Projections of Identity and Alterity in Three Weimar Films: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Pandora’s Box and Die Nibelungen

By Willow Elise Randles

1

Dedicated to Horst Kaiser

Many thanks to Karen Koehler, Eva Rueschmann, Will Ryan and my mother for all their support and guidance.

2 Table of Contents

Introduction 4

Literature Review- Meta-Myths of Weimar Cinema 30

Chapter One- The Mythic Man and His Mythic Nation 39

Chapter Two- The Master Mesmerist and Jewish Otherness 49

Chapter Three- The Uncanny Feminine 67

Conclusions 93

3 Introduction

At the close of World War I, the German nation and people were in a state of ideological and political upheaval. The period between the two World Wars, known in

Germany only as the Weimar period, was an era of magnificent chaos and profound artistic accomplishment. Often called the golden age of German film, some of the most extraordinary and original films arose out of the political and social chaos and search for meaning in the lost war effort. Many Germans lost their lives in World War I and the reasons for entering the war seemed inadequate in retrospect. The desire to find meaning is visible in the art and politics of the Weimar Republic.

In this work I will discuss the role of three films from this period in order to show how they reflect the historical moment of their production. Films from the Weimar era, especially art films have frequently been grouped under the term Expressionism, which as a descriptor for film quickly grows problematic. Expressionism, like any other -ism is full of contradictions. It over-simplifies a body of work that has not yet been fully understood. Andrew Tudor offers one of the best attempts to define and capture something shared by all Expressionist films:

Whether distortion depends primarily on the grotesque angles and impossible perspectives of expressionist design, or the strange shadings of the chiaroscuro tradition, seems immaterial. Generally there is a mixture and the result is largely the same. A world at odds with itself, peopled by the phantoms of both mind and spirit... disharmony is the keynote whatever the melody. The tortured characters of the German silent cinema are part of an alien malevolent world, permeated by fate. They are constrained

4 by the unknown; powerful forces wash over them; their world is dislocated within itself. They must inevitably pay Faust's price. Of course this cluster of meanings is very generalized. By its nature artistic style deals in such generalities. It communicates an ethos, a mood, a sense of fatalism and disorder. The whole pictoral character of these visuals makes a mockery of harmony between man and environment.1

Tudor manages at the very least to recognize how “very generalized” his words are but perhaps he recognizes something of the disunity, incongruity that we do see in the

Weimar films. Tudor leaves space for something unsaid in his description; “A world at odds with itself” or “dislocated within itself.” Even within this definition, one of the more interesting ones, there is something left unnamed. It is uncertain. He does not claim to understand why the world represented is so at odds with itself. These films about sleepwalkers and the undead, about ancient heroes, and an unknown element that comes from within humanity itself seem indefinable. The problems of Expressionism as a label for film as multiple as they are, is not however the focus of this work.2

I will explore how each film attempts to mythologize German nationhood, especially as it stood in opposition to an equally mythical but dangerous “other.” The

“othered” stereotypes that appear in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921), Die Nibelungen

(1924-25), and Pandora’s Box (1929) are the Jewish puppet-master and the uncanny feminine. These othered characters depart from the conventional German gender model from the turn of the century, which establishes the woman’s place at the center of the family, taking care of the home and putting her own desires last. Women who stepped

1 Andrew Tudor, Image and Influence, 160.

2 See Appendix I 3 Mary Fulbrook. History of Germany 1918-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 15.

5 outside of the home and Jewish characters are depicted as dangerous and threatening to the unity and sanctity of an already destabilized German identity. I will argue that film serves as a version of myth to mitigate and frame experiences that are frightening or unknown. Myths are especially important during times of transition because they create a sense of continuity and precedent. The three films act as myths creating identity but also undermine and complicate the very identity being constructed.

Beginning with a consideration of myth and its relationship to the Weimar era film, I will then summarize the films and give some general background on the study of

Weimar era film as it pertains to myth. Finally, I will analyze the mythic elements of the three films, with a focus on how Die Nibelungen becomes a metaphor for the loss of

WWI and the unfair terms of the Versailles Treaty. My study will continue with a comparative study of the types of Jewish and uncanny feminine characters that appear in each film, in an attempt to show how they are defined and how their threat escalates, culminating in a justification for a fascist response to these stereotypical tropes. While focused on one film, each chapter also works comparatively, establishing contrasts, and showing the development of that character or theme.

Weimar Germany

This era in German history is among the most discussed and also the most contested in part because of its culmination in the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party.3 For many scholars the question is how could a nation of rational, good-spirited, pragmatic, philosophical people such as the Germans allow for this to happen. There is no singular

3 Mary Fulbrook. History of Germany 1918-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 15.

6 answer to this question, as the Weimar period is a most complex and chaotic time in

German history. There were seven different governments over the relatively short period from 1919 to 1933. The Weimar era included Germany’s uneasy first attempt at a democratic system and extreme shifts in economic balance due to rapid industrialization.

These conditions further complicated efforts to achieve stability.

Due to the fact that there were several nation states that only truly became unified under Bismarck, fifty years earlier, there remained many questions of how to define

Germany or Germanness. Was the nation to be defined culturally, linguistically or otherwise? Goethe and Schiller, two of Germany's most prominent writers both ask:

“What is Germanness?” and “How can Bavarians be considered the same as people from

Berlin?” Schiller asked, “Deutschland? Aber wo liegt es? Ich weiss das Land nicht zu finden.” 4 (Germany? But where does it lie? I do not know how to find the country.)

Goethe wrote, “Zur Nation euch zu bilden, ihr hoffet es, Deutche, vergebens;/ Bildet, ihr könnt es, dafür freier zu Mensche euch aus.” (Any hope of forming yourselves into a nation, Germans is in vain; develop yourselves rather—you can do it—more freely as human beings!)5 These two men capture something of the essential question that plagued

Germany from its outset as a nation. This question can be seen as a driving factor for much of modern German history. Stefan Wolff writes that the German question is one of the defining questions of the European continent, one which shapes the politics and power dynamics of the European continent in the 19th and 20th centuries.6

In most cases, the Weimar era is separated into three distinct categories. The first

4 Mary Fulbrook. A Concise History of Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 1. 5 Ibid, 1. 6 Stefan Wolff. The German Question since 1919; An Analysis with Key Documents. Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2003, 1.

7 section from 1919 to 1923 is often called the years of crisis. The second part from 1924 -

1929 is considered to be the golden years, when there was relative stability and order.

However, these golden years abruptly ended when the American stock market crashed, and the already unstable German fiscal balance was sent into uproar. The years from

1930-1933, are know as the years of decline and are also marked by Hitler’s rise to power.

The ‘years of crisis’ 1919-23 follow on the heels of World War I, which left Germany decimated and seemingly at fault for a war they had felt justified in waging, a war which they expected to be over quickly. One argument why Germany supported Austria in starting the war was that they themselves were on the brink of civil war, and hoped that a war against other foes would bring Germany’s feuding parts in unison against a common enemy.7

The defeat was very difficult for Germany to accept. A popular myth arose that

Germany had been stabbed in the back. The myth attributed German losses to the dangerous internal forces such as Jews, Socialists and Bolsheviks who betrayed Germany to her enemies.8 It is important to note that while blame was gradually shunted off to minority groups, the original stab-in-the-back myth was also directed at the very government that sought to make peace with the allied nations at the end of the war. The first mention of the stab-in-the-back myth comes from an interview by the Committee for Investigating the Cause of German Defeat in the fall of 1919. Paul von Hindenburg quoted an English general who allegedly said, “The German army was stabbed from

7 Fulbrook, 1991, 151. 8 Eric D Weitz. Weimar Germany; Promise and Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, 20.

8 behind.”9 The imagery quickly shifted to the national myth of Das Nibelungenlied, a sort of German Iliad, wherein the main character is betrayed by his blood brother. Just one year later, Hindenburg would write, “Just as Siegfried fell to the treacherous spear of terrible Hagen, so did our exhausted front lines collapse.” 10 This myth figures prominently in the film Die Nibelungen (1924), which attempts to symbolically resolve how Germany was betrayed. It offers an alternative version of history that casts Germany as a victim of fate rather than the reckless aggressor, which was how the allied nations portrayed Germany when they signed the Treaty of Versailles that officially ended the war.

German citizens felt that Germany had been misinformed and betrayed. It seemed impossible that Germany had lost the war since there was no retreat. German citizens saw only the headlines that the German army was holding ground or even moving forward. The food shortages and economic hardship at home were well known.

What they did not see was the deplorable condition of the armed forces. The army was malnourished, and severely shocked by a war that turned out to be more brutal and devastating than anything previously known on the European continent. When the

Germans gained some ground in their famous attack on the Western Front on March

21st, 1918 they captured some food supplies and the starving soldiers stopped to eat their fill without regard for their commanding officers orders to keep moving.11 After the

Revolution, the war simply petered out, soldiers started returning home, walking across

France towards German soil. Continuing the war effort was hopeless not because

9 Quoted in Hiller von Gaertringen, “Dolchstoss-Diskussion,” page 138 here quoted from Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Culture of Defeat. Trans. Jefferson Chase. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003, 207. 10 Ibid, 207. 11 Weitz, 13.

9 Germany was defeated on its own soil but because there was no way to maintain the war effort.12 The structure of authority had worn too thin and the supplies to wage war were insufficient. Thus the stab-in-the-back myth served to explain this loss that seemed so sudden, perhaps even unwarranted to the authorities that waged war from afar.

These same authorities, made up of a chancellor, an emperor and a class of ruling elites and diplomats, were determined to make a last stand, even though German defeat was obviously at hand. At the close of the war, there was one final attempt at a naval offensive at Kiel. The officers gave orders to load up artillery and head towards British waters. The sailors, aware of how suicidal this mission was, mutinied on the 29th of

October 1918. This revolt could have resulted in the sort of Marxist revolution that occurred in Russia; however after months of civil war, the outcome was quite different in

Germany. The sailors’ uprising sparked revolt and revolutionary fervor, which caused riots and ultimately brought down imperial Germany. Delegates from the Social

Democratic Party (SPD) were sent to negotiate with the mutineers. Ultimately, riots were suppressed and the mutineers were allowed to go home. More than a few rebellions were snuffed out in this way. The Junker, or old upper class was concerned by what they saw as the revolution from below. The new German government (SPD) established a precedent of stifling the far left or what they then perceived to be radical uprisings. The war ended soon afterwards. Germany has had a complicated relationship with authority and authoritarians as anybody can see but total war had dramatically altered how authority was viewed. It no longer looked like a benevolent dictator but now seemed sinister and dangerously out of touch.

12 Ibid, 13.

10 The Treaty at Versailles that was meant to restore peace on the European continent felt like a significant betrayal to Germany. German hopes rested on Woodrow

Wilson’s 14 points that promised fairness and dignity. Instead German land was reduced by about 13% and they had immense war reparations to pay to the countries they had invaded. The most problematic of all was perhaps the infamous War Guilt clause that put all fault of the war on the shoulders of the already unbalanced German nation, which was suffering from severe inflation, continued food shortages and political turmoil.13

1924-1929

The period from 1924 to the 1929 stock market crash was considered relatively a peaceful one, despite the political volatility, and frequent uprisings that were put down by a well-paid Freicorps.14 The period was noted for its cultural richness and inconclusive political maneuverings. The peace was uncertain, often maintained by force. Crime, homelessness and prostitution were rife. Culturally Berlin experienced an era associated with decadence and nightlife in the city while other areas continued a more traditionalist, conservative point of view. Out of this new nighttime lifestyle come characters such as

Sally Bowles played by Liza Minnelli in Cabaret (1979). These characters are loose, morally grey, interested in glamour and utterly non-traditional. Threatening for some, liberating for others, the night-life characters are always portrayed as an other.

This is the dark underside of the rise of the “new woman.” She is typically portrayed wearing fashionably short skirts, or pants, and having her hair cut in an

13 Weitz, 38. 14 The Freicorps was a troop of rightist paramilitary men. Often ex-soldiers they were paid by the SPD to contain protests and other disruptions of the peace.

11 androgynous style. Active and exciting, the new woman presented a way for women to engage in the public sphere and to gain some independence. Her face filled magazines and storefronts. This new role, expanded woman’s ability to choose her lifestyle. Most heralded her as a positive change in a tired social order causing ripples in art, culture and politics. However, this new presence threatened traditional gender roles and was therefore difficult for some to accept.

The golden years were also a time of great artistic and scientific exploration.

There were nine noble prizes awarded to German citizens in this era, five of whom were

Jewish scientists and thinkers. Their obvious presence and dominating influence in these fields made them more threatening than ever. It was a rich era of rapid change and extraordinary steps in artistic, scientific and philosophical thinking. Jewish men and women were central to this expansion and their new ideas and positions of high visibility only made more conspicuous by awards and fame contributed to the idea of the international Jewish conspiracy.

Popularization of the media, the rise of new arts and the erection of cultural buildings made art and cultural expression more available for all urban German citizens.

Some of the most influential artists and thinkers to this day came from the Weimar era including Albert Einstein; sociologists Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm, Theodor

Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse; philosophers Ernst

Cassirer and Edmund Husserl; political theorists Arthur Rosenberg and Gustav Meyer; and many others. Various artistic styles became popular at the time, including what the layperson would call modern architecture and design. Much of this work evolved out of the Bauhaus school, which ran from 1919 to 1933. Film also took steps towards what we

12 now consider to be art film.

In the early 1920s inflation was already a problem, one that the German government attempted to solve by simply printing more money. When the stock market crashed in the US in 1929 hyperinflation, already rampant in Germany, rose to absurd levels so much so that it was cheaper to burn bills than to buy firewood. People were desperate to keep up with the speed of inflation, bringing wheelbarrows of money to buy groceries and lifetimes of carefully earned money were suddenly valueless. These bizarre and disparate trends of financial and political chaos paired with artistic and intellectual richness created a singular desire to understand what was happening to Germany and

Germanness.

1930-1933

One man had very concrete answers that resonated with enough Germans that he was able to take power. Adolf Hitler’s coup d’état and subsequent rise to power was a dark turn for Germany although nobody knew quite how fatal. In hindsight, we can recognize that he was able to come to power because of the deep divisions in Weimar politics that split the popular vote in so many directions that even a small party like the

Nazis was able to gain seats in the Reichstag. Factors such as guilt from the Versailles

Treaty that left Germany in a shameful position, the unstable government and economic situation all contributed to Hitler’s appeal. He promised to make Germany strong and return her to a position of dominance on the European continent. Hitler also recognized the opportunity to position himself as a member of a coalition government a position that allowed him to dismiss the checks and balances that might have otherwise hindered his

13 seizure of absolute power. To be sure there is much more to the situation and atmosphere of this period than I’ve allowed for here.

With this summary of Weimar culture, and history, I hope to demonstrate how the three films I’ve chosen are undeniably born out of the Weimar period; both its brilliance and innovative ideas as well as its destabilized identity and chaos are present in each film. The films act as a mirror to and commentary on the social events of their production, but they do not simply reflect back a complex era; they also show how

Germany grappled to establish a sense of permanence through artistic representation of

Germanness, even though that very notion was in flux.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Directed by Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is the quintessential Expressionist film, with painterly sets, a twisting storyline and characters that suggest much more than they tell. It is visually unique from any other film, even those by the same director or others within the Expressionist canon. It would be hard to find a film more written about than this one, partly because it was so widely shown, especially in France and the United States. Its popularity and frequency of international export is also why such a high quality print of it exists today. It was immediately heralded as a success in Germany. However, some critics felt that it trivialized the Expressionist movement into a set of strangely painted lines.15 For others, it epitomizes the complexity and flexibility of meaning that a true work of art should have. Every critic who writes about the Weimar era seems to feel obliged to address this film, or at least incorporate it

15 David Robinson. Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari. London: BFI publishing in association with Palgrave Macmillan, 1997, 51.

14 into their analysis. For me this is a great pleasure. Caligari embodies and exemplifies the disunity of the Weimar period by building a whole world of sloping roofs and jagged shadows. It constructs a parallel world that is perhaps the most avant-garde and consistently bizarre film ever made. It attempts to reveal something “Expressionist” by tapping into classically Freudian or unconscious themes.

The curtain opens on a pale man telling his story to an older gentleman. The pale man’s name is Francis. He has a haunted air about him as he begins with the story of his hometown. As he tells it, ghost-like Jane, the heroine of this tale, walks by him. There is extensive use of irises in the film and the story begins with an iris opening up onto the toothy silhouette of a town on a hill. Soon Dr. Caligari enters the scene. He is an eccentric-looking old doctor who comes into town to present his freak-show at the local fair. His specialty is this young somnambulist, who has spent all his life in a coma-like sleep. Caligari’s act lies in awakening the sleeping Cesare and asking him questions that he seems to have the sight to answer. Cesare represents the unconscious, a new frontier at the time, one that was supposed to answer all manner of mysteries about human nature.

Francis and his friend Alan go to see the show. At the show Alan asks how long he has to live. The reply is ominous; Cesare says he will live only until dawn. Alan is found dead the next morning. Other deaths seem to be taking place--all controlled by Dr. Caligari.

Jane goes to see the show and finds Caligari alone. He shows her his somnambulist in a strangely exhibitionist way. She has clearly caught Dr. Caligari’s eye.

Cesare is sent out in the night to kill. He acts not through his own will but because Dr. Caligari hypnotizes him. Perhaps the most striking scene in the film is when

Cesare enters the room of Jane as she sleeps. It is a scene to make even the driest critic

15 wax poetic because it is just like the scene where Romeo comes to Juliet to consummate their marriage, but rather than fearing the wrath of Juliet’s family, Jane and Cesare have a violence from within to fear. Cesare has received the hypnotic command to kill Jane.

Unlike any scene of Shakespeare’s the scene is completely wordless, even outside of language. As Donald Robinson writes, “Dominating all is the performance of the androgynous and sexually fascinating Veidt--concentrating Herculean struggle into the raising of the lids that cover the unearthly glare of his eyes; gliding along the wall of

Jane’s house like a shadow that has lost its body; transformed from seraph to vulpine beast when Jane resists.”16 Cesare breaks free from his violent suggestion and runs carrying the unconscious Jane over the rooftops of the city. He becomes another sharp angle in the texture of the landscape and dies of exhaustion some ways out of the city.

Jane is returned to her home but does not seem the same. She calls out for Cesare as though she too has been hypnotized.

Of particular significance to the Weimar era is the figure of Dr. Caligari who is an enactment of chaotic, unbalanced and dangerous authority. Francis, with the help of the police, figures out that Dr. Caligari is babysitting a puppet while his instrument is out doing his dark work. On being discovered Caligari flees. Francis follows him to an asylum where he clearly works. Francis alerts the other doctors that Caligari is not who he seems. They rummage through Dr. Caligari’s office and find letters and manuscripts as well as a journal that tracks his development into an obsessed maniac who takes on the identity of an Italian, Dr. Caligari, and travels around with Cesare. In this version of the story Dr. Caligari is enacting an othered character, both out of time and out of place, a

16 Robinson, 29.

16 distant myth. He is obviously crazed and the doctors manage to put him in a straight jacket.

At this point the story branches into another ending that undermines the validity of the previous story and the narrator himself. Francis seems to have become a patient in the hospital who is telling strange stories about the fellow inmates. All the characters we’ve seen seem to exist here as well, as though in a parallel world. He starts to scream when he sees Caligari, who is now dressed as the normal-looking director of an asylum.

The final scene is of Francis being put into a straight jacket, mirroring the scene where

Caligari is put into a straight jacket. The closing lines have Caligari ominously saying that at least now he knows how to cure Francis. This ending leaves us profoundly unsure of whom to believe. The narrator has proven to be untrustworthy or at the very least contradictory. It certainly casts the figures of authority in a negative light.

The Dr. Caligari from Francis’s story seems to be willing to do anything in the name of his experiment, a willingness that would have suggested the attitude of doctors and politicians at the close of World War I -- consciously or unconsciously --to the audiences of 1921. Many soldiers were sent back to the front despite suffering from extreme shellshock. The doctors at the time seemed willing to sacrifice anything in the name of total war. Anton Kaes suggests that the Weimar films are all responding to the trauma of World War I, a position that compliments myth and destabilized identity flawlessly.17 After the trauma of war there is a gap of meaning, a missing element of understanding and clarity about the act of war. What was the war for? This is especially true when the war is lost at great personal cost.

17 Anton Kaes. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

17 The “mythic” world of Francis’ story seeps into the “real” world of the asylum where Dr. Caligari is the director. Just as the Weimar era fears and hopes; traumas seep into the films of the time, muddying the distinction between the end of the war, the shell-shocked men and the absent-eyed Cesare who is forced to do as Caligari commands. The two worlds, that of the film and that of the historical moment, imbue each other with meaning.

Die Nibelungen

Die Nibelungen is another important example of how myth and history inform each other in the films of the period. Fritz Lang is perhaps the most well known German director of the time, in part due to his departure from Germany and subsequent work in the US. Yet, Lang is not known for Die Nibelungen, a film that was released in two parts in 1924 and 1925. The first part received great critical acclaim.18 It was dedicated to the

German Volk, which shows that it took itself very seriously and that it was trying to do a lot more than entertain. Lang attempted to recast Germanness so that nations outside of

Germany might understand how they were wrong to fault and mistreat Germany at the end of the WWI. The filmmakers, Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou, also hoped to unify Germany by reminding the troubled nation what Germanness was, especially by contrasting Germans with dwarves and Huns designated as lesser humans.

The film tells the story is of a young Aryan man named Siegfried who slays a dragon and becomes invincible in all but one location, his shoulder. He goes on to do

18 Stephanie Barron. “Degenerate Art” The Fate of the Avant-Guard in Nazi Germany. Exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, Publishers, 1991, 11.

18 battle with the evil dwarf Alberich, who gives him great treasure and a magical cap, which allows him to transform himself into anything he desires. In the film the character of Alberich creates a negative Jewish stereotype, which populated propaganda with increasing intensity as the National Socialist Party rose to prominence and ultimately power.

Siegfried goes to Burgundy and asks for the hand of the king’s sister, the beautiful

Kriemhild in marriage. King Gunther and Hagen, his loyal knight, demand that

Siegfried first capture Gunther’s desired wife Brunhild, who lives among the warrior women of Iceland and challenges any man who would take her hand in marriage to three tasks. Ultimately, Siegfried, disguised as Gunther, completes the three tasks and then

Brunhild begrudgingly goes home with Gunther. However, on the night of their wedding Gunther is too weak and cannot consummate the marriage with the unwilling

Brunhild. Siegfried goes and dominates her on the part of Gunther. In various stories

Siegfried completes that consummation and in others he does not.19 In so dominating

Brunhild, in the film version, Siegfried gets her bracelet caught in his robes. Kriemhild finds the bracelet in his robes a few days later and he tells her what happened, lest he be accused of adultery.

The secret of course makes its way out and back to Brunhild. Furious, she goes to

Gunther and demands that he kill Siegfried, and avenge her honor. In the film version, she declares that Siegfried took her virginity, a lie. Gunther and Hagen scheme about how to avenge the deed. Hagen asks Kriemhild to show him where it is that Siegfried is

19 The issue of maidenhood is written in post-Christianity. In the original song, Hagen and Gunther are jealous of Siegfried’s riches and strength and seek a reason to kill him. Brunhild’s plea is merely an afterthought. The tale itself is much more Pagan.

19 vulnerable to harm so that he may protect him. She stitches a small X on his back. The men take a hunting party out and Gunther is supposed to stab Siegfried in the marked place. Gunther is unable to manage it out of weakness, and Hagen acts in his behalf. His countrymen and wife stab Siegfried in the back. The stab-in-the-back myth is thus actualized on film, lending it unparalleled validity. In this interpretation, Siegfried-- blond, young and strong--is Germany itself. The actor who played Siegfried, Paul

Richter, became a star overnight and came to represent ideal Germanness.20 And this is just the first film!

This film seems like a complete story: rife with tragedy, heroes, heroines and obvious villains. In the film, Kriemhild dreams of three birds: two dark birds (Hagen and

Brunhild) who kill the third white bird (Siegfried). It is almost formulaic. But the story does not end there and the entire impact is shifted. The hero’s death does not resolve the conflict or return order. If it had, the metaphor for German defeat would have been much easier to reconcile. Instead after Siegfried’s death, each character is transformed in turn. Kriemhild becomes dark, menacing and almost unrecognizable. Hagen almost becomes a hero, defending his beloved Gunther, and Brunhild becomes the passive, subservient wife sacrificing her own life to be with Siegfried with whom she feels more connected than her husband Gunther.

In the second film, Kriemhild’s Revenge, she swears revenge on Hagen who delivered the killing blow to her beloved Siegfried. To gain a powerful ally she accepts an offer of marriage from none other than Attila the Hun. Her one condition is that he

20 Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter and Deniz Göktürk, Eds. The German Cinema Book. London: BFI publishing, 2002, 63-64.

20 defend her honor in the way that her brother should have done. Her family seems appalled that she would marry a nomad and abandon her country. She marries him and bears him a son, of whom he is extremely proud and toward whom she seems ambivalent.

There are obvious racial undertones that Kriemhild is doing something radical by leaving her country. Even more so, she is considered despicable for associating with a man like

Attila.

At the birth of the child, she asks Attila to allow her family to come and see him.

Attila agrees and the Burgundian court arrives. Kriemhild asks Attila to kill their guests but this is against his moral codes. Ultimately, Hagen says that the child does not look well and will not grow up to be a king. This enrages Attila and Kriemhild. Not long after these words are spoken, the child mysteriously dies. It is unclear if Kriemhild would go so far as to poison her child to avenge Siegfried or if Hagen cursed the child but the result is the same. Attila grows livid and wages war on the Burgundians. Slews of Huns die. The

Burgundian court also dies but slowly, nobly, and together in a flaming hall. They could have given Hagen up to Kriemhild from the start and gone home safely, but they chose to remain loyal until death. This is another moment where the film is trying to portray something profoundly German. This loyalty and courage in the face of death is praised despite the fact that everyone dies because of it. This Todesmut is a representation of the sort of sacrifice that German soldiers were expected to make during the fruitless attacks toward the end of the war. 21 Finally, Kriemhild kills Hagen as he mocks her and she is in

21 Todesmut is defined as courage in the face of death, but it has connotations of profound sacrifice where all is lost and only honor saved.

21 turn killed. It is quite a bloodbath. Every named character that appears in the second film dies, except King Gunther.

This pair of films captivated German audiences. Despite the nearly six hour run time of both films together, the narrative was quite popular and came to occupy a mythic place in German cultural ideology. Hitler used many of the logics of these films, and the

Germanic myths on which they are based to justify and even valorize his actions, which only goes to show how powerfully affective this story was in motivating and justifying

Germany’s actions.22

Pandora’s Box

Pandora’s Box is one of two films that German director Georg Wilhelm Pabst and American actor Louise Brooks made together. Pandora’s Box, like the mythic container after which it was named, does not go quietly back into its film canister.

Perhaps it is so memorable because it does not allow for easy classification. It has several levels of meaning and should be seen as a double story; it is the story of Germany in the late 1920s with its economic crisis and social anxieties but it is also the story of a young actor who symbolized a woman unbound by the norms of the era. The Weimar era marked a shift in gender expectations. At the first establishment of democracy women were given the vote. During the war women had taken on new roles in the German economy and were no longer content with the life of a housewife. Birth control became much more widely available and women with jobs suddenly had money to do with as they pleased.

22 Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Culture of Defeat. Trans. Jefferson Chase. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003, 212.

22 Brooks as Lulu powerfully embodies some of the worst ways in which a German woman could go wrong if she lived outside the norms of femininity. In many ways the story of Lulu mirrors the story of Louise Brooks who plays her. Even their names are quite similar. Brooks said she was playing herself in both Pandora’s Box and her next film

Diary of A Lost Girl. Pabst, who was gaining fame as a man who directed modern pictures with modern problems, especially surrounding the role of women, is now recognized as one of the great directors of the German silent era.

Pandora’s Box is the story of a young woman who leaves chaos in her wake.

Louise Brooks is unforgettable in this film. Her very face seems to define the fears and seduction of femininity in the Weimar era. When we think of the classic flapper we should think of Brooks. Pabst plays her up to the greatest extent possible and she is daring, sexy and pitiable all in one.

In the beginning of the film Lulu forces her rich German boyfriend into marrying her, by publically humiliating him, and exposing his inability to control himself in her presence. On their wedding night he tries to kill her perhaps because he cannot stomach the shame of having married a lowborn, Jewish flirt instead of the demure, German heiress he was engaged to marry. Lulu kills him in self-defense and runs away with his son, Alwa. She is tried in court and leaves the country running from a prison sentence.

Lulu, her father and Alwa go on a fearsome voyage where Lulu is blackmailed, Alwa picks up a gambling habit and Lulu’s father tries to sell her into the sex trade. The whole experience takes place on the no-man’s land of a ship. The displacement of the characters from Germany to the non-place of the sea show how far outside of the acceptable range of action Lulu and Alwa have stepped. When they leave the ship, they run to England

23 and take up a miserable existence in an incredibly shabby apartment in London. Here,

Lulu is forced into prostitution but instead of picking up a wealthy man, she picks up

Jack the Ripper because she likes the look of him. He kills her on Christmas Eve.

Prostitution and gambling among other vices were popular in the Weimar era and cast fear into the hearts of the Prussian aristocracy and others with more traditional values.23 As the title suggests, Pandora’s Box is about the worst side of humanity, especially personified in Lulu’s character. Her fate is much more gruesome than any of the characters in the earlier two films. This is in part a reflection of Pabst’s efforts to film in a new style called Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, which stressed realism and gritty social commentary.

This story is also the most cautionary of the three films. On the one hand Lulu is a sinner and sinners end up in hell, and on the other, Pabst and Brooks make sin look appealing and seductive, especially through the character of Lulu. There is something deliciously contradictory in the message of this film just like the contradiction of having some of the brightest thinkers and most profound artists at a time of such unrest and strife. Pabst is exploring themes of homelessness, crime, sexuality, vice and authenticity in an extraordinarily nuanced way. The film intends to hold up morality through its final resolution with Lulu’s death, however it also indulges in her seductiveness for nearly two hours. After which time, we have thoroughly fallen for Lulu, and when she dies we associate with her killer rather than with a higher morality that might portray Lulu as the architect of her own fate. The creation of Lulu as uncannily other is a deeply threatening mythic characterization of the loose woman who disrupts traditional family oriented

23 Weitz, 20.

24 culture. Unlike Die Nibelungen, we cannot say that the film mythologizes Germanness, but it succeeds in showing us a sliver of the contradictions of the Weimar period and creating a mysterious, uncanny feminine character who, will be discussed further in chapter four.

Myth and Identification

During the Weimar era, the act of mythologizing as an avenue for identity formation indicates a lack of harmony, one that these three films seek to resolve or address. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote extensively on the formation of identity in the individual psyche and his theories have been extended to groups of people and even nations. Philip Rosen writes that national cinemas serve a psychological function, not just a cultural or aesthetic one. He proposes, “The Lacanian might see the nation as achieving and maintaining its identity against those forces threatening to disperse it by means of a network of textual mirrors which recall an original formation of identity.”24 What we see in these textual mirrors, aimed to recall German identity most vividly are the villains: the characterizations of what might become of Germany, should traditional worst fears come true. These three films in their desire to contain the other, in boxes or in cabinets reveals and constructs them in the medium of film. What this means for Weimar Germany, and what makes the films from that time so interesting, is that the myths built up within the films gain momentum almost as though they take on a life of their own. My analysis of

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Die Nibelungen, and Pandora’s Box offer prime examples of the evolution of a character or theme over the course of an era.

24 Valentina Vitali and Paul Willeman, Eds. Theorizing National Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 2006, 24.

25 Film scholar Thomas Elsaesser identifies the divide between the historic fact--the sort of history that an unbiased textbook would record: facts, dates, events--and what he calls ‘historical imaginary’ which I term ‘mythical history.’ Elsaesser writes that “film history is necessarily the metaphoric double of another history, rather than driven by its own determinants, or merely the story of its films and its makers.”25 This history is a mythic cinematic narrative of the nation rife with gender norms, racial prejudices and moral systems. It isn’t the retelling of events nor does it necessarily tell a story about the time of its production, but if you read it carefully a film can tell you a great deal. These films show us that at its heart Weimar cinema is genuinely seeking for something to believe. For example, Nibelungen acts as a lens through which we can read the pride that

Germany had lost with the war.26 The first part of Die Nibelungen, Siegfried’s Tod looks backwards to a moment of origin and authenticity. It builds up a mythic Germanness which was supposedly unified, Aryan, and deeply loyal to their leader despite his obvious failings. These values represented in the film offer a sort of solution, albeit a highly problematic one, to the very real crisis of the early years of the Weimar era. The tension between the factual histories, the end of the war, the Treaty of Versailles, the stab-in-the- back myth and the mythic layer of these histories is made up of stories like Die

Nibelungen that may once have evolved from the historical fact but now act as a true story with an important lesson. The beliefs that go along with these stories, shape what is acceptable, what is right and how the identity of the nation and the individual is formed.

25 Thomas Elsaesser. Weimar Cinema and After; Germany’s Historical Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2000, 5. 26 Weitz, 2.

26 The films I’m discussing reveal a struggle to cope with modern problems and re- establish an ethical and moral system to believe in. The word myth has been used in many ways, and this is not the first usage that typically comes to mind. Mircea Eliade describes myth as a story with persons or beings greater than human. Campbell defines myth even more broadly as a function rather than just a type for story. Myths for

Campbell are a set of guideposts that help individuals navigate through human experience. Myths are especially important in times of transition, such as the Weimar era.

They create a sense of continuity, offer solutions to fears that are present in most lives and perhaps, most central to our reading of these three films, myths create common ideologies.

The filmic medium is very apt for thinking about myth because of the dynamics of transference that occur between spectators or viewers and the people or events on screen. Film is able to offer an object to watch; every body that goes up on the screen becomes an event to watch and experience. Actors on screen are separated from their personhood and become vehicles for narrative, expression and aesthetics. At the same time it is extremely easy to experience viscerally what happens on screen. We are very adept at imagining ourselves, even subconsciously in the role of the camera, or of a person in the film. Sometimes called “suturing,” it is the experience of being sewn into or attached to the experiences seen on screen that allows us the unique ability to get a flavor of what an experience might be like. In more concrete terms, say in a film, there is a young couple that falls in love. When we see this, we imagine what it might be to fall in love. maybe we think of our own experiences with love or how much we would like to

27 fall in love. The filmic representation of ‘love’ is a cultural artifact, and would look different depending on when, where and who made the film, however it is usually still recognizable. The same is true with emotions or experiences that are less comfortable or knowable. In our three films are a lot of deaths. In Caligari there are at least four depending on who we choose to believe; in Die Nibelungen there is mass death, in

Pandora’s Box there are only two deaths but they take up so much screen time that they feel enormously important. The various representations of death are all quite different and offer many modes of death for the viewer to view and to experience. These representations of death both objectify it, which “mitigates the violence posed by the real,” while still offering some tiny grain of experience.27 This is the same basic function as myth, which offers examples of how to respond to important moments in life.

Because the three films come from the Weimar era they have something of its disjointedness, its hopefulness and its deep questions about what Eric Weitz locates as modernity. He writes that “all of Weimar’s protagonists, whatever their political and cultural proclivities, grappled with this tension-bound world of modernity.”28 It is the desire to address a set of questions bound up with modern life, such as women’s new role in the economy, sexual liberation, national unity, national identity, personal identity, among others, that unite these films.

The Weimar period is a highly nuanced and multifaceted time, to the point that any claim made on behalf of the whole is generally over-bold. Anyone with experience in

27 Kate Elswit. “Berlin… Your Dance Partner is Death.” The Drama Review 53:1 (Spring 2009:73-89.New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 28 Weitz, 4.

28 the history of film from this era understands the desire to read the period as though it were a whole entity rather than a timeframe. However, the claim I am making is not that all films of the era are acting towards creating myths, nor that the whole era amounts to othering Jews, women, and outsiders, but only that there is profound destabilization in the national identity at the end of World War I and that these films attempt to respond to the tensions of Germany’s psycho-social state at the time of their production.

29

Meta-Myths of Weimar Cinema: A Literature Review

A number of film historians have dedicated much of their career to Weimar cinema, and they in turn have become synonymous with Weimar film. These film historians and critics have shaped the way we think about Weimar cinema and the Weimar period itself. It is because of them that we think of pre-Nazi cinema as proto-fascist, haunted, deeply psychological or reflective of German national moods. They have also played an important role in keeping these films alive. Many are professors or prominent writers who have introduced these remarkable films to a new generation of viewers and thinkers. In some cases the assumptions they made or conclusions they’ve drawn have taken on such significance that they have become meta-myths of Weimar film. Some are highly one-sided, others are limiting or do not take the complexity of the Weimar period and of its art into account.

Even so, they are instrumental to our understanding of the era and its various art works.

One of the earliest, although perhaps least known critics of Weimar art is Georg

Lukács.29 The relationship between Expressionist art and specifically film from the Weimar era and the rise of fascism in the 1930s has never been a casual one. A cultural Marxist,

Lukács was the first to link the Expressionist movement to fascism, declaring “expressionism was undoubtedly one of the diverse bourgeois ideological currents that would later result in fascism.”30 Writing this in 1934 about Expressionist art generally, he could not have known how dangerous fascism would become at the height of Hitler’s power. Even as the films were

29 Lukács is very well known, but perhaps not as a film critic. 30 Georg Lukács, “Grosse und Verfall des Expressionismus,” reprinted in Essays über Realismus. Neuwied, 1971, 120. Here Quoted from Patrice Petro’s article entitled “From Lukács to Kracauer and Beyond: Social Film Histories and the German Cinema” Cinema Journal 22.3 (1983) 47-70.

30 being released they were being read and interpreted as products of a culture in crisis. Films like Nosferatu, Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, among many others were seen as mirrors to society, which showed immanent chaos and fearsome dictators.

The critic who first recognized this at times troubling relationship between film screens and the world outside them, was Siegfried Kracauer, a German-Jewish journalist who was the film and literature editor for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s until his flight to

Paris in 1933. At first Kracauer was interested in the increasingly consumerist culture arising around him. Today he is best known for a provocative book entitled From Caligari to Hitler, which he wrote after his flight from Paris to America from 1941-1943. In Caligari to Hitler,

Kracauer not only ties Weimar society and culture to the films made at the time, but also suggests that the propensity for tyrants and dominating figures, which seem so prevalent in

Weimar films, is a national trait of the German Volk. He suggests that the prevalence of these tyrannical figures or puppet masters shows a deep psychological desire on the part of the German soul to be dominated by a tyrant.31 He claims that the films show a distinct struggle, as the German soul vacillates between the desire to be dominated and the desire to dominate others. And so when Hitler appeared on the political stage, Germany responded just as the films predicted. He was able to satisfy both desires, first he was a dictator dominating the political system and removing any threat to his position but second he promised that Germany would take over the world.32 Kracauer’s ideas were often contradictory and elusive, but not so simplistic as scholars have sometimes written.33 His theories do have the flaw of reading history teleologically and he never fully articulates how

31 Siegfried Kracauer. From Caligari to Hitler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. 32 Ibid. 33 Mike Budd, ed. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Texts, Contexts, Histories. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

31 the film industry, made up of many diverse studios, producers, and directors, each with their own agenda, could act as a whole. While many questions remain unanswered by his argument Kracauer is clearly looking to contextualize and understand in retrospect how the

Holocaust and World War II could have happened.

While Kracauer’s work is riddled with problematic arguments and assumptions about how the film industry became a vehicle for fascism, he still opens every conversation on the subject of Weimar film. His statements about the German soul are ultimately impossible to prove. Nonetheless, he raises potent questions. Why are there so many tyrants in Weimar film? What is the relationship between film and culture? Does film create culture of vice versa? How does film affect how we perceive others or ourselves? How does film affect our desires? If film does create desires who is responsible for them? The list could go on and on, growing increasingly philosophical. Those who write about this period are all seeking to answer these questions in one way or another.

Lotte Eisner, in The Haunted Screen (1952), attempts to understand why

Expressionism acts and looks the way it does. She explains the Gothic style of the many

Expressionist films as a return to something familiar for Germany. She sees the style and subjects of Expressionism as a resurrection of the German Romantic era with a focus on the melodramatic genre. 34 Today many of the Expressionist films are described as horror or mystery, even art film but in many ways they suit the genre of melodrama much better.

Perhaps they are psychological melodrama? Like Kracauer, Eisner was a German-Jewish exile,

34 The German romantic style dominated culture from the 18th to late 19th century. Perhaps most famous of all romantic era figures was Ludwig Van Beethoven although there were many other writers, painters and composers who are integral to German cultural history.

32 who had fled Germany around the rise of Hitler. Elsaesser writes about both Kracauer and

Eisner’s works:

Each is the work of a Jewish exile, who in the late 1920s wrote as a professional film critic or journalist, and each in its distinct way is a profoundly personal attempt to grasp through the cinema, something of the tragedy that had befallen the country and the culture they had loved and even over-identified with.35

With this in mind, Eisner’s perspective is unquestionably valid, but for the modern thinker, it leaves some large questions unanswered. She does not develop her arguments as much as describe the films, but her descriptions are very telling in their own right. They allow us to see as she saw, making them an astoundingly personal first account of a viewing experience.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, Patrice Petro resolved some of the gaps in Eisner’s argument and also introduced a much needed discussion of female viewership and how the cinema began to tailor to women in an attempt to negotiate their new role in the Weimar Republic, as consumers and independent thinkers. In Joyless Streets, published in 1989, Petro writes very convincingly about the role of the feminine gaze in Weimar cinema. She uses considerable primary material besides the films themselves. Petro also employs feminist film theory to create an extremely well rounded argument on the role of women in the Weimar period, one that has influenced my thinking about these films considerably, primarily in the chapter on the Uncanny Feminine. She has written numerous other articles about specific films or themes. One such article reviews Kracauer, Paul Monaco and Julian Petley on their respective writings on Weimar cinema.

35 Thomas Elsaesser. Weimar Cinema and After; Germany’s Historical Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2000, 20.

33 Kracauer, Monaco and Petley, even Eisner, all try to write Weimar film history as a whole. They make convincing claims about how film is related to culture and how it can show what that culture is struggling with. However, each author in turn also makes a fatal mistake and grossly oversimplifies a very complex and disunified time. Monaco in, Cinema and Society: France and Germany During the Twenties (1979), writes about films as dreams, which in itself is a promising and interesting idea, but then he proceeds to psychoanalyze the whole of Weimar cinema and categorizes all films under five headings, “Betrayal, The

Foreigner as Evildoer, The Street and City as Dangerous, The Outcast as Hero, and

Suicide.”36 Petro responds with:

This obviously oversimplified account of German cinematic themes and their relations to the traumas of the lost war and the disillusionment that follows cannot support Monaco’s contention that films reflect the concerns of the mass national audience… his application of this model to an investigation of the films of the period is utterly artificial, and reduces not only the complexity of individual works, but the history of the period as well.37

Petro also criticizes Petley, although not nearly as harshly. As a Marxist, Petley focused more on the film industry and film production than the films themselves. What is apparent through Petro’s review of these three writers is that they are all reading the film history of the Weimar period as a German national cinema rather than any sort of freestanding art form. In other words, the films from the Weimar era have become bound to the era itself and are rarely seen without context that mediates the viewer’s experience of them.

36 Patrice Petro. “From Lukács to Kracauer and Beyond: Social Film Histories and the German Cinema” Cinema Journal 22.3 (1983) 47- 70. 37 Petro, 1983.

34 What I am hoping to add to Petro’s analysis is that those who write about Weimar film tend to seek ways to classify, categorize or read this history even when there is no whole to categorize or read. For example, Kracauer read the films as a prediction of the rise of fascism. He imposes an order on them despite its ill-suited and generalized nature. Monaco seeks to organize the films in categories, some of which are certainly apparent, but limits himself to seeking only these five trends.

Could there be something about this period that demands interpretation? Caligari, for example, leaves much unexplained, the viewer practically must try to justify this twisting tale even though it is impossible. This lingering question of why we seek to interpret these films when it is obviously overly simplistic to do so pervades my study of Weimar film. I am amazed how these theoretical dialogues between a living and a dead scholar over the gap of decades still pushes me to ask about a history whose last witnesses are rapidly fading. Why do the five categories Monaco chooses seem so appealing? Why do we strive to understand this most turbulent time in German history in terms of one major theory? Why is it so difficult to accept triviality in a body of art so complex as this Weimar period?

As Thomas Elsaesser notes, these films raise questions not about the film world but about the real world:

The nightmare visions and psycho-horrors have not only led to conjectures about the society giving birth to these monsters on the screen. Testifying to the troubled political reality of the post- First-World-War German society or already shadowing the ideological turmoil to come, both rang true, depending on whether one thought of the lost war of 1918 or of the rise of Nazism at the end of the decade.38

38 Elsaesser, 2000, 19.

35 Elsaesser suggests that there are multiple answers to the question of why these films, look, act, and emote. He describes the relationship between the film and the history surrounding it as a “Mobius strip”: they feed into each other in a continuous loop. History seems to create the films and the films seem to create history. His writing acknowledges both the desire to read the history of World War I as well as World War II. Even Elsaesser, a normally very cautious writer, describes the films here as visions; while multiple, visions are still the product of one cohesive self. He too falls for the “German national cinema as one being” approach but also seems aware of this choice.

Elsaesser argues that Weimar cinema comes to signify something, which “becomes apparent” in retrospect. He writes:

The specific features of German Cinema cannot be understood in terms of some essence, some typical national character or particular obsession, but as the moment when in retrospect something became apparent.39

Elsaesser’s unwillingness to label this “something” is where the strength of his argument lies.

He both acknowledges our desire to interpret film in the context of history, as well as the difficulty of categorizing such complex and unique works of art. Perhaps the films of the

Weimar simultaneously demand and defy interpretation.

Elsaesser’s book Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (2000) is perhaps the most central source to understanding the three films in this work as mythic constructions of identity. He writes about the “historical imaginary” of Germany as an entity, which can bear enormous projection and fantasy. In some ways each author is contributing to the historical imaginary of Weimar Germany, as the real thing is long past.

39 Elsaesser, 2000, 81.

36 The historical imaginary potently suggests that screen tyrants evoke real tyrants. Elsaesser begins his book with:

No single stylistic label could hope to cover the many innovative ideas about film décor, the distinctive mis-en-scène of light and shadow, or the technical advances in cinematography usually attributed to Weimar filmmakers. And yet, in retrospect, a unity has imposed itself on the films, their subjects and stories. Unique among film movements, Weimar cinema came to epitomize a country: twentieth- century Germany, uneasy with itself and troubled by a modernity that was to bring yet more appalling disasters to Europe.40

Perhaps there is something “unique” as Elsaesser suggests, perhaps that uniqueness lies in the intensity present in many films from the Weimar era, an intensity of desire to interpret, to understand, to make meaning, to make myths. The “subjects and stories” he describes are extraordinarily seductive, and while I will try my best to ground each step I take in logic and analysis, it is almost inevitable that I will at some point discuss the films of the

Weimar as if they were directly connected to each other. It is almost as if they were the work of one artist--the Weimar era.

In addition to Elsaesser and Petro, there is a third contemporary writer, Anton Kaes, whose theories feature prominently in my analysis. He released a book called Shell Shock

Cinema (2009) in which he ties the films from the Weimar period back to the traumatic experiences of World War I. He describes how the various undead or unconscious forms, such as Cesare in Caligari, are echoes from the many lost or irrevocably altered men who went to the front. I will make use of his work from time to time, especially in Chapter Two on Die Nibelungen.

40 Elsaesser, 2000, 3.

37 All these film and art historians, philosophers and others with their own histories, contexts and beliefs have projected their own myths onto these films, creating an over- lapping meta-myth of the historical imaginary. These various works have shaped our understanding of Weimar film today. Thus, it is important to recognize some of the various layers, although impossible to recognize all of them. I will try to avoid the mistakes of the past in my own projection and interpretation of the Weimar films under consideration. I hope that the awareness of these tendencies will protect me from repeating the mistakes of the past.

38 The Mythic Man and His Mythic Nation

Germans in the Weimar era were fascinated by and preoccupied with classical mythology but especially the Germanic myths. They wanted to know what they meant, how they could change people’s thinking and where they came from.41 With forty or so political parties vying for power, in the span of a tumultuous decade, it became important to stake a claim to German heritage as a mark of authenticity. Politicians and political groups sought to highlight their origins in German culture, and a time and place that held some credibility and was separate from the difficult topic of the war and who should be held responsible for it. Association with mythic characters and deeds became a defining mark of legitimacy. For example some parties claimed that they, like Bismarck, would unite Germany, while others like the Volkische Party encouraged an increasingly exclusionary ethnic nationalism that aimed to purify and concentrate Germanness in the bodies of the nation. According to Robert Gerworth, the Weimar period was trying to legitimize itself and many sought to do so by associating with an earlier time.

Far from discrediting the classical, romantic and religious themes of the pre-war world, the traumatic experiences of 1914-18 strengthened the desire for a return to the familiar, comforting cultural imagery of the past…It was, for example, no co-incidence that historical films such as Die Nibelungen (1924)… ranked among the most successful productions of the 1920s…. But Weimar’s debate about the past was by no means exclusively academic. Politicians, novelists and public intellectuals alike engaged in the search for historical meaning.42

41 Suzanne L. Marchand. Down from Olympus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, 3. 42 Robert Gerworth. “The Past in Weimar History” Contemporary European History. 15.1 (2006): 1-22. JSTOR. Feb. 10, 2013 .

39 Gerworth goes on to discuss the various “myth-makers”--the various political factions that retrofitted history for their own purposes--locating themselves at the center of a narrative that made them out to be the saviors of the German fatherland. Each successful political party had to find a way to legitimize itself via the prevailing morality or historical structures of the past.

A particularly popular idea to revitalize the old German homeland as one unified whole came about in the early Weimar period. It was called the Anschluss movement and hoped to create an ethnically homogenous grossdeutsch Reich.43 The myth of a Germany that may have once existed became a vital element of the Nazi party as well as many others. On the extreme right was the Volkische party who encouraged a return to the countryside and a move away from urban environments. A return to the land so to speak, but they also sought to purify Germany by excluding Jews and other non-Aryan bloodlines. Obviously, they heavily influenced the ideology of the Nazi party but they appealed to many Germans, especially from the elite and upper classes who wished to return to older traditions. Most parties sought the elusive idea of Heimat, often translated as ‘homeland’ or ‘a sense of belonging.’44 How they proposed to create it varied wildly but as I suggested in the introduction with quotes from Schiller and Goethe, this idea of homeland is not easily captured nor does it translate into English well. It is a mythic place of home, before the war, a place of memory and nostalgia.

At the start of the war hopes had been high, the nation was confident that it would come out victorious so when they lost bitterly, the desire to find somewhere to

43 Ibid. 44 Christopher J. Wickham. Constructing Heimat in Postwar Germany; Longing and Belonging. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.

40 displace the blame was very strong. One explanation of why Germany had not lost the war was not due to its own failings but rather because of its lack of unity. Jews, communists and women were often blamed for that lack. “Germans’ sense of their failings and cowardice were inverted into paranoid hatred for those who had behaved differently. ” 45 Those “who had behaved differently” mentioned in this account gradually began to lose definition, one group of people bleeding into another. If a person was accused of being a communist then the subtext was that he was also a Jew and vice versa.46 It is through cultural myths that these other characters were defined, even created. Film was an incredibly powerful vehicle to create these myths.

Beyond politics, myth became a language through which Germany sought to redefine and establish itself. The three films in this study approach the task of constructing identity through mythic representations quite differently. Caligari seems to address themes of sanity and normality, in postwar Germany. We can see through the very world of Caligari that stability was not a certainty. The slanting houses and winding stairs seem precarious and threatening, suggesting that we question the foundations of our own mental structures. Perhaps this instability addresses a myth of permanence and stability that was shattered in the war. Die Nibelungen creates the myth of history. It reframes history as a hero-tale that ends in betrayal and loss. At the end of any war that is fought at great cost and is lost, the question of who is responsible, and of the meaning of this traumatic experience is raised. Die Nibelungen offers one solution to this

45 Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Culture of Defeat. Trans. Jefferson Chase. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003, 207. 46 Stephanie Barron. “Degenerate Art” The Fate of the Avant-Guard in Nazi Germany. Exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, Publishers, 1991, 11.

41 extraordinarily difficult question. It reinforced the “stab-in-the-back” myth, already present in the language of post-war politics, as a noble but tragically misguided act of sacrifice on Hagen’s part. Pandora’s Box projects the myth of morality and gender.

Pandora is, of course, Lulu and, because of her feminine nature and Jewish identity, she is the ultimate target for sin. She should be a lesson for German women of how not to live, but as we shall see, Pabst and Louise Brooks do allow for simple moral platitudes. Each film offers a version of Germanic identity in contrast with a problematically non-German and always destructive, seductive, betraying, or even murderous other. Furthermore the myths of what ideal Germanness should not be, are much more vivid than those that offer positive examples.

The desire to seek something familiar was central to any successful political group, but also for films of the era. Many films from the Weimar era function in a melodramatic mode that brings them closer to traditions of the Romantic era than

Modernist or Expressionist themes. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in particular is heavily linked with Romantic era monsters and maidens. The story is extraordinarily modernist in its costume and set designs but also harks back to something from another era. The fantastical monster (Cesare) that comes in the way of a traditional heterosexual marriage and the maiden in white who seems to be suffering form some sort of hysteria are both classic tropes from the Gothic era, popular in the 1890s and up until the turn of the century. What is not Gothic in these films is uniquely Weimar, such as the complicated engagement with questions of untrustworthy authority.

In the scheme of all Weimar film, Caligari in particular has played a central role in associating the historical moment with the various media representations of the time.

42 For example Kaes argues that the fear of authority that is evident in The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari stems from the fear and mistrust of the German government at the end of the war. He suggests that because the men who were supposed to make good choices for the nation had failed to do so, authorities generally seemed less trustworthy. He also points out that doctors played a prominent and sinister role in maintaining the war past its feasible limits, by sending soldiers who were suffering from shell shock back to the front.47 The figure of the traumatized man who walks as though not present would have been eerily familiar to Weimar audiences as would the sinister Dr. Caligari. The fact that

Dr. Caligari has his origin in pseudo-Italian myth and not in German folklore is an extremely interesting example of displaced blame and will be investigated further in the next chapter.

Caligari, and actors Conrad Veidt and Emil Jannings, who play Cesare and Dr.

Caligari respectively, also seem to suggest mythical or archetypal conflicts. Veidt especially draws out fantastical descriptions, even in the driest writers. Donald Robinson writes:

Dominating all is the performance of the androgynous and sexually fascinating Veidt--concentrating Herculean struggle into the raising of the lids that cover the unearthly glare of his eyes; gliding along the wall of Jane’s house like a shadow that has lost its body; transformed from seraph to vulpine beast when Jane resists.48

Veidt is transfixing and hypnotic to watch, his eerie expression and small body, do not seem entirely of this world as Robinson suggests. He seems like the dark shadow of

47 Anton Kaes. Shell Shock Cinema; Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton: Priceton University Press, 2009. 48 David Robinson. Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari. London: BFI publishing in association with Palgrave Macmillan, 1997, 29.

43 young Siegfried played by actor Paul Richter. Elsaesser suggests this relationship might be very revealing.49 He does not connect the pairing to the deeply divided German nation at the time; perhaps these two men could show the Janus face of the Weimar era best of all.

Kaes also recognizes their relationship and writes, “Richter had to compete for star status with Conrad Veidt, his demonic counterpart. While Richter personified the naïve and energetic idealism of German youth in its pre-war prime, Veidt symbolized repression, mystery and unappeasable desire. Veidt played complex and self-destructive characters…”50 Kaes argues that Richter was not so much acting a part but enacting a set of values that Germany sought to represent. He was Nordic, white, youthful and open.51

His body is displayed with great posturing at the opening of the film. He is forging a sword and his teacher, a hairy dwarf-like man is watching with a mixture of awe and jealousy. Kaes argues that Richter followed many cultural scripts and did not bring anything original or new to his portrayal of Siegfried. This is not a criticism however; it seems to be Richter’s strength to so perfectly embody the stereotypes of the national hero of the moment. Germany was heavily invested in the actor Paul Richter and in his portrayal of Siegfried but also fascinated by Conrad Veidt and his tortured performances.

There was, not surprisingly, great interest at the time in the story of Germany’s national origins. As with any people or nation seeking an identity, Germans turned to their mythological heritage. In their search for identity and homeland, the myth of Das

Nibelungenlied regained popularity, as the oldest German saga, a story of gods and people.

49 Thomas Elsaesser. “Haptic Vision and Consumerism: A Moment from Fritz Lang’s Siegfried (1924)” Film Moments. Ed. Tom Brown and James Waters. London: BFI in conjunction with Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 50 Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, Eds. The German Cinema Book. London:BFI publishing, 2002, 68. 51 Bergfelder, 67.

44 Much like the Greek pantheon of myths, the German gods are not omnipotent and sublime but rather meddlesome and strong-willed. The myth of the Nibelungs became a vehicle for national identity.

The myth of Die Nibelungen is of course much older than the Weimar period of

Fritz Lang’s two part film version, and because of its complex narrative and moral grey areas, it had served to represent many versions of German identity. In the movement for

German Unification before 1848 Siegfried represented a rebellious Germany leaving his father’s fortress and starting a new life. “After Germany’s unification following the wars of 1865-71, however, Siegfried became a symbol of an empire built of military victory.”52

Then there was Bismarck-Siegfried who emphasized strength and aggressive military tactics. The Wilhelminian era Siegfried emphasized the peace after hard-won victory.

Even Hagen is a sacrificing hero in some versions of the story. For example, when the

Kaiser fell, the stab-in-the-back myth served to remove an old monarchy that was no longer serving Germany. This model of necessary sacrifice is the version of the myth that

Hitler favored when he had several of his commanders murdered.53 The story of Die

Nibelungen was as well known if not more so than the Bible, so of course when Germany fell, the defeat was interpreted in terms of this mythic language.

Myth and history are closely tied in Germany’s attempts to establish legitimacy in the political sphere. Where birthright and bloodlines had once determined rulers, there was a vacuum of what gave one political influence. Die Niebelungen came at a time (1924) when the political structure was briefly intact and its opening night was a highly

52 Schivelbusch, 211. 53 Schivelbusch, 212.

45 politicized affair. Foreign minister Gustav Stresemann spoke at the premiere and the speech was published in the papers the next day. He said the he hoped the film would

“build a bridge to other nations”54 Other important political figures, as well as delegates from industry and commerce, were in attendance and the spectacle was covered by the news. In effect, the politicians and officials became actors, representing a nation.55 This was one of the first national cultural events since the beginning of the war. Many diplomats and men from the industrial sector gathered, as though attending the birth of a new monarch or an event of great national importance. That enactment of nationhood shows the conscious steps towards performing a coherent national identity. Hitler also favored the national cultural event to celebrate German artistic and cultural achievements.

Director Fritz Lang and his wife, the scriptwriter Thea von Harbou, did not see

Die Nibelungen as a simple restaging of an old myth. Like Wagner’s ring cycle, Lang and von Harbou hoped “to reconstitute a national community that had been lost, Lang’s

Nibelungen indeed promised a renewed sense of national identity and pride at a moment of crisis.”56 Von Harbou also thought that this film would launch the medium of film out of the world of popular culture into the world of art via the undisputable cultural capital of the Nibelungenlied. On the night of its premiere Lang and von Harbou went to the grave of Friederich der Grosse and placed roses. It was a public relations stunt to some extent but it was also a testament to the hopes that were riding on this film. Von Harbou said that the film’s goal was “to instill in the great, exhausted and over-worked German

54 Bergfelder, 65. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.

46 people a desire for collective identity based on a mythical national narrative.”57

Filmmakers and artists alike felt the burden of creating a mirror to society that would bring change.

Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box explicitly attempts to mirror society by professing itself as a film of the New Objectivity or Neue Sachlichkeit movement. Members of this movement attempted to stay away from the romanticism of Expressionism and present hard, factual representations of how society was falling apart. Although the reality depicted in Pandora’s Box is quite a harsh one, it also has the common feature of constructing a version of German identity or what it could become in the worst scenario.

It is still speaking in the same mythic language of the postwar decade and should be understood as such.

Pandora’s Box must be read with knowledge of the various myths of Pandora in order to begin to grasp Lulu’s divided nature. Pandora herself has two different connotations. In the earliest version of the myth, she is the first woman on earth, wife to

Prometheus. In this version, she bears a cornucopia containing all the provisions to feed mankind. She is seen as a mother figure full of generosity and grace. This motherly figure is not the Lulu in the forefront in Pandora’s Box. As the title suggests, and a judge within the tale informs us, Pandora is the worst kind of woman. None-the-less, there are moments when we see the gracious, kind, motherly Pandora in Lulu.

In the second much better known version of the myth, Pandora is created by Zeus to punish Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods. In this later version she brings a box, which contains all the ills of the world, which she frees out of womanly curiosity.

57 Bergfelder, 65.

47 The parallel in Christian terms is Mary in one version and Eve in the other. She is a mother and then she is a woman who gives in to temptation. In the Christian mythos these qualities do not overlap. Karin Littau argues that this separation is a false one in

Lulu’s case. She argues that Lulu is both “whore” and “mother” at once.58 This will be discussed in great depth in chapter four on the Uncanny Feminine. However, the myth of

Pandora is vital to understanding Lulu and her overwhelming appeal to German audiences from the Weimar period and many other audiences since.

In the search for mythic origins, for homeland, for a tangible identity, Germany created some of the most amazing works of art and some of the most memorable villains.

From the trauma of war to the desire to look forward to a new age that would create harmony and unity within the amorphous German nation, there is a strong conviction of who Germany should not be, a construction of an artificial other, one that dominated the screens and narratives of the Weimar era and shaped the decades to come. The three films in this study are effectively cautionary tales of how lost Germany would or could become, some carry solutions, such as Die Nibelungen, others do not.

58 Karin Littau. “Refractions of the Feminine: The Monstrous Transformations of Lulu” MLN 110.4 (1995): 888-912. JSTOR. 20 Dec, 2012. .

48 The Master Mesmerist and Jewish Otherness

When we first meet the puppet master Caligari, at the very beginning of The

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, film, trauma and regression become one. When we enter into

Francis’s story, there is first a city, flickering. Is this a vision from his unconscious or his memory? We have no way of knowing the difference. The film jumps especially badly at this first vision of Holstenwall. Francis sets a place for the story to unfold. Next, he suggests a time, the annual fair at Holstenwall, and he is suddenly revisited by a specter.

“That is Him!” Francis declares. Then, as though from the thick fog of repression, a man slowly climbs out from below. He struggles up each stair, walks uneasily with a cane, squinting through round glasses. He comes towards us, towards the camera, and the frame closes to an iris around his scrunched face. This face and body with its aged motions and unnatural expression become synonymous with the film; he and his doll-like

Cesare are never forgotten. Why are they so vivid? How does Caligari fit our desires for a villain and how does he reflect the greatest fears and fascinations of the 1920s?

The Weimar period precedes the most anti-Semitic decade in German history, so it should not be surprising to find caricatured stereotypes of Jewish doctors and mesmerists in various forms of cultural expression. The three films in this study have

Jewish characters that are constructed as villains and as scapegoats, acting as a catchall cause for the defeat at the end of World War I and ultimately the problems of the post- war Republic. Like Caligari in the opening scenes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, these

49 Jewish mesmerists are specters, figments of our imagination, constructed so as to fit the moment and the viewer. These characters are masterful manipulators and hypnotists, magicians who are othered from the “German” way of life because of their adherence to unfamiliar rituals. In the metaphorical world of film, their religious practices become magic, dangerous and unknown. Their religion casts them as foreign first and foremost; however, the signs of Jewishness become increasingly concretized and recognizable as the dangerous Jewish mesmerist is constructed, almost coined. The Jewish population in

Germany in 1925 according to the census was 564,973, which amounts to about 11% of the German population.59 So how was it that the “Jewish problem” became so threatening and was perceived as so dangerous to Germany identity that these few German Jews had to be contained by whatever means necessary?

One factor of this aggression towards German Jews was the popular stab-in-the- back myth that located Jews as partially responsible for German defeat and enormous loss of life in World War I.

The right-wing myth (of) the Dolschstosslegende, the legend of the ‘stab in the back,’ according to which Imperial Germany had been humbled in World War I not on the battlefield but on the home fronts by the enemy within –that is, by women, socialists, Jews, homosexuals, and others.60

These perceived enemies from within soon became targets for real attacks and were built up to enormous proportions in order to maintain the façade of fault. These enemies from within bled together. For many they were simply called Jews. It was easiest to scapegoat

59 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Jewish Communities of Prewar Germany.” Holocaust encyclopedia. 5 April 2013 . 60 Richard W. McCormick. “From “Caligari” to Dietrich: Sexual, Social and Cinematic Discourses in Weimar Film. Signs 18.3 (Spring 1993): 640-668. JSTOR. 25 Feb., 2013 . The tendencies he’s talking about here are those that gave rise to a fascist and highly nationalist Germany.

50 German Jews because of their status as a minority and the long-standing anti-Semitism that has plagued Jewish populations for centuries.

In order to justify how 11% of the population could have betrayed so powerful a nation as Germany, the Jewish stereotype that was most convincing was that of the puppet-master--one man who could manipulate many others. With a growing interest in psychoanalysis because of Freud’s work, among others, the puppet masters were constructed as mind-controllers. These powerful mesmerists fascinate us to this day and while they are obviously vilified, what we may not recognize is the subtext that they are meant to be Jewish.

In considering the figure of the Jewish mesmerist we must also consider the darker cousin of psychoanalysis: occultism as well as a growing spiritualism. As W. D.

King writes:

From the year 1842, when there first came reports of spirit rappings in the house of the Fox sisters in Rochester, New York, it became virtually impossible to enter any discourse-- scientific, religious, artistic, moral--without addressing the immanent darkness within Enlightenment.61

This “immanent darkness,” which King introduces, is the fascination and pre-occupation with all manner of ghosts, the spirits of the dead, and other unknown or unexplainable phenomenon. There was also a “rising belief in the autonomy of the spirit” and the problem of what must become of it after death.62 The question of the autonomous spirit was especially important to those who had lost loved ones in the war. They wanted to

61 Simone Natale. “The Medium on the Stage: Trance and Performance in Ninteenth-Century Spiritualism” Early Popular Visual Culture 9.3 (Aug. 2011): 239-255. London: Routledge, 2011. 62 Cited from W.D. King - Philippe Ariés. The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, 457.

51 believe that there was an afterlife and many even sought to reach out to this after-life through séances and other occultist practices. Often through the help of a hypnotist or other such “specialists.”

The highly performative magicians or mesmerists put on quite a show, not unlike the traveling Dr. Caligari.63 One woman Fanny Kremble wrote about her experience witnessing Dr. H.E. Lewis, a famous black mesmerist in the 1850s, put a female audience member into a trance. She wrote of Dr. Lewis’s “lithe, black hand… stretched nearer and nearer its victim, waving and quivering like some black snake.” 64 This vivid description shows both how fascinated and frightened Kremble was. “Lithe” suggests extraordinary grace, even beauty, but the imagery of the snake clearly marks this beauty as dangerous and unnatural for a man to possess. The effect on Mrs. Crowe, the entranced woman, was “quasi-diabolical.”65 Apparently Mrs. Crowe spent some time in an asylum recovering from this experience. This incident highlights the racially and socially othering aspects of the stage hypnotists and those who claimed to summon the dead or call forth demons. Dr. Lewis seems almost inhuman.

All of these sinister associations should be born in mind when we consider the mythic figure of the Jewish mesmerist. He, for he is always masculine, was perhaps first constructed as both Jewish and a magician in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel whose main characters are an ominous Jewish mesmerist named Svengali and a young woman

63 Simone Natale. “The Medium on the Stage: Trance and Performance in Ninteenth-Century Spiritualism” Early Popular Visual Culture 9.3 (Aug. 2011): 239-255. London: Routledge, 2011. 64 Ibid. 65 Cited from W.D. King - Francis Ann Kremble. Records of a Later Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1882, 232-233.

52 named Trilby whom he hypnotically controls.66 Much later in 1931, a film named

Svengali was produced in Hollywood starring John Barrymore, but in those 37 years since the first Svengali, he did not fade away nor was he far from the public eye. In the three

Weimar films I discuss, there are important reinterpretations of the Svengali character as he evolves in threatening and devious ways.

In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari we have the convoluted figure of Dr. Caligari, associated with Freud by many writers and who must therefore assume a Jewish identity as he controls Cesare with little more than his speech.67 In Die Nibelungen there is the character of Alberich, the dwarf who creates powerful mirages and tries to kill the Aryan

Siegfried. Alberich’s racial otherness is apparent but he lacks Caligari’s potency. Finally the character of Schigolch in Pandora’s Box is a very manipulative man and always seems to get what he wants. He is identified as Jewish through association with Lulu herself who has a menorah in her apartment and claims to be his daughter.

In 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was premiered and famously advertised with a swirling symbol and a single command. “Du Musst Caligari Werden!” (You must become

Caligari!). The posters proclaimed this command without telling the audience anything more than a time and a place.

66 J. H. Duval. Svengali’s Secrets and Memoirs of the Golden Age. New York: Robert Speller and Sons, Publishers, Inc., 1958. 67 Clément, 1990.

53 68

The allusion to hypnotism within the film, highlighted in this poster is quite clear. In order to fully understand why hypnotism was such a potent subject at the time we must look a little farther back than 1920 to the early work of Freud, and his teacher, the hypnotist Charcot, to the birth of psychoanalysis.

Anton Kaes and Stephan Andriopoulis both wrote about Charcot and the public hypnotic tests he performed. These authors suggest that like Charcot, Caligari put on a show for a public, that both hypnotists have complete power over their subjects and that they produce powerful results. 69 Certainly, Charcot made some fascinating advances and contributed greatly to Freud’s career as a psychologist but he was often accused of staging his hypnotisms. His subjects, who were nearly always women, walked around in a sleep- like state. Some screamed hysterically, while others revealed things they would never have wanted publicly exposed. The quality of these spectacles was often distasteful, taking advantage of the women and their vulnerable state.

The unconscious was as yet a profoundly unknown, untapped realm. Many people wondered how far a person would go in hypnotic trance. Could someone be forced to kill another person while under the hypnotic influence? If so, who would be responsible for

68 Olaf Grill. “Die Muse des Dr. Caligari.” Weblog Post. Gilda Lander.de Jan 25th 2013. 69 Noah Isenberg ed. Weimar Cinema; An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

54 the murder? The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari enters into this conversation by staging some of these questions. Cesare, the perpetually hypnotized man, acts both under Dr. Caligari’s will and also breaks free, acting by his own accord. He seems to be the Id-like, unformed, non-verbal, and extraordinarily human in his desires. Dr. Caligari, however, is a calculating scientist who plays with moral boundaries and manipulates people into proving his theories right.

In the original script of Caligari, the character of Dr. Caligari was associated with a group of Gypsies. When a wandering band of gypsies passes Francis’ house, he suddenly remembers Dr. Caligari and shivers. It is the gypsies who trigger him to begin the story that makes up the film.70 The gypsy in Europe has long since been an alienated figure. The deep-rooted prejudice against them placed them in the same category as homosexuals and Jews, especially towards the early 1930s. That is not to say that the two groups are equivalent; however, for the purposes of understanding what sort of a character Dr. Caligari was created to be, we can see that he was from the conception of the film a racially othered character.

Dr. Caligari also inhabits a position of “Other” in the Lacanian understanding.

Catherine B. Clément suggests that Dr. Caligari is a sinister version of Freud in his early years where he was more interested in psychological experimentation.71 This earlier Freud used his insights into the human mind for ill, and ceased to see his subjects as people. For

Caligari and Freud, their subjects are vehicles for scientific advancement. She makes a persuasive case, arguing that:

70 Mike Budd ed. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Texts, Contexts, Histories. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990, 2. 71 Catherine B. Clément. “Charlatans and Hysterics.” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories. Ed. Mike Budd. London: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 191-204.

55 The same characters haunt Caligari, the film and Freud, his myth, his writings, his phantasms. The doctor, the student the somnambulist, the young woman: such are the characters in Caligari. The Doctor, the lunatic, the hysteric, such are the Freudian characters… The male somnambulist, almost androgynous in Caligari’s manipulations, is the female hysteric: they exchange the same look, a pure stare, detached from its object, the space where desire passes, an obscure desire.72

Caligari, like Freud, “sows seeds of discord at the heart of the traditional family” by introducing fear of overtly sexualized relationships into an otherwise repressed system.73

They both hold the title of Doctor, which gives them power over our minds and bodies.

Freud changed how people thought about themselves at least for a moment when they first understood his ideas. Caligari also affects each person in the narrative, and those who become viewers of it. He becomes all-powerful, able to end life with only a few words. Thus his otherness becomes Other with an uppercase “O” as he dominates us and

Cesare for much of the film. Caligari also hypnotizes us through the medium of film. We become Janes and Cesares dominated by the alluring spectacle of this 35mm nitrate wizzing by at 24 frames per second. In this case, Cesare’s ability to break out of Caligari’s control becomes an act of authentic and remarkable establishment of self as distinct from the Other.

If Caligari is Freud or a darker double of Freud, is he not then also Jewish? While it is impossible to my knowledge to prove that Caligari was intended to be Jewish, we know that he was conceived of as racially other, and we know that he came upon his identity as Dr. Caligari in an obscure text from another time. Cesare’s and Caligari’s

72Ibid. 73 Ibid, 199.

56 costumes are distinct from the more contemporary costumes of the other cast members, an inconsistency for which the film has often been criticized for but perhaps there is some significance in this choice. These two figures are from elsewhere. They do not fit in and perhaps there is a racial reason for the difference. Maybe this is why the town official at the start of the film treats Caligari poorly.

If the character of Caligari makes reference to a Jewish psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, then his threatening qualities are only as threatening as he is sane. His experimentation becomes as mad as the storyteller’s. Towards the end of the film when he is fleeing from the words “Du Musst Caligari Werden!,” he seems a victim himself.

He himself is the hysteric in need of a doctor. Could he just be a kindly Doctor who is cast in a demonic light by an angry patient? The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is intentionally ambiguous about its implications. We aren’t even sure that any of the story even happened by the time the film has ended. If there is one thing that all film historians agree on about Caligari, it is the disunified story, which leaves the viewer unsure of how to interpret the veracity of the tale.

57 74

74 Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari. Dir. Robert Wiene. Perf. Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, Lil Dagover and Frederich Feher. UFA, 1920.

58 If Dr. Caligari is an uncertain character, the highly stereotyped Jewish mesmerist in Siegfried’s Tod is the opposite. His caricatured Jewishness is visible in his body.75 His nose has clearly been elongated and his beard and hair are long like an Orthodox Jew.

The likeness only lacks the side locks or Payos as are visible in the right hand poster.

Compare his image (left) to that of the main villain in the 1940s propaganda film commissioned by Goebbels (right).76

75 Thomas Elsaesser. “Haptic Vision and Consumerism: A Moment from Fritz Lang’s Siegfried (1924)” Film Moments. Ed. Tom Brown and James Waters. London: BFI in cahoots with Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 76 Ana the Imp. Jud Süß Weblog. Accessed on Feb. 2nd, 2013 .

59 There are other disturbing racial undertones among the dwarves as well as the

Huns in Die Nibelungen and they are especially set up in contrast to Siegfried whose hair and body were chosen and enhanced to look as Aryan as possible. Alberich is also in possession of the Nibelungen hoard, which fits the negative stereotype of the stealing or greedy Jew. Furthermore, he has enslaved several little people who are forever holding up his treasure. Does this make him a bourgeois Jewish mesmerist? Either way, his

Jewishness is much more overt than Dr. Caligari’s. It is clear that he was constructed to look Jewish in a highly stereotypical way. But how powerful is he?

The magic that Alberich deploys to tempt and confuse Siegfried before trying to kill him is a hypnotic power of the mind, rather than the body. Elsaesser wrote about the same moment when Alberich shows Siegfried several illusions. Elsaesser argues that this moment shows us Siegfried’s status as a simpleton and a “rube.” He defines rube as someone who does not understand that the illusion is not real, like a filmgoer who thinks that the images on screen are somehow tangible or present as objects.77 Elsaesser suggests that the medium of film “pushes haptic perception into the realm of the optical and ownership into the realm of the obsessional and phantasmagoric possession.”78 In other words, like Alberich, film manipulates us into desiring what we see. Film becomes a wish creation engine that always postpones gratification. Alberich and the filmic medium both show us illusions that we come to desire but cannot attain. I do not, however, agree with his claim that Siegfried is a rube, because the filmic illusion of the riches Siegfried could

77 Thomas Elsaesser. “Haptic Vision and Consumerism: A Moment from Fritz Lang’s Siegfried (1924)” Film Moments. Ed. Tom Brown and James Waters. London: BFI with Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 71. 78 Ibid, 71.

60 possess, is in such a medieval setting that it is profoundly magical, not technological. On the other hand Siegfried is a naïve and openhearted character.79

So what sort of a threat is this version of the Jewish Mesmerist? His magic and his wealth are grand; and yet, our hero bests him without much trouble. It is important to note that both times Siegfried beats Alberich, it is at a battle of strengths. Their physical bodies do not compare. Even when Alberich first attacks and Siegfried cannot see him, he is able to get free of him relatively easily. The implication is that Siegfried’s Aryan body would out-do even Alberich’s magic and illusions. Strength lies in the purity of the breed in Siegfried’s Tod. The same does not seem to be true in Kriemhild’s Revenge.

Alberich may yet play a larger role in court than we suspect. When Siegfried takes the invisibility cap, he does introduce the element of deceit into the court, triggering all the terrible things that happen to Siegfried and Kriemhild towards the end of the first part. In one way, Siegfried passes the major test of being fooled by the dwarf’s illusions but fails the other. Succumbing to greed he takes the treasure and cap without which he would not have posed such a threat to the Burgundian king nor been able to fool Brunhild into marrying Gunther.

The final character is Schigolch from Pandora’s Box. He is, like Alberich, clearly

Jewish but this time more overtly than ever. If Schigolch is Lulu’s father as the film states, he is marked as Jewish due to the presence of the menorah in her apartment. Lulu acts as Schigolch’s instrument. Whether or not he is her father or her pimp is not clear

79 I would say that the apparitions he sees are more like Jesus on the Mount when the devil comes and shows him all that could be his if only he stepped off the path. This Christian parallel was probably not created accidentally. Could Lang have been aware that he was re-telling a Christian myth?

61 but he obviously participated in her upbringing and education. She does whatever he says, except at the close of the film where she, like Cesare, acts out of desire and disobeys

Schigolch’s potent suggestion. His mesmerism of Lulu is neither magical nor overt but he does seem to exert considerable sway in her life. He takes her money, he sells her body to curious men and then he comforts her. It is remarkable how similar their roles are to Dr.

Caligari and Cesare. Lulu, like Cesare, is astounding to watch and maybe this has to do with her fascinating balance of autonomy and subservience. Unlike Caligari, Schigolch looks like a vagrant or a suffering homeless person, and yet he brings down various important German men with his tool, Lulu. His presence in the film is subtle. He appears to travel with Lulu and her lovers no matter where they go and he always seems to make the best of what is available. At the same time, he nudges Lulu in fearsome directions, and suggests that she provide for the family by prostituting herself. If Lulu is an extension of him or a product of him, she causes terrible ruin in the upright German homes shown in the film.

In fact Lulu sins on a biblical scale. The film is partitioned into seven acts. Are the acts created to parallel the seven deadly sins? They are certainly suggestive categories but perhaps a little too neat. It is clear that Lulu dies as a martyr as well as an object of lesson at the end of the film. The narrative seems to say “those who transgress end up in tragic circumstances,” not unlike the Bible. However, the underlying suggestion is that her racial and religious otherness brought her to inevitable downfall and that her actions were a product of that otherness.

62

80

At the end, as Lulu lies dying, Schigolch eats Christmas pudding in a warm, rowdy bar. This is a truly fearful message. He triumphs at the final moments of Lulu’s life. It is his genial exterior that makes him so threatening. Like Jack the Ripper, he looks like just another fellow at a bar who has fallen on hard times, but his impact is quite large. He uses Lulu to seduce the characters in the film and ends up seducing the viewers in the process. Ruin, suicide and broken homes follow in his and Lulu’s wake. He does a

80 Pandora’s Box. Dir. G.W. Pabst. Perf. Louise Brooks. 1929. UFA Studios. DVD released by Criterion Collections, 2006.

63 masterful job of selling Lulu. This Jewish mesmerist is the most confident and threatening of the three.

Perhaps the development is telling. First comes the othered if not explicitly

Jewish, powerful hypnotist Caligari, then the Jewish creator of illusions Alberich and finally the outwardly normal, distinctly dangerous and Jewish Schigolch. The emphasis shifts from mesmerist to Jew over the course of these three films. Each is othered, first because of their hypnotic abilities and then increasingly because of their Jewishness alone.

In 1929 when Pandora’s Box was released the Nazi party had not yet taken power but was growing exponentially and many important people were Nazi sympathizers, including UFA owner and director Alfred Hugenberg who purchased the studio in 1927.

While, as Patrice Petro notes, Hugenberg did not censor or control all aspects of UFA, it is hard not to think of films at the time in terms of racial profiling.81 Both Lulu and Alwa are punished for their otherness and lack of traditional values, which at the time was almost synonymous. Over these three films the stereotype seems to evolve, crystallize and appear more threatening than ever.

81 Patrice Petro. Joyless Streets; Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

64

Film generally has been associated with hypnotism or even some forms of hypnotic possession and Caligari especially exemplifies this connection because of its otherworldliness and themes of sleepwalking and dreams. In an article from the 1950s when film theory and the ontological study of film began to gain speed, Robert Brown wrote about the camera as follows:

Thus the camera makes participants of its audience, for it invests them with super-human privileges, makes them omnipotent, ubiquitous, and from this special character of cinema is derived… The camera takes literal possession of the spectator, thrusts him into the plot. 82

Perhaps Weimar cinema’s “predilection for tyrants,” as Elsaesser called it, comes from this unconscious association, that the viewer, like a puppet, watches the film, assuming and understanding exactly what the director wishes. This era is especially potent for these mesmeric characters because they act upon the viewer via the medium of film, and because silent film was seen as so much like dreaming, an act of unconscious vision.

Hugo Münsterberg writes that the viewer creates the film as much as the director, that they are equal participants in the spectacle.83 It must be said that the viewer plays a much more unconscious, even hypnotized role than the filmmakers. However, a large percentage of the artists, directors, actors, and designers were Jewish.84 Fritz Lang himself and UFA director Eric Pommer were Jewish. How conscious can they have been about

82 Robert Brown. “Film Myth and the Limits of Film.” The Hudson Review 4.1 (Spring, 1951): 111-117. JSTOR. 21 Feb. 2013 . 83 Hugo Münesterberg. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings. Ed. Allan Langdale. New York: Routledge, 2001. 84 Ofer Ashkenazi. Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, Introduction.

65 the construction of these Jewish magicians? Surely, they did not attempt to construct their own racial and religious identities as problematically other. Were they simply pandering to the fears and desires of their audiences? This line of inquiry only becomes more troubling. Obviously, the stereotyped, painted faces that we see on screen are not representative of real people, only of the constructed other, but what can we make of the fact that these screen spooks played some role, however indefinable, in bolstering anti-

Semitism? Is this what artists and directors, Jewish and otherwise, were taught villains looked like?

66 The Uncanny Feminine

Women have always been man’s greatest other, an other in need of containment, management, ownership and shaping. Representations of women have always differed from the women themselves and this is particularly true in the Weimar period. The women in the three Weimar films in our study show a deep rift between two archetypal women: the virgin and the vamp. All three women seem to have a good side, one that is familiar, respectable and safe, and a darker side that appears at some point during the films to threaten the male characters and stability of the narrative. It is within this divided persona embodied by one single woman that I am locating the uncanny, which refers to something familiar that becomes somehow alien. In each film, the main female character is punished for her otherness, when she departs from what Klaus Theweleit, among others, has identified as the “good” woman. I may use his terms “good” or “bad” but they are stand-ins for the larger concepts of safe, in control and the opposite, dangerous, frightening, and unmanageable.85

Beginning with an introduction of the uncanny and women’s role in the uncanny, then discussing women’s roles in the Weimar era and finally I will explore how the three films model the stereotype of the “evil” woman and how she is formed. As in my previous chapters I will look chronologically at the development of the women’s characters over the three films. Like the Jewish mesmerist, the women become increasingly other and increasingly dangerous as the decade of the twenties progresses, building to a myth of dangerous, if artificial, femininity. The othered woman is even more threatening than the

85 Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies; Volume One: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

67 Jewish characters discussed in the previous chapter, and also much more problematic for the German viewer, because the uncanny woman also resembles German women, their mothers, sisters, and girlfriends. This issue of the familiar other is resolved by Lulu in

Pandora’s Box, towards the end of the chapter. She is a woman who is both uncanny and

Jewish, therefore safely not German and an easy target.

The uncanny is a particularly difficult concept or experience to describe, as it manifests differently for different individuals. Freud considered this an issue of

“aesthetics,” in his essay “Das Unheimliche” in 1919. He draws on E.T.A. Hoffman, a writer whom he felt used the uncanny to potent affect. Locating the uncanny is not a simple matter of definition, but basically it translates to “un-homely” and is usually defined as something unexpectedly alien in a familiar place, although most dictionaries vary greatly on the actual terms they use to define it. Books have been written about this feeling or aesthetic state and my task of defining it here will have to be a cursory one.

The uncanny is something familiar yet unfamiliar. All things that raise an unnamable yet distinctly unpleasant feeling of wrongness or disunity can be termed uncanny. Some examples are: extremely life-like mannequins or robots, discovering someone’s body part is missing, doubles of people or things, the sensation that events are taking place for a reason or will follow a set course, even dismemberment or disfigurement can be uncanny. The dead are uncanny, in that they have passed from a state of familiar movement and life to another alien state, yet the deceased person is still familiar to someone. Death is also one of the most feared human experiences and yet everyone will have this experience and the vast majority will witness it.

68 Freud analyzes The Sandman, a short story written by E.T.A. Hoffman, which he finds uncanny in an attempt to show what he finds troubling about it. In the story there is a character known as the Sandman. He puts sand into the eyes of his victims, causing the eyes to fall out. Then he collects them and brings them back to his owl-like children. In

Hoffman’s story, a young male narrator remembers the death of his father as associated with the Sandman. The storyteller also falls in love with his neighbor’s motionless, speechless daughter, Olympia, who turns out to be a very life-like doll. For Freud, the doll is obviously uncanny, but he seems to struggle to understand why the loss of sight is so troubling. He connects the loss of the father and the loss of sight to a fear of castration.86 There is also something about the secrecy of the Sandman and the experiences that the storyteller has that is uncanny. The word in German is Unheimlich, which has several relevant meanings. Heimlich literally means secretly or secretive but also homely or of the home. If we consider how the women of the Weimar era might have resisted the idea of being confined to the home and occupying the position of “angel in the home,” we can come to understand why they might be seen as foreign, or not as they used to be.

Women in film are doubly uncanny. Photographs and film are considered uncanny because they arrest life, showing a doubled instant that will never fade or change. Barthes notes “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead”87

Film scholar Tom Gunning writes:

86 Sigmund Freud. The Uncanny. Trans. David Mclintock. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, 139. 87 Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Fontana, 1984, 9.

69 If photography emerged as the material support for a new positivism, it was also experienced as an uncanny phenomenon, one which seemed to undermine the unique identity of objects and people, endlessly reproducing the appearances of objects, creating a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles alongside the concrete world of the senses verified by positivism.88

Film captures us, captures our specter-like double. We never seem to look quite like ourselves in photographs. A good photograph is one where we look least foreign, where we can recognize ourselves.

The uncanny is inherently other than what is expected, it is uncomfortable but, what is more, it is abject. Julia Kristeva first wrote about the abject in her re-working of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The abject is everything beyond what is safe and acceptable.

For example death, manifested in a corpse, is abjected because it is so threatening to the self and the symbolic order that contains and maintains the self. She describes it in this way:

The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.… It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.89

This ambiguous composite is richly available in the heroines of the three films. The abject contrasts with myth; it is a force for destabilizing identity, either personally or within a social system. Whereas myth constructs, establishes and re-enforces the self, its

88 Tom Gunning. “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films and Photography’s Uncanny” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 42-71. 89 Julia Kristeva. “Approaching Abjection.” The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Amelia Jones. New York: Routledge, 2003. 398-391.

70 moral code and normalizing presence over the abject and unconscious. The abject is really anything that frightens and intrigues at the same time. “Composite” is a particularly interesting word, as each heroine is mutable and multifaceted; the same cannot be said for the male characters, especially in the later two films, Die Nibelungen and Pandora’s

Box.

So why are the women in our three films uncanny if the concept is paired with such diverse and colorful material? Each woman manifests a divided self. One half is a good, gentle, motherly, asexual and familiar persona and the other dangerous, sexualized, castrating and alluring. Their alterity is as constructed as their familiarity. These films seek to model and define womanness, and especially German womanhood, what it should look like, how it should act, and importantly how it shouldn’t be or act and how disastrous it can be if a woman gets out of control. The desire to construct a controllable woman is as prevalent in media as the desire to see, have and tame disobedient or “bad girls.” The split is particularly interesting during the Weimar period because both the society and women were undergoing extreme transformations. In effect, the role of women was up for debate and the various sides of the conversation had extraordinarily differing opinions.

Nicholas Royle, author of The Uncanny, writes that women have from its conception, been tied to the uncanny and even the death drive.90 He synthesizes several arguments about female uncanniness, that perhaps “death and woman function as

Western culture’s privileged tropes for the enigmatic and for alterity.”91 He adds that

90 Nicholas Royle. The Uncanny. New York: Routledge, 2003, 87. 91 Ibid.

71 silence is usually a significant part of this enigmatic uncanny. The desirability of death, or death drive, is also linked to the desirability of a beautiful woman. The two are linked in

Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.92 Both sexual desire and the death drive signify a loss of self. In death and in passionate surrender there is the loss of ego. This is one explanation of how women are often linked with eerie qualities of otherness. However, this does not resolve why women during the Weimar era were represented as mysteriously other, more so than usual.

To answer this question we must look to the events that changed women’s position in the social order. In 1919 both men and women over the age of 20 got the right to vote. Women had already begun to shift their roles during World War I, the first experience of total war in Europe, which required work on the home front despite sending most young men off to the front. In their stead, women stepped into the factories, the shops and ultimately out of the home into the public world. Because they had jobs, they could suddenly buy clothes, accessories and, most importantly, go to the cinema. It is not a stretch to say that most men were deeply threatened by women who perhaps no longer relied on their husbands to support their families, but were consumers in their own right. The reality was that women in Weimar Germany did not get nearly as liberated as the image of the “New Woman” suggests. While some worked in influential positions, over the course of the decade this percentage became quite small. In 1918, 9.6 percent of the Weimar National Assembly had been women but by 1930 only about 7 percent of all of parliamentarians were women.93 By 1932 it was illegal for married

92 Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. London: Norton & Company, 1990. 93 Katharina von Ankum ed. Women in the Metropolis; Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture. Berkley: University of California Press, 1997, 4.

72 women to hold a job as a Public Servant. While some women did experience the freedom and Berlin nightlife that is so readily associated with the Weimar era, it was a relatively small percentage as Katharina von Ankum writes:

Despite its limited reality, the icon of the New Woman that emerged form the war years as the embodiment of the sexually liberated, economically independent, self-reliant female was perceived as a threat to social stability and an impediment to Germany’s political and economic reconstruction.94

It is particularly difficult to accept how anti-feminist and uncertain the position of women was in the eyes of the Weimar government, especially when we recognize how minimal the reach of the workingwoman was. Weimar gender politics, especially after

1924, stress the “natural” role of women as mothers and how stepping beyond that role only causes unnecessary suffering.

The legendary New Woman was extremely threatening, so much so that other aspects of Weimar culture got associated with this dangerous yet appealing new femininity. The culture that was perceived as new and modern was also feminized. The city of Berlin is described countless times as a woman, young and seductive. Film is also described as women’s entertainment. Because it was perceived as low culture it was relegated to the women’s sector at least openly.95 The fear elicited by this change in social structure can be seen in the ambivalence and often-contradictory representations of women within the films of the time. Petro suggests that this is why film of the Weimar period is so preoccupied with women’s issues, women’s place in society and how to

94 Ibid, 4. 95 Patrice Petro. Joyless Streets; Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 43.

73 mediate the new experiences that modern life brought.96 In none of the three films is the division of “good” and “bad” women a simple black and white contrast.

In our earliest film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the division between “good” and

“bad” is perhaps the most complicated question of the film. With its nested stories and inconsistent plot, Caligari frames the question of “good” and “bad” in terms of “sane” and

“insane.” Viewers are left to negotiate which reality they wish to believe, Francis’s story or the other story concluded by Dr. Caligari. Neither story goes off without a hitch. That is, neither story offers a clear option between sane and insane. The uncanny female character is twofold: Jane, herself divided, and Cesare, not female but feminized and visibly othered.

Jane’s uncanniness lies in her conflicting states of being. The first time we see Jane she seems to be in an altered state; her eyes are rolled up, she walks slowly as though in a trance and her pure-white gown makes her look ethereal, almost like a nymph from classical mythology or an angel. She is both contained, as her personhood or consciousness seems absent, and objectified. She is literally the object of the two male characters’ gaze as they sit on a bench talking about her. Francis claims that she is his fiancé, which we can already recognize as an empty or false claim, as she does not acknowledge or look at him. His childish desire for her is obvious on his face, as is the fact that he has never laid claim to her in any meaningful way. Jane is both managed by the men in the film as well as for the male viewer, for now, but it is clear that she is going to be a driving factor of the conflict within the film.

96 Ibid, 225.

74 Patrice Petro argues that when Jane wanders into the fairground and sees Cesare for the first time she is given the unusual perspective of occupying the otherwise male role of the gaze. Petro quotes Linda Williams who suggests that early horror films often:

permit a different form of identification and sympathy to take place, not between the audience and the character who looks, but between the two objects of the cinematic spectacle who encounter one another in this look—the woman and the monster.97

Jane’s gaze at Cesare is a startling moment. Jane, through no special power other than her gaze, awakens Cesare from his coma-like sleep. From this moment onwards they are connected.

97 Patrice Petro. “The Woman, The Monster, and Caligari” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Texts, Contexts, Histories. Ed. Mike Budd. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 203-217.

75 98

Like Jane’s ambivalent introduction, Cesare is managed and laid claim to by Dr.

Caligari. He is fed like a puppet and utterly dominated by Caligari. His uncanniness is readily apparent. He is a puppet that also lives. He is suspended between a state of semi- wakefulness and death-like sleep. He is feminized by his passivity as well as his many pairings with other characters within the film. Catherine Clément writes, “The male

98 Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari. Dir. Robert Wiene. Perf. Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, Lil Dagover and Frederich Feher. UFA, 1920.

76 somnambulist … is the equivalent of the female hysteric.”99 The role that Cesare plays in the symbolic order of the film is manifold.

Elsaesser links Cesare with Francis and with Dr. Caligari. The latter association is fairly obvious, Cesare acts at Caligari’s will; he is an extension of Caligari, albeit a sexualized one.100 Elsaesser also links Cesare to Francis, suggesting that Cesare acts as his unconscious half, perusing Jane and killing Alain when he poses a threat to his relationship with Jane. Again, Cesare plays the unconscious role of the repressed or sexualized self.101

Anton Kaes, on the other hand, writes that Cesare represents and embodies death, that he is the representation of the fear and presence of death in the 1920s in

Germany. Kaes suggests that Cesare is thin, skeletal and acts as a force for death. He does kill several of Caligari’s victims before breaking free from his hypnotic suggestion and running away with Jane. However, if he is death, then how can we make sense of this flight with Jane? Cesare’s heroic denial of death in this scene makes his death not suicide, but martyrdom for the sake of love, sexual desire, and perhaps even life?

Another irreconcilable layer of meaning or interpretation is added when we add

Petro’s interpretation that Cesare and Jane are in fact complementary parts. Feminist theorist Linda Williams writes, as Petro quotes, “There is not much difference… between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned.”102 We do sympathize with Cesare in some way, his passivity, his ferocity

99 Patrice Petro. “The Woman, The Monster, and Caligari” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Texts, Contexts, Histories. Ed. Mike Budd. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 203-217. 100 Thomas Elsaesser. Weimar Cinema and After; Germany’s Historical Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2000, 79 101 Ibid. 102 Patrice Petro. “The Woman, The Monster, and Caligari” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Texts, Contexts, Histories. Ed. Mike Budd. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 203-217.

77 when he attacks Jane and overt sexuality is fascinating and unforgettable. He seems to bring out extreme projection on the part of critic and viewer alike.

Kracauer suggested that Cesare is a feminine portrayal, or a masculine figure in crisis, one who has lost something inherently masculine.103 Cesare is feminized because of how he moves, how he is costumed, because of his passivity, and because of his status as an object fetishized by the gaze of the viewer and the characters within the film. His male body is readily apparent in his skintight clothes, as opposite to Jane’s flowing white nightgown as can be. Aesthetically speaking they certainly complement each other in this way. However, the parts that make him feminine have more to do with the seemingly passive role that he plays. His movements are dancerly and light and his body is exposed and vulnerable compared to the overcoats and vests that the other male characters wear.

The many facets of division present in Cesare’s character are critical to his construction as an othered, abjected force. Even more than Jane, Cesare is the uncanny androgynous, a force so much more problematic for traditional masculine identity than any dangerous woman.

103 Siegfried Kracauer. From Caligari to Hitler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

78 104

The threat of Cesare or Jane’s uncanniness is mediated by the frame story that could allow the viewer to brush off the whole story as the ravings of a lunatic. Thus the threat of disruption to the symbolic system is profound during the film, and suggests further consideration, but can also be swept under the rug by the conscious mind.

Relegated to the hazy unconscious, where it exists as a fear or question. The uncanny and abject qualities of the female or feminine characters could hardly become more extreme however it could become more real or more threatening, as we shall see.

104 Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari. Dir. Robert Wiene. Perf. Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, Lil Dagover and Frederich Feher. UFA, 1920.

79 In Die Nibelungen, Brunhild and Kriemhild seem to exchange dispositions at the time of Siegfried’s death. Once the vengeful warrior woman, Brunhild chooses to commit suicide on Siegfried’s deathbed, and Kriemhild, the once virtuous, gentle wife clad in white, becomes a dangerous, strategic, violent force of revenge. At the close of Siegfried’s

Tod, Kriemhild swears revenge by the very soil that absorbed her husband, Siegfried’s pooling blood. At the opening of the second film, Kriemhild’s Revenge, she is a different woman than we remember. She wears long, dark richly textured robes that cover all but the oval of her face, rendering her desexualized. No longer clad in lose-fitting dresses that show her neckline, she seems to have encased herself in armor. The opening shot is of her in formation with her ladies in waiting, looking into the camera, over the tomb of

Siegfried, as though accusing the viewer of causing his death.

80 105

Throughout the film, Kriemhild and other characters claim that she is dead, that a part of her died with Siegfried, and an important one at that. Her marriage to Attila, in some versions called Etzel, renders her impure, and it is unclear if she poisons their child.

She singlehandedly causes every named character to die in the second film. Her revenge is complete; she annihilates herself and all of her kinsmen save Gunther, along with innumerable huns and Hagen. She appears dehumanized, killing ruthlessly, without regard. Attila suggests at one point that, although they never loved one another, they are finally united in hate against a common enemy. Kriemhild replies, “Never was my heart more filled with love.” This cryptic message only serves to further alienate her from the

105 Die Nibelungen. Dir. Fritz Lang. Perf. Paul Richter, Margarete Schön, Hanna Ralph and Rudolf Klien-Rogge. UFA, 1924.

81 viewer and the spectacle of death before her. In Kriemhild’s case the uncanniness arises from her occupying two worlds; she is between life and death.

In the scene where Kriemhild has just given birth, there is a moment where she could have re-entered the world of the living but chose instead to follow Siegfried to an early grave. She gets out of bed, much like the scene where she approaches Siegfried’s dead body, and walks slowly, even laboriously over to her child. She is wearing the same plain white nightgown as the night when Siegfried died and her expression is quite similar. She approaches the child, looks longingly, sadly, and then seems to resign herself and goes to the box which contains the soil upon which Siegfried died. Her preference for a box of soil over her own child is inhuman. Her desire for death, not just for herself, is unsettling, and certainly her willingness to sacrifice everything, including her own child is a step beyond what morality can tolerate, even in the hypothetical world of dragons and mythic imaginings. In this way she becomes utterly abject and othered.

It is clear that the women in this film are making the choices; the men, aside from

Siegfried himself, all react to them rather than act on their own will. Brunhild’s last words are “Hail to you, King Gunther, for the sake of a woman’s lie you have slain your most loyal friend!”106 The only choice they seem to make as a whole is to die together at the end of part two--an act that is rendered in heroic angles and slow demise. Kriemhild becomes too cold and distant even for Attila or the viewer. The men seem to stand together at the end of the film and clean up after the battle. How could they not if the

106 Die Nibelungen. Dir. Fritz Lang. Perf. Paul Richter, Margarete Schön, Hanna Ralph and Rudolf Klien-Rogge. UFA, 1924.

82 alternative is the madness and loss of emotion that seems to befall Kriemhild as she watches her brothers die?

The extremity of Kriemhild’s abjection is tempered by the mode of story telling.

She is a very threatening force to the moral or social order. Obviously within the film she destroys everything. But, the film does offer some sort of solution, albeit an unsuitable one to the “problem” that she creates. The loyalty and Todesmut107 of the men, who die together at the end of the film, seem valiant. They are all we can grasp onto as the film unravels. Perhaps it is the pacing or the story itself, but the only resolution that the film realistically offers is that death is a noble option. The men, who bond together at the end of the film, are few, but if we see them as the founders of the German nation, what do we have to be proud of? Their loyalty? The same loyalty that got them all killed instead of giving up one countryman? It is this problem; this lack of identification that Kracauer suggests gives rise to fascism. The men, who die together, die for a leader that was born into his place. He is followed with unquestioning loyalty even when his mistakes prove to be disastrous. There is the husk of something to believe in at the end of this film.

Gunther, survives the bloodshed until the very last moment because his brothers and friends all die around him and for him. Despite all the horrors, a bard lives and the tale is carried on. What we are to make of this “solution” is unclear but there is the semblance of meaning, the promise that if you are just loyal and stubborn enough you will be remembered forever.

107 Todesmut is a difficult word to translate. It literally means courage in the face of death but it is also associated with a distinctly German cultural model of heroism. It is an act of extreme gallantry.

83

This semblance of meaning is not to be found in Pandora’s Box. Just as disastrous, although with differing causes, Pandora’s Box, depicts the divided feminine, embodied by

Louise Brooks. Lulu is perhaps the most difficult to reconcile case of the uncanny in all of our three films. Lotte Eisner describes her as:

Many times Pabst films Lulu’s features on a slant. Her face is so voluptuously animal that it seems almost deprived of individuality. In the scene with Jack the Ripper, this face, a smooth mirror-like disc slanting across the screen, is so shaded out and toned down that the camera seems to be looking down at some lunar landscape. (Is this this a human being—a woman—at all? Is it rather the flower of some poisonous plant?) Or again Pabst just shows, at the edge of the screen, the chin and a fragment of check belonging to the man next to her, with whom the audience automatically identifies.108

108 Lotte H. Eisner. The Haunted Screen. Berkley: University of California Press, 1952, 299.

84

109

Eisner captures so much in this description. She recognizes how foreign, fascinating and natural Lulu is. I am especially drawn to her description of the lunar landscape, because it reveals something of the strangeness, the untouchable quality that Lulu has, despite always being touched by others. Everybody and everything seems to watch Lulu in this film, she is all there is to see, anything else is secondary. The way that she takes up our view is hard to define. She is so alluring and yet totally disastrous. The ultimate femme fatale, she appeals to us, without even trying or so it seems, and appeals to the characters in the film with minimal effort. The idea that we identify with Jack the Ripper also reveals us for what we are, as voyeurs and desirers of Lulu.

109 Pandora’s Box. Dir. G.W. Pabst. Perf. Louise Brooks. 1929. UFA Studios. DVD released by Criterion Collections, 2006.

85 In an attempt to master or own Lulu, many have described her as a whore. Her sexuality is unfettered by normative rule; she moves from father to son, an act that is typically considered deeply incestuous, especially for a woman, without any seeming difficulty. Petro says, “the growing visibility of women in Weimar in fact helps explain the defensive reaction toward women in the discourses of artists and intellectuals; their attempt to distance and thereby master the threat perceived as too close, too present, too overwhelming.”110 Certainly attempts to shoehorn Lulu into the category of whore or victim are in some way a similar reaction--an expression of fear because she is constantly too close and too sexual and too much.

Elsaesser suggests that Lulu is excessive and excess incarnate. She is the “object of desire for everyone in the film” and “preserves herself by being nothing and everything.”

Littau interprets this to mean that she is “excessive darkness; and as everything we might say, she is excessively dazzling.” 111 Lulu is of course neither and both. Lulu is the ultimate composite, the ultimate in-between. She is deadly, beautiful and dies beautifully.

Pabst’s film moves the character of Lulu beyond the roles she’s given as the whore or the victim as she is cast in Wedekind’s play of the same name.

There is a definitive theme of racial otherness within the film that seeks to solve the uncontainable question of Lulu. As if to suggest that if she is Jewish and threateningly uncanny, perhaps it is her Jewishness that can be blamed. Lulu never escapes her original framing in the first scene where she dances in front of her pimp/father. She is positioned right in front of a painting of herself and a menorah. The

110 Patrice Petro. Joyless Streets; Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 69. 111 Karin Littau. “Refractions of the Feminine: The Monstrous Transformations of Lulu” MLN 110.4 (1995): 888-912. JSTOR. 20 Dec, 2012. .

86 first item objectifies her and contains her in a frame as the film does. She is constantly being watched, captured, and followed by the camera and us as viewers. The second item racially locates her as Jewish in an era where being Jewish was highly problematic. Her dark hair and relationship with Schigolch (an impossibly ugly name that casts him as scum, if his clothes and manners didn’t already do so) further condemns her as something that looks good but does not have a good core of personhood. Her class also brands her, and the traditional German who she manipulates into marrying her cannot get over the two identities that she contains and tries to get her to kill him. The symbolic act of marriage to her is so unpalatable that he prefers death. This is the first pairing of death and sex, or union in the more symbolic sense, which is brought full circle by Jack the

Ripper who seems to represent Dr. Schön’s counterpart.112

112 Littau, 1995.

87

113

Interestingly, other characters do not have the moral code to know a bad woman when they meet one. Alwa wants to run away from home and the moral structures that are represented and upheld therein. Perhaps it is his age that separates him from the perspective of his father. Maybe this is a social commentary on Pabst’s part that the younger generations do not have the same standards as the pre-war generations. Or perhaps Alwa is the product of another one of his father’s impulses, an illegitimate son destined to be less morally upright as the product of a sinful union. Alwa is also a much less German name than his father’s Ludwig.

One of the most strikingly othered characters is the Duchess von Geschwitz who is clearly in love with Lulu. She may be the first lesbian character who is represented this

113Pandora’s Box. Dir. G.W. Pabst. Perf. Louise Brooks. 1929. UFA Studios. DVD released by Criterion Collections, 2006.

88 unabashedly on film.114 The openness to other sexual orientations as shown here is a direct product of social modes of thinking in the Weimar period. This attitude was not to last in the following years.

Ultimately, the film reaffirms normative behaviors for women and punishes Lulu for her sexuality and unpredictable desires. Like the original Pandora’s box, Lulu

“endlessly frustrates (re-)containment - it becomes a container for the uncontainable.”115

She is a sign of the uncanny. Karin Littau develops the idea that Lulu, like Pandora from classical mythology (see chapter on myth), is doubled and divided. She locates this doubling in the scene where Lulu is looking in the mirror and taking off her pearls and train after her wedding party. She writes:

We, as an audience are literally faced with Lulu’s double role, as both seductress and wife; and as spectators we are also faced with more than one image of Lulu: Lulu on screen and in the mirror; Louise Brooks on screen as Louise and as an actress; Lulu on the screen looking at Lulu and looking at herself playing Lulu in the mirror.116

114 Littau, 1995. 115 Littau, 1995. 116 Ibid.

89 117

Louise plays Lulu and Lulu plays Louise. The life of actor Louise Brooks is uncannily like the story of Lulu. Even their names are quite similar. Brooks called herself

Lulu and claimed she was playing herself in both Pandora’s Box and her next film Diary of

A Lost Girl.118 Brooks, like Lulu, started out a promising career as a dancer and then went into show business, but because she was both so charming and difficult to get along with she made and lost friends and lovers very quickly. On screen, she captures our attention right away and we are fascinated by her desire to live dangerously and break all the rules.

In real life, she angered too many important men in the film industry. One such man

117 Pandora’s Box. Dir. G.W. Pabst. Perf. Louise Brooks. 1929. UFA Studios. DVD released by Criterion Collections, 2006. 118 Criterion DVD extras from - Pandora’s Box. Dir. G.W. Pabst. Perf. Louise Brooks. 1929. UFA Studios. DVD released by Criterion Collections, 2006.

90 spread the word that she did not have the ability to do sound film. This essentially ended her career and she moved home. Brooks started a dance school but it failed and she ended as a broke, alcoholic in New York City. She, like Lulu, even worked for an escort service for a time. Lulu and Louise both started out as dancers, both are flappers at the height of its fashion and they are both not easily contained by men. Lulu’s duplicity and divided nature does not end here.

When she dies it is both tragic and exalting. Her act of generosity, i.e., inviting this stranger into her room, is necessarily set up in comparison to the generosity of the

Good Samaritan who gives Jack the Ripper a cup of something hot, a branch of pine, and a candle. I don’t think Pabst is trying to turn his nose up at the young woman’s gifts but her character is sympathetic and simple. She can be documented as a Good Samaritan and this description is sufficient. Not so Lulu, who can neither be marked “Good

Samaritan” nor whore. If she can be labeled by one of these names, then only because another element is being disregarded or forgotten. When she brings Jack the Ripper into her room, she literally disarms him with her candor and he drops his knife on the way up the stairs. How does a serial killer decide not to kill a woman? This is very unrealistic, almost miraculous, as though his need to kill stems from a need to penetrate forcibly, and when he is invited in he loses that power and that need. Just as we are ever trying to enter into Lulu, understand her, see her, know her. Something about their position, in the final moments of Lulu’s life, is very touching. She sits on his lap like they know each other well, and even while she did not agree to this type of penetration, at least she chose this man. Her own knife rather than his kills her, as though the threat to her life is not external but internal. On the one hand she seems to have more agency than either Alwa

91 or her pimp/father character because she is still taking actions rather than allowing things to happen to her but, on the other hand, her femininity puts her at risk of murder by this stranger. It is clear that her femininity gives her power over Jack but it does not stop her death. Wedekind’s play, upon which this film is based shows this death as a lesson. It is bluntly politicized. Even Wedekind’s supposedly clear message gets more complicated when we note that Wedekind cast his wife as Lulu and played Jack the Ripper himself. Is this not a conflation of sex and death, or desire and annihilation? The doubling of the story, that of light and dark, of the powerful Lulu and the weak Lulu, the tramp and the mother, comes together here. This is the climax and the resolution of the story.

If Germany was trying to construct an identity, it was by way of the other that

Germans defined themselves. As if by showing the uncanny, the indefinable feminine, the dangerous mesmerist, Germany could contain and manage it. Germany is not divided, or uncanny, Germany is wholesome and without a darker underside. If this underside should exist though, it is Jewish not truly German and should be eradicated.

The supposed Jewishness is ambiguous enough in these films that no direct association can be made. However, the presence of these various “Jewish” characters reveals an unconscious fear that grew ever more apparent over the span of the decade. By constructing the other in this artificial way, it gives away the profound confusion and fascination with the other that Germany contained. It is as though through these three sets of feminine characters we can see the development of what German women should not be, the definition of what Germany would push away from. What exactly that other

92 is gets clearer and more concrete in each film. What exactly Germanness should be remains vague.

93 Conclusion

This work attempts to show how, consciously or otherwise, post-war Germany was seeking new avenues for self-identification and understanding in the aftermath of humiliating defeat on the global stage. The characters they constructed include the mythic hero, his mythic nation, the Jewish puppet-master and the dangerously unknown feminine. Each reflects a facet of German fear and perception of itself. This writing has used them to identify commonalities among diverse, even disparate films. Only by looking at these three rather different films did I come upon the remarkably consistent characters of the Jewish mesmerist and the uncanny feminine. If we consider other films of the era, the questions of identity and alterity are richly available.

Consider The Golem (1920), for example. The golem is a creature of Jewish folklore that protects and does the bidding of his creator. He is summoned and controlled by mysterious “Jewish magic,” which seems to be something borderline religious, but obviously highly problematic. That is, they show a highly tenuous grip on Jewish traditions and beliefs. Cesare and Lulu are reminiscent of the golem as they are both constructions of a Jewish puppet-master and their master manipulates them.

What about M (1931)? Is Peter Lorre the puppet of his own demons? His character, Hans Beckert, was made Jewish after the films completion, when Nazi propaganda used clips of his confession to show the alleged horrible nature that Jews suffered from.119 Lorre is also highly feminized or rendered as a child when he cannot control himself. He seems always to be putting something in his mouth, smoking,

119 Maria Tatar. Lustmord; Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

94 drinking or chewing his nails. His oral fixation seems to postpone his darker desires but not for long.

In The Blue Angel (1930) Marlene Dietrich is the ultimate castrating woman. The respectable Professor Immanuel Rath, a Jewish name from the Old Testament, is seduced and reduced to a stage-clown unable to even take care of himself. It is hard to say who is guiltier in this film, the professor or Lola Lola, played by Dietrich. Even the name Lola

Lola is reminiscent of Lulu and her doubled and divided persona. Interestingly, the same actor who plays Dr. Caligari, Emil Jannings, plays the Professor. Marlene Dietrich is heralded as a truly German woman although she clearly walks the line of gender and identification.

Much more remains to be said about the distinctly German characters, in part because the three films in this study had examples of these ineffectual heroes. The hero is clearly present in Die Nibelungen, but is undermined by the very text of the film. The title alone of the first film, Siegfried’s Tod suggests that we should not grow attached to

Siegfried.

There are numerous other German films from this decade, the vast majority of which have been lost. However, the gendered and religiously othered roles are clearly a subject of profound and revealing debate within the discourse that is the body of films that form the Weimar cinema. Whether they should be seen as a unity or not, they do seem to have important and revealing common characters.

95 I too am guilty of trying to bring order to the cultural dissonance and contradictions of this pivotal moment in German history. In the end, I am seeking mythic characters, labels and containers for Weimar film and its players; one that captures the mythical and Germanic hero and the stereotypically Jewish puppet-master, and another that distils the unknowable, unfathomable feminine. I am also seeking to interpret this most slippery of decades, one that does not allow for classification, only embroilment. The three films chosen for this study are an unusual set and span a decade.

Yet each seem to encapsulate fear from various perspectives. Caligari involves us with the fear of authority, the fear of the world inside a man’s head. Die Nibelungen offers a view into the fear of national loss, failure and destruction. Pandora’s Box shows a fear of the unknown woman and what she might be capable of. They all have the character of the

Jewish puppet-master and the uncanny feminine; both unknowns have a lot to offer and seem very rich. How can we deny the charisma of Dr. Caligari? Or Lulu, how will we ever forget her? Why are the “other” characters so much more interesting, than those with whom we are supposed to identify? Traditionally the storyteller is the character that we most identify with but nothing could be farther from the truth in The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari. Francis is confused, but dull and only serves as a portal into the world of his story.

These characters that so fascinate us quickly became a target for violence and were associated with many cruel names. In 1937 the National Socialists compiled an art exhibition aimed to teach German citizens how wrong the art that they had admired for years was and how it distorted and perverted their experience of the world. The so-called

“Degenerate Art Exhibit” was one of the most widely seen exhibitions of its time.

96 Millions flocked to see what they were not supposed to. Most of the works in the degenerate art exhibit were recent pieces by prominent German and European artists in various styles other than strictly realist. In comparison, the approved art exhibit, demonstrating good, wholesome German art was attended by a fraction of the number of people who came to see the degenerate art. Perhaps there is something both disturbing and fascinating about the works from the Weimar period, which leads the viewer to recognize their own darker nature. For this body of art works to be labeled so harshly only a few years after its rise to prominence suggests how affecting and disturbing the figures and characters within them appeared to certain viewers.

When we see the tortured landscapes and distorted faces, there are many responses. There is nothing prefabricated or ready-made in the body of what has been called Expressionist art. The bodies and figures are often distorted, emaciated, bare, or simply bizarre. Modigliani’s faces, long and uneven, were among those in the degenerate art exhibit. Emil Nolde, a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party was also featured in this show. Even the inspired creatures and lines of Paul Klee were seen as dangerous and degenerate.120 In this exhibit the National Socialists attempted to define and destroy the collective memory of a nation that was in the throes of development. Their attempt to rebuild culture on an extraordinary scale shows how the ideals of a nation were to be housed in art. German art was to be as pure and unvaried as the citizens of the nation.

120 Stephanie Barron. “Degenerate Art” The Fate of the Avant-Guard in Nazi Germany. Exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, Publishers, 1991, 9.

97 The faces on screen are often just as distorted and astounding as the art that was labeled degenerate. We do not wholly enter into the experiences of the othered characters, but they do pre-occupy us when we see these films. Arguably, they are what these films are about. Perhaps, as Heidegger suggests, the fixation on these characters is a mediating experience of them, one that allows them to be more accessible, even familiar. “Contemplation becomes a means of compensating for powerlessness, a way of overcoming the radical otherness of the self in a more detached and, hence, more intellectually mediated aesthetic experience.”121 In other words, the fear of the unknown, within or its external manifestations, is lessened by contemplation. If we can think something, go through the motions in our minds, aren’t we closer to doing it, or knowing it? As trauma therapists say, what can become intellectually manageable can become emotionally manageable as well.

According to Kracauer: “In the pure externality of the cinema, the audience meets itself, and the discontinuous sequence of splendid sense impressions reveals to them their own daily reality. Were this reality to remain hidden from them they could neither attack nor change it.”122 Could cinema offer our best chance of changing society and the ideological world we live in? Cinema is of course typically a for-profit art form. Does that make it less true or more revealing? These questions cannot be answered simply, however, in the three films in this study the desire to create a national identity is quite telling and

121 Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 164-65. quoted in Patrice Petro. Joyless Streets; Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 54. 122 Siegfried Kracauer The Mass Ornament. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995, 67-76. Quoted from Patrice Petro. Joyless Streets; Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 65.

98 suggests that film and representation might play a much larger role in our conceptions of ourselves than we expect.

Perhaps the many analyses that interpret Weimar film and history stem from a desire to mediate and to define that which we see on the screen. Sontag suggests

“interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it with something else.”123 Each narrative offers an interpretation of how the history really happened, why these films fit into five tidy categories and how

Expressionist film created the German desire to be dominated. They reposition the films, overlooking whatever does not fit, and build up one theory that pigeonholes them into cabinets, boxes, canisters and contains them. Perhaps these films are un-interpretable.

Because they are silent, they are certainly outside of language. It is because of their form that they are so hard to come to terms with. They are not just strangely painted sets that serve only as “a garment in which to dress the drama.” 124 They are much more. If cinema offers one of the only means of witnessing society, then the form in which it comes is the perceived shape of the social world itself.

Is there a flickering of the uncanny about Weimar film, something that is difficult to stomach, something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time? We are used to being in the position of the voyeur, the spectator, the fly on the wall, but the three Weimar films in our study all create another level of self-awareness. The voyeur is witness to themself.

The fantasy of the hero, in Nibelungen, his death is self-aware. How do we reconcile this constructed spectacle of death? Richter performs death in a highly Expressionist manner,

123 Susan Sontag. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966, 10. 124 Hans Janowitz, quoted by Mike Budd ed., The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Texts, Contexts, Histories. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990, 59.

99 with great pomp and circumstance, too much emphasis, and yet it is still moving. How can this artifice be yet so authentic? Perhaps why we strive to interpret but also cannot interpret this sort of drama is that it is so over-stated. Everything that is to be understood is thrust into the viewers face leaving us wondering what it meant.

100

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107 Appendix

Appendix i: Our desire to see “Expressionism” as the Oxford Reference suggests, in terms of a movement, a phase in film history, is powerful but misleading. The issue is that there are too many contradictions, even within the defining characteristics of Expressionism.

A modernist film movement that developed in Germany in the first part of the 20th century, lasting roughly from 1919 until 1924. The best-known examples of German Expressionist film are: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (director Wiene, 1919), Metropolis (director Lang, 1926), and Nosferatu (director Murnau, 1921). Contemporaneous with the tumultuous Weimar period and the rise of German fascism, its dark, anti-realist aesthetic was inspired by the pan-European movement of Expressionism in the arts, typified by such diverse figures as Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, and Vincent Van Gogh ; more locally, it took inspiration from the Munich-based Der Blaue Reiter (the blue rider) group of artists and the Dresden-based Die Brücke (the bridge) group, whose members included Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Kirchner, and Fritz Beyl. Like Expressionist art, which was similarly influenced by psychoanalysis, its subject matter tends to be focused on ambivalent questions to do with sexuality and emotion, which it explores via supernatural and science fictional tales.(“Expressionist Film.” The Oxford Reference Online. Accessed Feb 12, 2013.)

In order to understand exactly how contradictory this definition is, one would have to search for the connection between Expressionist art and Expressionist film. However, besides a certain “look” the two share virtually nothing in terms of their goals or desires. The two spheres, painters and filmmakers, rarely seem to touch. Expressionist artists, especially Kandinsky, listed in the definition, was passionate, even spiritual about art as a means to change the world and not interested in money, at least not primarily. Expressionist filmmakers and producers, while equally passionate about their work, adapted to suit the trends of the time. Eric Pommer, the producer who agreed to make The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, did so because he thought the more unusual he could make his film look, the more tickets he would sell.1 Filmmakers often had close connections with the theater and close ties can be seen between trends in the theater and in films of the time. By using terms like “anti-realist” or phrases like “ambivalent questions to do with sexuality and emotion,” while seemingly true, the Oxford Reference’s writer sidesteps the issue of definition. These terms are vague and unspecific to the Weimar films. They might just as easily apply to the entire genre of romantic comedies, or, to give a contrasting example, many of the films directed by Martin Scorsese. The only part of this definition that limits how we might define Expressionist film is the years (1919-1924) that the Oxford Reference states. However, Metropolis, listed here as an Expressionist Film, falls outside the very timeframe they’ve given. Pandora’s Box, one of our films has all of the psychological elements of Expressionist film listed by the Oxford Reference but does not take place only indoors, nor is it a tale of the supernatural. Where do we place it? There are many modern films that seem to capture the feeling of Expressionism without meeting the criteria of time frame or as the Encyclopedia Britannica describes indoor settings.

In its effort to embody disturbed psychological states through decor, Caligari influenced enormously the UFA films that followed it and gave rise to the movement known as German Expressionism. The films of this movement were completely studio-made and often used distorted sets and lighting effects to create a highly subjective mood. They were primarily films of fantasy... (“Expressionist Film.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Accessed Feb 12, 2013.)

108

Ian Roberts introduces his definition of Expressionist film as such “Each of the films examined in this study (and many others besides), display many or most of these elements to a certain extent:” (Roberts, 7.) He then lists essentially all the definitions that various previous scholars and critics have suggested and combines them in one cohesive definition. The three qualifiers “display many,” “most” and “to a certain extent,” used in his introduction make it clear that there is no simple way to use the term Expressionism in regards to film.

Mike Budd argues that Caligari is not a truly Expressionist film because it follows conventional editing, and modes of story telling.1 And if Caligari, supposedly the epitome of Expressionist films is not an Expressionist film how can we continue to use the word “Expressionism” in regards to film?

If there were a version of Expressionism that stands up to time, it would be Willet’s third definition, listed below. It is compelling in part due to its vagueness that allows for diverse application, but it is not so vague as to suit anything. The key difference with the Oxford Reference’s term “anti-realist” is the use of “distortion,” which for me is a truer likeness to the films of the 1920s. Willet’s definition also allows for a personal interpretation that makes Expressionism, like the uncanny a relative term to the individual who uses it.

Particularly when the term is applied to the theatre and cinema, however, there is semantic confusion about the word Expressionism, succinctly analyzed by John Willett; the term, he explains, has varying meanings which “differ according to the context (and to some extent the country) in which they are used. Expressionism then is normally: 1. a family characteristic of modern German art, literature, music and theater, from the turn of the century to the present day; (In Willet’s case this is about 1970) 2. a particular modern German movement which lasted roughly between 1910 and 1922; 3. a quality of expressive emphasis and distortion which may be found in works of art of any people or period. (Willett quoted by David Robinson. Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari. London: BFI publishing in association with Palgrave Macmillan, 1997, 35.)

These definitions, while useful and versatile, do not describe a movement of art in a 5-10 year period. They are a mode of narrative that may have been born at the turn of the century, maybe even in the 1910- 1933 period, but what these more descriptive definitions have in common is a feel, an aesthetic, or maybe a mode of experience on the part of the viewer. They have an intangible sense of similarity, and have been grouped together under various titles, but they are not easily grouped under the title of “Expressionist Film Movement.” The same is not true of Expressionist art that seems to better fit the categories listed above. There is something unpinnable about Expressionist film, and perhaps related to the motion of film itself. Photography and film by extension has been conceived from the start as the most realist of all the art forms in existence. This is because of its capacity to capture just what there is without “interpretation.” This is of course not true either. The very framing of the shot implies choice and thus intension that plays into how something is photographed. However, it is not anti-realist by any stretch. In this way, Expressionism is just another false unifier for the films of the Weimar Republic.

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