ABSTRACT
Historians of Weimar culture have often viewed the cinema part of what makes Weimar 'Weimar', but they rarely give it the privileged status it has for Kracauer and Eisner, unlocking the Zeitgeist, the ever-elusive essence of an epoch, and mockingly summarised by John Willett:
'When we think of Weimar' writes Peter Gay in the preface to his Weimar Culture, 'we think of The Threepenny Opera, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Magic Mountain, the Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich'. More recently that other eminent historian Walter Lacqueur has defined its Zeitgeist in very similar terms as 'the Bauhaus, The Magic Mountain, Professor Heidegger and Dr Caligari'. 1
