ABSTRACT
The capacity for cinematic constructions to shape society's relationship to the past demanded pedagogical intervention. Audiences of historical films were making their own sense of filmed history. Rather than requiring the "unnatural" thinking of historicist classroom instruction the audience's relationship to moving history on film can be better understood through Benjamin's conception of children as rebellious appropriators of information and objects placed before them. The potential for popular historical film to influence the Weimar classroom was apparent in initiatives like class trips to the ever-multiplying movie theaters. Not only was popular film linked to the surface culture of Americanism and therefore shunned, but the ability of the medium to show a version of the past in motion also generated great concern. By exploring this ambivalence toward the potential of cinema in historical instruction, this chapter discusses the history of film in the Weimar classroom, and theorizes the medium's unique pedagogical possibilities across time for historical instruction.
