As in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the story is set in the past, at the height of the sedate Biedermeier era and the dawn of industry, technology, and modernity. Its enunciative stance, however, is not a subjective flashback (as in Caligari) but a written account of a survivor of the “great death.” In the tradition of the historical novel, the embedding of the story in an overtly sober and authoritative report lends the uncanny events an air of legitimacy and authenticity. Ostensibly perturbed by the massive dying (das grosse Sterben), the chronicler and diarist promises to tell a story and reflect on it—“I have thought long about the beginning and the end of the great death”—again gesturing toward his bewilderment and lending the subsequent film the form of an essayistic attempt to come to grips with the “grosse Sterben.” To have a sympathetic narrator present a complex story is a narrative trope often used in Romantic literature: it mediates between the insane world of fiction and the sane world of the audience, providing a degree of normalcy against which the bizarre characters and their strange experiences are thrown into stark relief. The narrative voice accompanies the film and appropriately provides a comprehensible conclusion at the end.

The film uses its mock documentary style to elicit a surge of associations and possible meanings from the spectator. A case in point is the year 1838, which, according to the first intertitle, is the year in which the story takes place. It evokes the cholera outbreak in the early 1830s that killed hundreds of thousands in Europe (including Hegel and Clausewitz). Understood as the return of the infamous bubonic plague or Black Death of fourteenth-century Europe that had killed 20 million people (a quarter of the population) in just four years, cholera returned time and again throughout the nineteenth century with death tolls of over a million in Europe alone. While tuberculosis and other diseases had claimed even more victims, the psychological impact of cholera was unprecedented, as the cholera bacillus produced violent symptoms—with death occurring often within a few hours. At the very end of the war in 1918, a global influenza epidemic, the Spanish flu, spread like the plague had in prior centuries. The epidemic that came on top of defeat and starvation produced indelible images of the transmissibility of death. Death itself became contagious. Long lines of hearses filed out of towns to the cemeteries, an image that also appears in Nosferatu. Images of the cholera epidemic are a visually potent substitution for the experience of death in World War I; they serve as a mask that hides the traumatic experience of mass killing that could not yet be visually articulated. Representations of plagues of previous centuries provide a language with which Murnau could symbolize the “Great Death” of only a few years before.

While the first and third title cards record t...