Introduction

The German cinema of the Weimar Republic is often, but wrongly identified with Expressionism. If one locates Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and F.W. Murnau on the mental map of Berlin in the twenties, home of some of Modernism's most vital avant-garde directors, then Expressionist cinema connotes a rebellious artistic intervention. If one sees their films grow from the studio floors of the Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), the only film company ever to think it could compete with Hollywood, this golden age of silent cinema takes its cue more from commerce and industry than art. Either way, coming so soon after a catastrophic military defeat and a failed socialist revolution, the emergence of a national cinema of international fame in Germany was as unexpected as it proved to be exceptional. No single stylistic label could hope to cover the many innovative ideas about film decor, the distinctive mise-en-scène of light and shadow, or the technical advances in cinematography usually attributed to Weimar film makers. And yet, in retrospect, a unity imposed itself on the films, their subjects and stories. Unique among film movements, Weimar cinema came to epitomise a country: twentieth-century Germany, uneasy with itself and troubled by a modernity that was to bring yet more appalling disasters to Europe. This legacy, embodying the best and worst not only of a national cinema, but of a nation and its people is largely the consequence of two books: Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen. Their works, more than any other, have encouraged a potent analogy between film culture and political history, where experience (of key films) so uncannily matches expectation (of what German cinema should 'reflect') that the convergence of image with its object has for nearly fifty years seemed all but self-evident.