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    From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
    From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
    From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
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    From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film

    By Siegfried Kracauer and Leonardo Quaresima

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    An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticism

    First published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler remains an undisputed landmark study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic. Prominent film critic Siegfried Kracauer examines German society from 1921 to 1933, in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel. He explores the connections among film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer makes a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation.

    With a critical introduction by Leonardo Quaresima which provides context for Kracauer’s scholarship and his contributions to film studies, this Princeton Classics edition makes an influential work available to new generations of cinema enthusiasts.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateApr 2, 2019
    ISBN9780691192086
    From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
    Author

    Siegfried Kracauer

    Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was a member of the Frankfurt School, and is considered one of the great film critics of the 20th century. Johannes von Moltke is Associate Professor of German Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, (UC Press). Kristy Rawson is a graduate student in Screen Arts & Cultures at Michigan.

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      From Caligari to Hitler - Siegfried Kracauer

      FROM CALIGARI TO HITLER

      A PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE GERMAN FILM

      FROM CALIGARI TO HITLER

      A PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE GERMAN FILM

      REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

      By SIEGFRIED KRACAUER

      Edited and introduced by Leonardo Quaresima

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 1947, 2004 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press,

      41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersev 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,

      Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

      All Rights Reserved

      First published 1947

      Revised and Expanded Edition, 2004

      First Princeton Classics edition, 2019

      Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-19134-8

      eISBN 978-0-691-19208-6 (ebook)

      Version 1.0

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the last edition of this book as follows:

      Kracauer, Siegfried, 1889-1966.

      From Caligari to Hitler: a psychological history of the German film / by Siegfried Kracauer; edited and introduced by Leonardo Quaresima.—Rev. and expanded ed.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 0-691-11518-4 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-691-11519-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

      1. Motion pictures—Germany—History. 2. Motion pictures—Germany—Psychological aspects. 3. National socialism and motion pictures. I. Quaresima, Leonardo. II. Title.

      PN1993.5.G3K7 2004

      CONTENTS

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS  vii

      EDITOR’S NOTE  xiii

      INTRODUCTION TO THE 2004 EDITION  xv

      PREFACE  li

      INTRODUCTION  3

      I: THE ARCHAIC PERIOD (1895–1918)

        1. PEACE AND WAR  15

        2. FOREBODINGS  28

        3. GENESIS OF UFA  35

      II: THE POSTWAR PERIOD (1918–1924)

        4. THE SHOCK OF FREEDOM  43

        5. CALIGARI  61

        6. PROCESSION OF TYRANTS  77

        7. DESTINY  88

        8. MUTE CHAOS  96

        9. CRUCIAL DILEMMA  107

      10. FROM REBELLION TO SUBMISSION  115

      III: THE STABILIZED PERIOD (1924–1929)

      11. DECLINE  131

      12. FROZEN GROUND  138

      13. THE PROSTITUTE AND THE ADOLESCENT  153

      14. THE NEW REALISM  165

      15. MONTAGE  181

      16. BRIEF REVEILLE  190

      IV: THE PRE-HITLER PERIOD (1930–1933)

      17. SONGS AND ILLUSIONS  203

      18. MURDERER AMONG US  215

      19. TIMID HERESIES  223

      20. FOR A BETTER WORLD  232

      21. NATIONAL EPIC  251

      SUPPLEMENT: PROPAGANDA AND THE NAZI WAR FILM

      1. NAZI VIEWS AND MEASURES  275

      2. FILM DEVICES  277

      3. THE SWASTIKA WORLD  280

      4. SCREEN DRAMATURGY  288

      5. CONFLICT WITH REALITY  297

      NOTE ON THE INACCURACIES  309

      BIBLIOGRAPHY  315

      UPDATED BIBLIOGRAPHY  327

      NAME INDEX  333

      FILM INDEX  339

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      EDITOR’S NOTE

      THE PRESENT edition refers to the text published in 1947 and reprinted in several paperback editions. No alterations have been made to the text. Brief corrections and emendations are contained in the Note on the Inaccuracies. The most significant historiographic findings are discussed in the editor’s new introduction. The Structural Analysis section of the 1947 edition has been omitted.

      The bibliography originally compiled by Kracauer has been revised and updated, and a short section has been added listing the main studies on Weimar and Wilhelmine cinema to appear after the publication of From Caligari to Hitler. The original index has been broken down into two separate indexes: name and film. The name index excludes names mentioned only in the footnotes. The film index gives the primary film data (original title, director and year of release) for those films cited in the book. Since the original illustrations do not reproduce well, they have been replaced with pictures that correspond to Kracauer’s selections. Only in the case of illustrations 4, 28, 31, 34 and 59 have new pictures been utilized. Karsten Witte’s German edition of the book (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979; 2nd rev. ed., 1984) proved invaluable, as did the latest Italian edition (Turin: Lindau, 2001).

      I wish to express my gratitude to the institutions that made possible the research on which this new edition is based: the Deutsches Literaturarchiv of Marbach am Neckar (where I was able to consult Kracauer’s papers) and the archives and library of the Filmmuseum Berlin/Deutsche Kinemathek. I wish to express my personal appreciation to Jochen Mayer and Reinhardt Tgahrt of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv; and to Werner Sudendorf (collection) and Uta Orluc and Annemarie Lorenz-Tröstrum (library) of the Filmmuseum Berlin. Alessandra Raengo helped me to research the American titles of films and other matters, for which she deserves a special thank you. I also wish to thank Hans-Michael Bock and my friends at CineGraph, Richard Abel and Paolo Caneppele (Cineteca Comunale Bologna), for their friendly collaboration, and Thomas Elsaesser for his suggestions. My deepest gratitude goes to Tony Kaes, to whom I owe my involvement in this project and to whom I am indebted for his invaluable advice; to Fred Appel and Karen Jones, who have followed this work with passion and expertise; and to Ezio Quarantelli (editor in chief) and Barbara Zileri (editor) of Lindau Publishing (Turin). An affectionate thank you to Luisa Bettiga.

      INTRODUCTION TO THE 2004 EDITION: REREADING KRACAUER

      by Leonardo Quaresima

      Translated by Michael F. Moore

      I

      THE CENTENARY of the birth of Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) led to a flurry of scholarly activity. The Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, which inherited Kracauer’s papers following the death of his wife in 1971, organized a large exhibition in 1989 that retraced Kracauer’s biographical and intellectual itinerary and revealed to the public a wealth of materials, including original manuscripts, letters and notes. American scholar Thomas Y. Levin prepared an all but definitive bibliography of Kracauer’s writings. A well-documented biography was also published.¹ The feuilletons Kracauer had written for the Frankfurter Zeitung between 1921 and 1933 emerged from oblivion, including many of his film reviews, which had appeared in the newspaper’s city section (a supplement that had been microfilmed only partially and was difficult to consult in its entirety), and other works that had been either unpublished or out of print.² The feuilletons also appeared in the fifth volume of the Schriften (1990) and two other anthologies, although there is still no complete edition of his film reviews.³ In 1989 an ambitious conference was the stimulus for new research and thinking on Kracauer.⁴

      There was also significant momentum outside Germany. In the United States the journal New German Critique dedicated a special issue to Kracauer in 1991, and Dagmar Barnouw published a study in 1994.⁵ In Italy the publisher Marietti, which had brought out Italian translations of many of his works, organized a conference in Genoa on Kracauer in 1989 and later published the proceedings.⁶ In France a monograph by Enzo Traverso appeared, as did a study of the relations between Kracauer and the trans-Alpine world.⁷ Subsequently new monographs, essay collections and more general appreciations appeared in German.⁸ In the United States the anthology The Mass Ornament (with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin) and Die Angestellten were translated and a new edition of Theory of Film, with an introduction by Miriam Hansen, was published.⁹

      This renewed interest in Kracauer’s writings makes the situation of From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) all the more puzzling. Rightly or wrongly it is the work most closely associated with Kracauer’s name over the years. Yet it has also received the least critical attention and reinterpretation during this latest phase. In many of the editions, translations and critical works cited, some of which are remarkable for their depth and novel approach, there is no specific analysis of the work.¹⁰ The often implicit justification that the work is already well known and thus, in a certain sense, established betrays a feeling of discomfort and embarrassment, as if it was considered hopelessly inadequate and feeble, the inference being that Kracauer’s true originality and importance are to be sought elsewhere. Some scholars have openly declared their reservations. Barnouw, for example, calls From Caligari to Hitler the most widely known and, on the whole, least satisfying work. … It exhibits some of the more important fallacies that can trap the historian.¹¹

      The situation in Germany is noteworthy since the book did not appear there until 1958, long after its publication in English, and then only in an abridged and bowdlerized version that tried to mitigate or even alter the original approach, which was evidently thought to reflect a dangerously Marxist bias.¹² Although the book was critically lambasted at the time, it later became a touchstone for the influential school of criticism that gravitated around the magazine Filmkritik. Starting in the mid 1960s (with the ultimate success of the new cinema) the connection was broken and his method was officially abandoned. In a famous commentary Enno Patalas wrote: No other book influenced us all so much in our youth. … Nowadays the exclusively sociological critics no longer grasp the meaning of the important films. … The need for an aesthetic approach to film criticism has become imperative.¹³ Frieda Grafe was even more critical, proclaiming the author’s realistic concepts to be inoperative for a cinema that viewed the duplication of reality as not a trump card but rather an obstacle to overcome.¹⁴ The appearance of the first installments of the complete edition of Kracauer’s works in the 1970s, a new unabridged translation of the book in 1979 and the passionate attention of its editor, Karsten Witte, reopened the discussion on new grounds.¹⁵ Even in the pages of Filmkritik there was talk of a return to Kracauer despite misgivings about him.¹⁶ Nevertheless, today the echo of From Caligari to Hitler is heard mainly in academic circles.¹⁷

      The situation in Italy, where From Caligari to Hitler had played an important role in the development of Marxist criticism, also bears mentioning. First translated in 1954, after the 1977 edition was issued it would remain out of print for years.¹⁸ In France, where the book’s methodology had been absorbed, implicitly and explicitly, into the field of relations between cinema and history, Traverso’s monograph lamented the oblivion into which Kracauer’s work had fallen. Critics did note the similarities between Kracauer’s methodology and Marc Ferro’s notion that film is the place to record gestures, objects and forms of social behavior.¹⁹ Although Pierre Sorin was critical of many aspects of the book’s approach, he considered it a fundamental reference.²⁰ A more recent collection of essays published in France, however, does not include a single essay on Kracauer’s study of German cinema.²¹ From Caligari to Hitler deserves to be reread.

      II

      On May 3,1937, Max Horkheimer (who was already in the United States) wrote to Kracauer (who had been living in exile in Paris since March 1933) that the Museum of Modern Art in New York had a virtually complete collection of silent films dating from the beginning of the film industry … and an almost complete collection of films produced in Germany. He added that the museum was considering the possibility of studying, on the basis of the available materials, the relationship between social development and cinema in Germany. He also reported that he had recommended Kracauer for the job.²² This was the spark that gave birth to From Caligari to Hitler.

      In June 1939 John E. Abbot, then director of the New York Film Library, approved a proposal that had been sent to him by Kracauer (whose papers include a general Ideenskizze zu meinem Buch über den Film) and offered him a position as special research assistant at the film library so that he could work on the book. With the outbreak of war, Kracauer’s life was rocked by a chain of tragic events. He was with Walter Benjamin from August 1940 until shortly before the latter’s suicide in late September, a step Kracauer also contemplated following his friend’s death. In April 1941 he finally reached the United States, where he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, followed by a position as special assistant to Iris Barry, the curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s film division, which was also financed by the foundation.

      Kracauer buried himself in a systematic study of the films and books on Weimar cinema (which he found full of inaccuracies and errors) and on the social, political and artistic situation of postwar Germany.²³ It was an arduous enterprise that severely taxed the scholar. (Eyewitnesses remember him always surrounded by books in the library or holed up in the screening room.) He was also busy gathering the testimony of German cineastes who had emigrated to the United States, such as Fritz Lang, William Dieterle, Richard Oswald, Hans Richter, Hans Janowitz, Henrik Galeen and Eugen Schufftan.

      The work proceeded slowly. His initial one-year grant was extended until 1943 and then replaced by annual funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, which was renewed until 1945. The task was completed in the spring of 1946.²⁴ While he originally intended to call it The German Film and the German Mind, he gave the work its definitive title at the beginning of the same year. The book was published in April 1947 by Princeton University Press, the publisher that Erwin Panofsky had originally recommended to Kracauer. An advance copy of the CALIGARI chapter appeared in Partisan Review, XIV (March-April 1947), no. 2. The work was completed despite considerable obstacles. Although the MOMA archive was available to him, Kracauer was not able to have a second viewing of some films he had seen during his career as a film critic (starting in 1921) for the Frankfurter Zeitung.

      His notes provide a fairly accurate idea of his viewing and work habits. They were probably written, partly in shorthand, during screenings and contain references to scenery, camera angles, intertitles and coloring. In some cases (such as CALIGARI and films by Viktor Eggeling, Hans Richter and Walter Ruttmann) they also include sketches that reconstruct single frames (or helped him to memorize abstract configurations). This is important material since it unequivocally refutes the oft-cited opinion that his work was based mainly on an analysis of film plots.

      When Kracauer could not see a film a second time, he always made it perfectly clear that his sources were secondhand, never compromising the correctness of his method. The way he formulates his judgments sometimes reflects this situation, such as cases where his analysis does not go beyond a certain level or include important films that would have enriched his argument.

      Kracauer the scholar was greatly aided by his background as a critic. In a Preliminary Report that he wrote to summarize the work he had done so far and to explain why it would be impossible to meet the 1944 deadline, there is a rare mention of his reviews from the 1920s and 1930s. He states that his book "will refer to the articles I published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, and that the conclusions at which they arrived corroborate to some extent my present ones. … The immediate reactions of the contemporary testify in favor of the historian’s mediate accounts."²⁵

      Kracauer was also plagued by feelings of separation and detachment. In such cases he identified with a doctor who is performing an autopsy and at the same time doing a cross-section of a piece of his own past, which is now completely dead.²⁶ The same applies to his rejection of German and decision to write in English, the language he would use in all his subsequent works. This required an exhausting extra effort: Every inch of ground that is won means a lot to me.²⁷ Thus, it was the author himself who underscored, however indirectly, the gap between his earlier reviews and the book as a result of the new perspective in which he viewed his subject matter: I’m amazed to know so well from the inside something that I observed from the outside … and I was happy when by chance my judgment from then happened to coincide with my knowledge today.²⁸

      Kracauer was thus the first to point to the disparity in his judgments. He had a remarkable awareness that his object had become something completely new, making any possible discrepancies between the way he used to view a film and the way he now saw it both entirely justifiable and not at all problematic. He consequently quoted only two of his articles from the 1920s: Der heutige Film und sein Publikum (1928), to confirm his reservations about Walter Ruttmann’s BERLIN (a formal idea which does not imply content), and KUHLE WAMPE verboten! (1932), a review that triggered a bitter dispute with Ernst Bloch, which led to a breakup of their friendship that was not repaired until the late 1950s (at the time of the publication of the German edition of From Caligari to Hitler).²⁹

      An analysis and comparison of Kracauer’s articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung and From Caligari to Hitler shows both the connections between and the autonomy of the two systems.³⁰ His new recognition and redefinition of critical parameters took place within a framework of substantial continuity. However, as a reviewer he generally noted (and criticized) features that as a historian he would have to ignore. His choice of a socio-psychological perspective and need to designate groups and tendencies according to these guidelines led to a simplification or bias in his analyses, which often neglected important aspects of individual films—and not just on the aesthetic level.

      There are far fewer instances in which his judgment as a historian enriched his original critique (and possibly lowered its polemical tone). Nevertheless, in some cases he completely changed or even reversed his judgment. One of the most conspicuous and surprising examples of this discontinuity concerns Arnold Fanck’s mountain films. While Kracauer the film critic dismissed DER HEILIGE BERG (1926) with a virulent pan—emphasizing its connections to antimodern trends and noting its unintentional parody and its eccentric contents—he reserved a warmer and more positive judgment for DER BERG DES SCHICKSALS (1924). Here he saw the bond between man and nature not so much as a caricature or exaggeration of romantic concepts but rather in more neutral terms, situated in the sports world and associated solely with athletic prowess. Kracauer the film critic ultimately praised Fanck’s cloud motifs for their expressive technique and visual appeal: Cumuli, enormous white clouds that scatter, seas of clouds that surge and slowly ebb, banks and herds of sheep. In his review of DER HEILIGE BERG, he noted that the floating of cloud banks is shown magisterially.³¹ Kracauer the historian, however, saw the same motifs as related to the canons of Nazi cinema and culture—even precursors of them.

      III

      From Caligari to Hitler underwent a long and complex gestation period. The summaries of the project that he wrote during successive drafts help us to understand the guiding ideas and how they evolved. Scholars generally examine the book’s introductory chapter to identify and discuss Kracauer’s methodological criteria. This is where, in effect, Kracauer explicitly laid out his agenda and his premises. He worked on this chapter till the end, as his many corrections to the proofs attest.³²

      The introduction largely represents a confluence of the programmatic points Kracauer had elaborated during previous stages of the work. But the path he follows is not always linear and automatic. A study of the various draft stages enables us to understand the work’s foundations more precisely.

      The following are the texts to which I will refer: (a) Ideenskizze zu meinem Buch über den Film, written in France in 1938–39; (b) Notes on the Planned History of the German Film, written after August 1942; (c) Preliminary Report, prepared in 1944 to summarize the work he had done thus far and the work still remaining to be done; (d) an early typescript of what would later become the introduction;³³ and (e) the final text of the introduction. Obviously the ultimate reference is the book itself, which clearly and unequivocally reveals Kracauer’s working methods.

      The Ideenskizze zu meinem Buch über den Film, a work of primarily historical value, already provides valuable insight into his method. It is modeled upon Kracauer’s study of Jacques Offenbach (1937), in which he devoted to operetta the place that cinema would occupy in his later work.³⁴ The relationship between cinema and society is still very general; Kracauer treats cinema as the product of a specific historical era, a system whose social function he proposes to investigate. He refers to the the interaction between the unique structure of film and various social factors (p. 2). He also adopts a phenomenological approach: As in no other art, film captures the most fleeting, contingent features of social life (p. 2). By referring to a specific stage in the author’s formation, this sentence anticipates one of the most characteristic features of the approach Kracauer would ultimately take. This outline also suggests a perspective that is theoretical and not just historiographic, plus a field of inquiry that is not exclusively German.

      The Notes on the Planned History of the German Film is the first text to reveal the structure of the work in an advanced state and the complexity (and diversity) of its sources. The portrait presented of a subject appearing on the postwar German scene as an unhappy, homeless soul [moving] like a stranger through the world of normal reality, a free-wandering soul [who imagines] madmen, somnambulists, vampires and murderers (p. 5) still reveals traces of the Kierkegaardian existentialism (or Georg Lukács’s concepts in Theory of the Novel) that so greatly influenced his formation and writing in the period leading up to his essay on the detective novel (1922–25).

      The text, however, is dominated by Kracauer’s readings of Georg Simmel’s sociology in the early 1920s, filtered through his understanding of Marx, which led to an original materialistic realism (characteristic of his better-known feuilletons, collected in The Mass Ornament,³⁵ and his 1930 book on office workers entitled The Salaried Masses).³⁶ Because of cinema’s ties to folk art and its technical resources—ubiquity, detail, camera angles—Kracauer depicts it as the art of detail, of the surface (a central notion for him), the medium best able to capture the infinitesimal movements and [the] multitude of transitory actions … physiognomies, small gestures, occasional complexes of things and human bodies and all the passing phenomena that constitute the surface of life (p. 2). This formulation owes more to Simmel than to any other author. In his 1920 essay on the sociologist Kracauer wrote: Using a net of relations of analogy and of essential homogeneity, he advances from the surface of things to their spiritual/intellectual substrata everywhere he looks. In the process, he demonstrates that this surface is symbolic in character and that it is the manifestation and result of these spiritual/intellectual powers and essentialities. The most trivial event leads down into the shafts of the soul.³⁷

      According to Kracauer, Simmel starts by discarding the prism of a sublime metaphysical idea³⁸ and instead builds relations between remote objects and assigns a fundamental place to the moment of perception. There could be no better description of the method that Kracauer himself developed in his works dating from the mid 1920s until the rise of Nazism, which also characterized all his later works. Benjamin described him in an image that Kracauer cherished: A ragpicker, at daybreak, picking up rags of speech and verbal scraps with his stick and tossing them, grumbling and growling, a little drunk, into his cart, not without letting one or another of those faded cotton remnants—‘humanity,’ ‘inwardness,’ or ‘absorption’—flutter derisively in the wind.³⁹

      The essay The Mass Ornament (1927) opens with a justly celebrated first sentence: The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself (p. 75). This premise is the basis for Kracauer’s critical theory concerning the products of industrial culture—from cinema to photography, from variety shows to the Tiller Girls. One of his most recent applications of it had been in Die totalitäre Propaganda (1936–38), an essay that was supposed to appear in the review of the Institut fur Sozialforschung, which had already moved to the United States. (Kracauer withdrew it from publication after receiving Adorno’s corrections, which reversed the initial approach of moving from the particular and the concrete to the general; Adorno preferred to start with general principles.)⁴⁰

      The visible world is expressed through surfaces; interrogation of these surfaces will lead to a physiognomy of the world.⁴¹ Reality can be interpreted as a hieroglyph (another notion central to Kracauer’s thinking). Space is a social hieroglyph (Über Arbeitsnachweise, 1930), in which the structure and relationships of a social reality are inscribed.⁴² What is simultaneously manifested in it is the physical world, the materiality of things—according to an ambivalence that runs through all of Kracauer’s work and is only resolved in Theory of Film.⁴³

      When Kracauer speaks of film’s ability to show infinitesimal movements and the multitude of transitory actions (p. 2), he seems to be referring to an involuntary quality of reality, thereby suggesting the existence of an underlying latent content in addition to the content that is manifest. Hence he also adopts a psychoanalytic model, his text referring explicitly to the "symptomatic value of cinema (p. 4). The reviews written during the 1920s (which he vindicates in his next work, the Preliminary Report) also describe the German Screen as a symptom of the domestic situation" (p. 98).

      Kracauer focuses on the mental processes of the subjects (the free-wandering soul, the man of the crowd) who populate the social scene of postwar Germany, thereby activating a second level of the Freudian model and postulating within this framework a direct connection between film’s technical and stylistic choices and psychic organization (p. 6). The mobility of the camera is related to the wandering attitude of the soul; the light contrasts with the terrific visions of a mind put out of joint (p. 6).

      However, the relationship between film and reality is also built upon sociological foundations (with references to Marxist concepts). Kracauer actually adopts two models: mirroring, in which films mirror … the ideology of a society in decomposition (p. 7), and transparency, in which films are … transparent. … It is as if the despair after the War and the violence of the interior struggles had removed some of the opaque layers which, in more normal times, separate the course of art from that of contemporary reality (p. 4). Kracauer seems to attribute to German films a particular inclination (which he does not clearly explain) in the way they relate to historical and social reality, arguing that more directly than the films of other nations [they] point to the background from which they emerge (p. 4). At the same time he maintains that they have the ability to act upon reality.

      The Notes on the Planned History of the German Film also introduces a formalist perspective, assigning an important role to the disorientation and estrangement mechanisms that are so frequently adopted in the feuilletons.⁴⁴ The detail helps foreground neglected aspects, as though one looked through a narrow window at strange scenes that, outdoors, would be entirely invisible (p. 3). Directors, according to Kracauer, tend to portray … apparently familiar objects and make them seem new (p. 5).

      Aesthetic issues, by contrast, are completely ignored. The proposed study intends to refer not only to German silent-film classics but also to commercial films, the anonymous, average … film, more permeable to certain traits of contemporaneous life than those outstanding creations (pp. 6–7). Kracauer makes no mention of issues connected with auteur film. This aspect of his study is perfectly consistent with the orientation of all his preceding work. The average film had been the focus of one of his most original and successful works during the Weimar era, The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies (1927).⁴⁵ The final version of the introduction draws attention to the importance (though not exclusively) of popular films.

      Various methodologies can thus be identified in the Notes on the Planned History of the German Film, including phenomenological, psychoanalytic, Marxist and formalist. They are not so much connected or integrated as they are stratified. Other models are then projected onto them. Cinema brings the viewer into contact with a historic scene, individual or collective subjects or interior states, which in turn are either individual or collective (German life and mentality).

      In the subsequent Preliminary Report, the collective subject was further defined, but with new ambivalence: as an abstract category (the people, Germany, the German mind) or one that is both socially and historically defined (the middle class). Furthermore, the subject—the German collective dispositions (p. 8)—is viewed at a moment when it is either influencing or being influenced by historic events. Here Kracauer established the coexistence and stratification of the two levels (which he reiterates in the final version of the introduction), while firmly denying any intention of postulating a fixed national character (p. 8) as a category (a common criticism of his work). The typescript of the introduction also mentions the German soul and the German multitude (p. 29), but its historicist approach is more focused (in terms of middle-class strata and petty bourgeoisie), also making direct reference to his study of office workers, The Salaried Masses (pp. 27–28). The final text of the introduction reiterates Kracauer’s rejection of any notion of a national character pattern allegedly elevated above history: national characteristics should be interpreted as effects rather than as causes (p. 54). Although it mentions the mentality of a nation, collective dispositions and the psychological pattern of a people, the notion of the middle class is what prevails, both here and throughout his discussion, based on the argument that middle-class ideology and behavior influence other social strata.

      The Preliminary Report reinforces the psychoanalytic model: films offer an access to the subterranean inner dispositions of the society and throw light upon certain collective attitudes of the time (pp. 1–2). The report also mentions the symptomatic value of the themes of films. It plays down the mirroring model, instead highlighting the dislocation between the inner dispositions of the middle classes and the outer conditions of life (p. 7).

      A new perspective emerges from the Preliminary Report that will be greatly developed in the final draft of the introduction: HOMUNCULUS endow[s] its main character with all the traits of Hitler (p. 2). The outcome (Nazism and Nazism in power) becomes retroactive, as if history could bend backward.

      The first draft of the introduction develops and openly declares a psychoanalytic perspective. Cinema is more relevant to the unconscious nature of human relations than to the principles directing them in the sphere of consciousness (p. 14). Films should be considered symptomatic of certain subterranean states of mind prevailing in Germany at that time (p. 15). And, even more directly, Films are permeable to unconscious characteristics (p. 18). In the words of Horace Kallen, The silent film offered itself, far more explicitly than any other art, as a drama of two levels, a sequence of symbolic actions with a ‘manifest content’ and a ‘latent content’ (p. 19).⁴⁶

      Kracauer also tightens the association between film and everyday life, which he feels are connected by the informal, casual manner of cinematic perception (referring to Arnold Hauser, not Benjamin): The details on the screen … are invaluable to the study of socio-psychological problems. By bringing to the fore innumerable surface phenomena of life, the cinema makes transparent motivations in the depths of the soul (p. 19).

      Cinema’s special aptitude for making reality and history visible emerges as a key theme, while the privileged position of German film starts to wane. Here Kracauer advances the hypothesis that property derives from the collective characteristics of production. He also points to film’s ability to fulfill the wishes of the masses, primarily through its technical resources. While his treatment of these two issues is here still very tentative, he formulates them more articulately and assertively in the final text (where they would provoke considerable criticism). Finally, the text discloses an iconographic approach: It is certainly not the plot which makes a specific source of knowledge (p. 15). Imagery and pictorial realization play a fundamental role (pp. 15–16).

      The final text of the introduction reduces the emphasis on phenomenological assumptions, instead giving prominence to a perspective that can be traced back to Panofsky, in combination with a Freudian perspective. This version highlights the importance of the persistent reiteration not only of narrative but also of figurative motifs (p. 53). Despite its crucial role, this is one of the least analyzed aspects of From Caligari to Hitler.

      The psychoanalytic approach operates on two levels. On one level film is a primarily social symptom: Films … provide clues to hidden mental processes and are outward projections of inner urges (pp. 7–8). In short, Cinema [is] a social testimony because it captures the unobserved and the recurrent. Its horizon is a culture’s unconscious.⁴⁷ On another level, the mechanisms of the collective psyche are invoked, but without defining a psychological model (or mind, mood, state of mind) of a collective subject (people, nations or, more specifically, middle-class people, middle-class Germans). Clearly the terminology already has a high degree of mobility and ambiguity, and the system to which it refers is wholly undefined.

      This is a crucial point. It is no accident that the subtitle of the book refers to a psychological history of the German film. Kracauer’s source for this construction is primarily the social psychology of Eric Fromm (he cites Escape from Freedom [1941]). In 1929–30, at almost the same time as the appearance of Kracauer’s Salaried Masses, Fromm had conducted a study (published only several decades later) of the social and cultural situation of German factory and office workers. His findings revealed a discrepancy between workers’ political positions and their personalities that is consistent with Kracauer’s own conclusions.⁴⁸ Kracauer also cites a research project promoted by the Institut für Sozialforschung on Autorität und Familie (which was completed in New York in 1935 and published in Paris one year later), with theoretical contributions from Max Horkheimer, Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. He specifically mentions Horkheimer’s essay.⁴⁹

      The reader, however, will search in vain throughout the text of the introduction or the rest of the book for any development or definition of the notion of social psychology, or of the model used to extend to a collective subject the mechanisms of the individual psyche. The reader feels a strong need for this, especially considering the crucial role this model plays in support of the thesis of the book. Nor is any reference made to the Freudian texts that shape this perspective.⁵⁰ The introduction does not make explicit mention of mirroring processes (in the common Marxist sense) or of counterhistorical concepts (the foreshadowing of history). These are points to which Kracauer will return.

      IV

      Do the contents of From Caligari to Hitler respect its stated programmatic assumptions? A careful reading of the book reveals a few surprises. A specific social class with defined characteristics—the German middle class—is Kracauer’s first point of reference, explicitly or implicitly. Kracauer uses vague terminology derived from Geistesgeschichte when talking about the soul of a people, the German mind and the collective soul, but he always refers to a specific social group. In this sense the study is in a line of continuity with The Salaried Masses, from which it borrows the principles of sociological investigation conducted according to the methods of qualitative analysis (which was widespread in the United States in the 1940s and is the subject of a methodological essay by Kracauer), while rejecting the feuilleton-style resources typical of his German writings.⁵¹ Both The Salaried Masses and From Caligari to Hitler share the same initial assumption, namely, that there is a dislocation between the material conditions of the middle class and the forms through which it represents itself: The position of these strata in the economic process has changed; their middle-class conception of life has remained.⁵² In economic terms, the middle classes today are to a great extent proletarianized; in conceptual terms, they are homeless.⁵³ These are the same premises on which Kracauer operates in From Caligari to Hitler. He judges individual features associated with middle-class social life in the same way: sports are seen as an element of depoliticization (the reason for his reservations concerning KUHLE WAMPE, to which he returns in the book); the New Objectivity is harshly criticized (From behind the pseudo-austerity of the lobby architecture, Grinzing grins out).⁵⁴

      The motifs identified at the psychological level (such as immaturity, the theme of the Doppelgänger,) are always related, directly or indirectly, to a social situation. The psychological sphere is anchored to a specific context. From this point of view the text of the book itself is more advanced than the introduction. Karsten Witte is right to note that the staunch opponents of this [psychological] thesis often never read beyond the introduction.⁵⁵

      In the essay Revolt of the Middle Classes the middle class is depicted as oscillating between violence and liberalism. In Die totalitäre Propaganda the same class, in its inability to be attracted by capitalism, is located at the center of an antagonism between right- and left-wing parties that could no longer be bridged by democratic means.⁵⁶ This same diagnosis reappears in From Caligari to Hitler, in which reason is viewed as a weak and fragmentary alternative.

      The argument confirms the central importance of analyzing the processes of the psychic apparatus, its mechanisms (compensation, projection, etc.), unconscious elaboration and what Kracauer aptly terms subterranean content that, like contraband, had crossed the borders of consciousness without being questioned (p. 163). The limits of this approach are that it is being applied to a collective subject—the middle class—without adequate support through research. The films give me precise indications about the psychological dispositions of the Germans, Kracauer wrote to Hermann Hesse.⁵⁷ But upon what foundations could such a construct be placed?

      Even as an instrument for interpreting film as a symptom of a social and political situation, this model is not defined or developed. However suggestive it might be, however effective at the operative level, it has been adopted without a systematic design or rigorous methodology for making generalizations. From a methodological perspective, it is a step backward from his formulations in Notes on the Planned History of the German Film, as well as from his insights in the 1920s and 1930s regarding the idea

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