1. The Setting

Weimar Germany and the Motion Picture

Weimar cinema, like Weimar culture in general, dates not from 1918 but from immediately before the war. Whether one examines the outstanding art films, the debate over the cinema’s social and political significance or the varieties of postwar cinema culture, the formative years were the last of the German empire. From about 1910 German film entered an era of rapid commercial, artistic and technical development. Over the next decade the cinema experienced unprecedented growth and acquired a position which would have shocked turn-of-the-century observers. Until shortly before the war most films came from abroad, catered to a predominantly lower class audience and appeared in a relatively few, unimposing theaters. One decade later they were produced in the main in Germany, boasted impressive cinematographic qualities, drew patrons from all social classes and were released in theaters which in number and style far surpassed the standards of pre-1914. By the beginning of the 1920s the cinema was not only the mass entertainment medium of the period but a booming industry and a novel art form.^[1]

The simplest and most revealing indicator of the cinema’s growing public role was a sharp increase in the number of motion picture theaters. In 1910 there were approximately 1,000 theaters in the Reich; two years later, 1,500; in 1914, 2,446; in 1919, 2,836.^[2] Although these figures conceal variations in size, luxury and program which mock the attempt to speak of a single cinema culture, they actually understate the extent of expansion. Theaters grew in size as well as number. In 1910 1,000 cinemas accommodated roughly 200,000 patrons; nine years later fewer than three times that number of theaters could seat almost five times as many viewers.^[3] Furthermore, among these were a growing number of movie palaces which symbolized the maturity and importance of the cinema in the subsequent decade. Clusters of downtown premiere cinemas appeared in major German cities, foremost among them the group along Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm running into the Tauentzienstrasse, where films premiered before Germany’s social and political elite.^[4]

Central to growth in the exhibition sector was the establishment of a substantial production base. Before 1914 German filmmaking remained relatively modest in scale.^[5] Estimates for the period 1905–1910 indicate that French, American, Italian and Scandinavian imports accounted for thirty, twenty-five, twenty and fifteen percent respectively of the movies released in Germany. Domestic output did not exceed ten percent of the home market. Nor did the immediate prewar theater boom find a full parallel in the production sector. In 1912–1913 the native share of the market still reached only thirteen percent.^[6] Precisely at this moment German cinema experienced the breakthrough from confectionary trade to art and big business. For historical convenience that transformation is often dated to the appearance in 1913 of two feature literary adaptations (Autorenfilme)—Der Andere and the original Paul Wegener version of Der Student von Prag—as well as the publication by Kurt Pinthus of Das Kinobuch, a collection of film treatments by young Expressionist authors. These milestones marked both the technical/industrial potential and the literary/intellectual resources which were to give Weimar cinema its distinctive face.^[7]

It was the war which spawned an independent German cinema, partly because it provided existing producers new opportunities, and more essentially because it finally mobilized the financial forces required to sustain large-scale production. In the first instance, declining output in France and Italy gave a crucial fillip to native production. This was accompanied in 1915 by a ban on import of foreign (chiefly French, British and Italian) films made since the outbreak of war. Then in February 1916 a comprehensive ban was imposed as part of a general tightening of import/export regulations, leaving import permission to a federal commissioner.^[8] By 1916 German films outnumbered imports by somewhat less than 2 : 1. Admittedly, this ratio concealed anomalies. Chief of these was the fact that the foremost “German” producer was still a foreign company. The Danish concern, Nordisk, largely filled the void left by the French and Americans and enjoyed a commanding position on the German market. Nordisk not only distributed in Germany but had its own production facilities and owned the largest chain of German theaters. So powerful was its position that it gained exemption from the import ban. Thus restriction of import provided a precondition but not a guarantee for the ascendancy of domestic producers.^[9]

More portentous than the removal of foreign film suppliers was the role of the war in impressing upon business and government leaders the untapped potential of film in propaganda for German cultural and industrial interests. The realization finally dawned that motion picture production could not only be profitable in its own right but was also indispensable to the selling of Germany and German products abroad. The skill with which Allied film propaganda blackened Germany’s worldwide reputation drove the lesson home. In the latter half of the war the creation of Deutsche Lichtbild Gesellschaft (DLG) and the better known and more ambitious Universum Film A.G. (UFA), introduced a new era in German film history. DLG owed its establishment to the director of Krupp, Alfred Hugenberg, and other leaders of heavy industry in the Ruhr of which he was the representative. It specialized in the production of short educational and advertising films which were to bolster the image of Germany and German industry.^[10] UFA proved the more significant creation, for it was to become the leading concern of the interwar period. It too originally aimed to counter Allied propaganda but very rapidly took the lead in general movie entertainment. Its capital base of twenty-five million marks towered over that of every other German firm. In it were united the interests of the government, of shipping, electrical and banking firms brought together by the director of the Deutsche Bank, Emil Georg von Stauss, and of the heretofore predominant Nordisk. From its inception UFA represented the same type of vertical integration, though on a grander scale, which had characterized the operations of Nordisk. Production, distribution and theater management were combined in one mammoth undertaking. All these features suggest what was made explicit in UFA’s initial press statement, namely, that the company saw itself as the advance guard of German film in postwar competition against the foreign firms which had previously dominated the German and international markets.^[11]

The third pivotal development in the decade before the founding of the Weimar Republic was the initial collision between the motion picture and interests representing literature, the theater, national virtue and public order. The early Autorenfilme and Das Kinobuch symbolized the breakthrough of the cinema as a serious art form. Authors, playwrights and performers began to recognize in film a new field of creative endeavor. The acceptance of film roles by such theatrical performers as Paul Wegener and Albert Bassermann lent credibility to the young medium. Simultaneously, however, the movies disturbed entrenched interests. Live theaters, varietés and pubs saw their existence jeopardized by cheap competition and launched petitions to limit the cinema’s expansion. More influential was a concerted campaign by the trustees of German Kultur to adapt the motion picture to their social and political purposes. Middle-class conservative pedagogues, clerics and jurists, the guardians of German moral and social probity, launched a “film reform movement” to tame this sensationalist, escapist and immoral form of entertainment.^[12] For the extremists among them this meant a blanket ban on all but educational films. More generally they sought supervision of the movies through censorship and state ownership. From their efforts emerged a prewar compromise—local censorship and entertainment taxes.^[13]

Immediately after 1918 the motion picture experienced a veritable Gründerzeit. Another boom in theater construction between 1918 and 1920 pushed the number of cinemas up from 2,299 to 3,731. With this explosion came growing numbers of elegant premiere theaters seating as many as 2,000 viewers, most notably in Berlin’s west end, which became institutions of the urban bourgeoisie.^[14] After 1920 there were slight setbacks but the long-term trend remained upward so that at the end of the decade Germany boasted over 5,000 movie theaters. Estimates of attendance at middecade vary widely, between slightly fewer than one million and two million persons daily, but even the lower figure implies that on average every German over 18 years of age went to the movies 6.6 times annually.^[15]

Domestic film production grew apace. UFA’s lead was felt immediately, even though it did not possess a numerically dominant share of German output. In 1918 UFA already controlled roughly one quarter of all the motion pictures distributed in Germany. It employed many leading German performers and directors, among them Henny Porten, Paul Wegener and Ernst Lubitsch, and it operated the largest chain of theaters.^[16] Nor did UFA’s impact extend only to the motion pictures it produced, distributed and exhibited. Like Nordisk it pioneered film’s breakthrough on German capital markets. The immediate postwar period witnessed the founding of the other major concerns which together led the German film industry in the 1920s: Emelka, Terra, Decla-Bioscop, Deulig (a reorganized DLG), and National. The common aim was concentration of capital and resources, which meant that banks were the prime movers behind these creations. At the same time, a host of smaller firms sprang up to exploit the seemingly endless demand for motion picture entertainment. The net result then of UFA’s appearance was not the monopoly which trade circles initially feared. In the distribution sector several firms (UFA, Emelka, National) were clearly dominant and in exhibition the large concerns controlled many of the prestigious cinemas, but lesser companies continued to thrive.^[17]

So fundamental was the transformation of the German film industry that by 1919 native firms were technically the sole suppliers of the domestic market. Although motion pictures continued to enter Germany from abroad, by any previous standard native producers had a well-sheltered and expanding market at their disposal. Moreover, with the growing and then precipitous decline of the German mark they could dump their output abroad in exchange for hard currency. The promise of fantastic foreign earnings, plus the natural barrier which inflation erected against foreign competition at home, lent this era its distinctive flavor. Hand in hand with commercial expansion went the filmic experimentation responsible for Weimar’s cinematic reputation. Expressionist films, chamber dramas which with a limited cast and minimal dialogue gave mimetic form to psychological conflicts, and historical pageants with imposing mass scenes enriched German production and thanks to foreign, not least American, applause, also quickly became Weimar’s self-assigned trademark.

Since many of the feature films from the early 1920s have perished, it is difficult to generalize accurately about German production values in this period. But there is no doubt that the hundreds of features produced in the inflationary period exhibited enormous variety. Immediately after the armistice so-called Aufklärungsfilme, pretending to warn the population of the dangers of vice and venereal disease while capitalizing on the abolition of censorship, earned notoriety. Detective and adventure films of uneven sophistication, romances and humorous subjects likewise flourished. Isolation from American suppliers even prompted German studios to produce ersatz westerns to quench the screen thirst for Karl May. All in all, despite uneven quality—inflation encouraged quick and inexpensive production for export—German output was both variegated and served a socially diverse and expanding clientele.

On the basis of all this evidence the historian can endorse the contemporary perception that the German cinema came of age at the end of the war. Contemporaries were awed by the whirlwind tempo at which casual amusement for the working classes became serious business and part of the nation’s culture.^[18] Historians have been impressed primarily by the qualitative achievements of a young industry. Both views are well founded, but neither does full justice to the position of film in Weimar culture. No amount of evidence detailing expansion and popularity can disguise the fact that the Kulturkampf over film which raged before the war did not end in 1918. Relations between cinema and various levels of state, cultural and artistic authority (or vested interest) remained unsettled. Moreover, even as rapid development spawned a substantial community of persons bound to the motion picture, it generated internal divisions over the cinema’s nature and purpose. For social, economic and political as well as artistic reasons, Weimar cinema displayed greater pluralism than homogeneity. Since external pressure at the point of contact with entrenched interests and internal strain arising from disagreement about the purpose of the medium created the Sitz im Leben for reception of American movies, both require elaboration.

State concern for the motion picture dated from its birth as a public medium, initially because it posed an extreme fire hazard. Very rapidly film began to cause anxiety for moral and social reasons. The suggestiveness both of film content and of the atmosphere in which it was shown became a point of complaint among middle-class guardians of German virtue. In the last years before the war the film reform movement sought to focus public attention on the dangers of movies, especially for German youth. While local authorities, usually the police, acted as censors, the reformers sought national measures governing censorship and permitting municipal takeover of movie theaters. Legislation embodying these proposals came before the Reichstag but was set aside under the circumstances of national mobilization. For the duration of hostilities Germany remained under martial law, giving regional military commanders ultimate authority over licensing and censorship. Tightening of control and a ban on imports went hand in hand with growing recognition of the vital propaganda and entertainment role of the cinema, witnessed by the cooperation of government and big business to found UFA.^[19]

The fall of the imperial regime and end of martial law seemed to portend a new era in the relationship between government and the cinema. But it very rapidly became apparent that the revolution had not transformed concerns or regulatory mechanisms. The attempt to do away with the Bismarckian state ended, ironically, in a motion picture law whose centralization and consistency fit the authoritarian image of the old regime. Ultimately the movie industry remained in the private sector and was regulated from without by two traditional expedients—taxation and censorship. State supervision throws into sharp relief the blend of respect and dismay with which official, middle-class Germany confronted the cinema.

Just three days after the proclamation of the Republic the temporary Council of People’s Representatives abolished all forms of censorship. Initial drafts of the Weimar constitution likewise rejected any infringement on freedom of expression. Yet as finally adopted the constitution included a rider (article 117) which permitted eventual censorship of film. Less than one year later (May 1920) a Motion Picture Law instituted nationwide censorship. Article 117 of the constitution and the law of May 1920 came from a National Assembly in which socialist and liberal-democratic deputies dominated. Both provisions also passed by overwhelming majorities. The usual explanation for the behavior of an assembly led by parties hostile to restrictions on freedom of expression cites the wave of “enlightenment” films about prostitution and venereal disease which appeared in the aftermath of the war. Ostensibly serving to educate and thus protect the public, these films exploited the subject material for such sensational effect that they prompted public protest.^[20] Although the Reichstag debates on the problem substantiate this interpretation—postwar social/moral decline concerned all parties—they also reveal assumptions about the power of the cinema which transcended worries about sexual explicitness.

The decision to include censorship provisions in the constitution was taken almost without debate, particularly on the part of the ruling parties. In the spring and summer of 1919 the National Assembly admittedly had many more pressing matters to settle than a brief clause authorizing some future arrangement for movies. Nonetheless, apparent absence of partisanship is striking. Two weeks before ratification of the constitution, article 117 prompted a brief exchange. The German Democratic Party (DDP) took the stand expected of liberals’ descendants, arguing that film censorship represented a throwback to the Metternich era and negated constitutional recognition of adulthood at age twenty. Independent Socialists (USPD), by now seriously disaffected by the use of Republican troops against striking workers, blamed current abuses on the profiteering of big business and demanded state intervention to curb it, advocating censorship only to protect minors. The German Nationalists (DNVP) echoed these sentiments towards capitalist manipulation of the cultural and moral standards of the German people but believed censorship an adequate solution to the problem. While right and left therefore made common cause, Majority Socialists (SPD) and the Catholic Center (Zentrum), the dominant parties in the assembly, silently accepted the reigning consensus.^[21]

The parliamentary discussion late in 1919 which preceded introduction of formal legislation underscored near unanimity on the need for action. That a Nationalist deputy who decried movies as a pestilence unleashed by unscrupulous capitalists won the applause of both the Center and the SPD gives a fair indication of the prevailing mood.^[22] While members forwarded a number of measures for consideration—licensing or outright communal ownership of cinemas and socialization of film production—the simplest one to agree upon was censorship. Attempts by the USPD and DDP to challenge this approach to the problem made little headway. To defend the cinema as an enormously important cultural advance and to question the practicality of censorship did little to dent the general opinion, prevalent even in their own ranks, that something had to be done, and immediately, to arrest the poisoning of German minds with filth and lies. Censorship not only had the advantage of familiarity, but it also skirted the larger economic and political issues raised by suggestions of socializing the industry or communalizing the cinemas. Following the path of least resistance, Erich Koch, the Democratic Minister of the Interior, adopted the nationalist cry that the issue was not political but moral. He promised a draft censorship law and possible restrictions on the expansion of motion picture theaters.^[23]

The sense of inevitability about censorship pervades debate which ensued on second reading of the bill in April 1920. Each party now had its spokesperson and sought to articulate a distinct position, but on essentials the consensus emerged stronger than ever. The DDP launched debate with the open admission that in this case a break with its cherished principle of free speech was unavoidable. Later the SPD followed suit, accepting “with heavy heart” the need for censorship even though it ran contrary to party philosophy. Similarly, while the USPD made another assault on the bill as evasion of socialization measures necessary in the production and exhibition sectors, it too preferred immediate action of some kind to a continuation of present circumstances.^[24] The other parties had minor criticisms of the bill but accepted it in principle. Consensus was so overwhelming that the spokesperson for the Center praised the agreement of deputies to limit debate so as to speed the enactment of the bill. Despite some sqabbling over details the Reichstag passed the final version rapidly and with only minor changes.^[25]

The National Motion Picture Law thereby enacted created two censorship boards, one in Berlin and one in Munich, and an appeal board located in Berlin. Films were to be reviewed by a five-person committee, a chairperson and four others. Representation was granted the film industry as well as pedagogues and cultural authorities. The appeal procedure was likewise handled by a mixed committee of experts. Although some disagreement surfaced over the composition and jurisdiction of these boards the greatest source of controversy was the crucial clause stipulating the grounds upon which the boards were to cut or ban motion pictures.^[26] Examination of this clause indicates that Germany’s political leaders were concerned not only with the corrosive influence of sexual explicitness. Any motion picture which would “endanger public order and security, offend religious sensibilities, have a brutalizing or immoral influence or compromise the German reputation or Germany’s relations with foreign states” was banned from German theaters. Moreover, persons under eighteen years of age were not to be admitted to any screening from which there was cause to fear a “harmful effect on the moral, spiritual or physical development or overstimulation of the imagination of young people.”^[27]

In retrospect, the outstanding feature of the final bill, as of the Reichstag debates, was the intense anxiety written between its lines on the part of Germany’s political and cultural leadership vis-à-vis the lower classes which constituted the bulk of moviegoers. Although sexual suggestiveness created the immediate offense, the origins of the law must be located in assumptions about the influence of the medium. In fact, the kernel of the motion picture law offers the most eloquent statement of contemporary fears about the persuasive powers of the cinema and the serious challenge it posed to the religious, social, moral and political status quo. To counter this challenge censors received a mandate comprehensive and flexible enough to cover any eventuality.^[28] That at the same time they were being handed a double-edged sword did not entirely escape the deputies intent on reforming German cinemas. Not by accident, the SPD spokesperson insisted that in no instance should political, social, religious, ethical or ideological opinions justify a ban. But the inclusion of a clause to this effect and the defeat of a Nationalist motion to ban films “fomenting class hatred” (i.e, advocating socialism!) could still not divorce the review process from politics. If censors had authority to protect public order and security their role could not but be political. As the USPD repeatedly warned, censorship reflected a desire for control rooted in politics and was inevitably susceptible to abuse.^[29]

If the heart of censorship legislation was fear of the cinema’s enormous power, the social group most threatened was German youth. Here partisan opinion vanished. The left sought a lowering of the age of majority from eighteen to sixteen, but agreed entirely that Germany’s young people were to be protected from moral contamination. The very general and universally applicable clause for restricting films did not leave much doubt about government intentions. Nor did the fact that the law overrode central control in this department, allowing local authorities to supercede the central boards to restrict films. Nor finally did censorship practice disappoint the framers of the legislation. Whereas censors banned a negligible number of films in the 1920s, they classified roughly one-third of the total for adults only.^[30] In this context it is not at all anomalous that such an unsparing critic of German officialdom as Kurt Tucholsky fully endorsed special protection for German youth. Protests from the film industry against this aspect of state paternalism proved futile.^[31]

The upshot then of postwar policy was not the extensive restructuring envisioned since before the war by film reformers. Although for a short period the Damocles sword of socialization and/or communalization hung over the industry, the outcome was a national motion picture law that the industry had considerable cause to welcome. The establishment in Berlin and Munich of central censorship boards spared producers the caprice of state or municipal authorities who, in the absence of federal control, had begun to exercise their own rights to censor movies. Furthermore, the new system provided representation and safeguards for film interests. One-quarter of the committee which classified films was to consist of delegates of the industry and adverse decisions could be appealed to a supreme censorship court. Apart from complaints about unfair scapegoating of the cinema by centering it out for systematic censorship, and notwithstanding a fitful campaign to have the age of majority lowered to sixteen, trade reactions to the new law were not uniformly hostile. Although disliked from opposing sides by advocates of freedom of expression and conservative film reformers, censorship represented a workable compromise.^[32]

Less a matter for national politics but equally revealing for the place of cinema in Germany was the second official expedient used to control the movies, the entertainment tax or Lustbarkeitssteuer. This, a prewar practice borrowed from regulation of circuses and other public amusements, was a surcharge imposed by the municipality on ticket prices. It fluctuated so widely from one locality to the next that any generalization about its severity is hazardous, but in the early 1920s it ranged in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty percent. In some cities it rose well above these values, however, and was blamed for bankrupting otherwise profitable cinemas.^[33] Even if city councils did not aim to strangle motion picture enterprise entirely, as theater owners charged, their taxation policies did reflect residual disdain or distrust for the motion picture paralleling the sentiments of Reichstag deputies.^[34] The provision for tax savings of up to fifty percent for films with artistic or educational merit confirmed the bias against dramatic or entertainment films.^[35] The motion picture lobby fought a lengthy, uphill battle for standardization and reduction of the entertainment tax. Needless to say, the loss of income—by its own reckoning this amounted in 1925 to roughly thirty-six million marks—rubbed salt in the wound caused by an official attitude for which film’s chief virtue lay in the tax revenue it generated.^[36]

State control over the cinema through censorship and taxes merits attention not as evidence of outside manipulation of film production but as testimony to a consensus which acted as a powerful internal constraint. Apart from decisions on restricted films, censors made relatively few controversial judgments. If in a handful of notorious rulings they became arbiters of Weimar’s political and social stalemate, they functioned primarily to reinforce tendencies built into the mass orientation of the medium. On the matter of taxation, loss of revenue obviously impacted the industry negatively, but it is idle to speculate about what German producers would have accomplished with an extra several million marks annually. The point is rather to emphasize the ambivalent position of cinema within Weimar culture as a whole. On the one hand, the motion picture had become in the space of a decade an industry giving work to tens of thousands and diversion and instruction to millions. Its power to entertain and influence found almost universal recognition. On the other hand, there were no guarantees that the diversion and instruction it offered would prove either harmless or beneficial. The speculative, profit-seeking character of the industry weighed heavily against it. Official Germany, not entirely certain how to cope with the new medium, adopted a policy of better safe than sorry. Fearing the unwashed heritage of the medium, the authorities devised a code which gave them virtually unlimited power over what German companies could produce or theaters exhibit and endorsed an entertainment tax which prevented the cinema from underbidding all other forms of amusement.

Censorship and tax policies indicate clearly what official Germany did not appreciate about the cinema. Their restrictive functions should not disguise, however, that both used negative means to forward a positive goal, namely, development of a cinema consonant with middle-class artistic, educational and moral standards.^[37] Since this purpose had its immediate roots in the film reform movement it can be judged, with some justification, as socially and politically reactionary, an expression of visceral hostility toward the plebeian roots and uncultured character of the medium from persons unwilling to enter the twentieth century. A prime case in point was the postwar report by the Popular Association for the Preservation of Decency and Good Morals in Cologne which damned ninety percent of all film releases as worthless or harmful.^[38] Behind this judgment, a match for the sharpest prewar polemics, lay deep-seated social and cultural bias against the motion picture. But the attitudes which it betrayed cannot be dismissed as the pettifogging of a morally fastidious fringe. Although extreme in formulation, it expressed sentiments which enjoyed wide currency in bourgeois Germany. These did more than is usually acknowledged to shape the contours of Weimar cinema culture.

Moral crusaders and state authorities played no active role in the production process. While the industry had no choice but to cooperate at one remove with the latter, it ridiculed and pretended to ignore the former as exponents of a dying world. Nonetheless, both carried tremendous indirect weight because their aspirations were those of the dominant groups in German society. Their desire to ennoble the movies, to fit them to a middle-class mold of sophistication, virtue and seriousness, impacted German producers in three ways. First, it demanded practical accommodation as a means of broadening and enlarging the domestic cinema audience. Second, it encouraged production eligible for tax relief and other forms of indulgence from local, provincial and national authorities. Third and most crucially, it corresponded to a need for legitimization and self-realization which existed within film circles. The drive to ennoble the cinema was not just imposed from without. Whether through literary adaptations, chamber drama, exploration of myth and legend, Expressionist devices or the later realism of Neue Sachlichkeit, Weimar’s film artists shared the aspirations of reformers to see the cinema realize possibilities beyond mass escapism. Indeed the unifying feature of that portion of Weimar cinema best remembered today was self-conscious striving for the embourgeoisement of the motion picture—even if in antibourgeois interest.^[39] This drive left an indelible mark on the production process and on the whole ambience of Weimar cinema culture, including the practice of film criticism which is crucial to this study.

Efforts by film reformers, censors and champions of film art to preserve bourgeois cultural hegemony and inherited artistic values reinforced the tendency for cinema to fracture along class lines. While Weimar did not entertain a strictly dualistic cinema culture, it did resist the democratic tendencies of the medium. One symptom of the differentiation which resulted, though scarcely unique to Germany, was the wide range of theater types. At one extreme, cinema entertainment rivaled opera or live theater in orchestration and dramatic impact, not to mention in admission price. Gala premieres in palatial theaters boasting big-budget movies, full orchestras and illustrated programs, attended by leading government and business personalities, lent the cinema respectability.^[40] At the other extreme, there still existed a moviegoing experience not far removed from the circus and vaudeville, offering a cheap source of laughter, tears and excitement: here pianos took the place of orchestras and luxurious furnishings gave way to a meeting hall decor.

Another indication of the varieties of cinema experience was the range of motion pictures produced in Germany. Historical interest has, of course, been heavily weighted toward a group of artistically pioneering motion pictures. Although informed contemporaries had a natural tendency to identify Weimar cinema with this select group of films, they knew that experimental works and artistic masterpieces did not dominate domestic production. More numerous and generally more popular were the sensationalist films of Harry Piel, light dramas of Helen Richter or the military farces and Rhein-Wein-Gesang films which fed provincial audiences.^[41] Equally noteworthy is that the line between high and low cinema culture remained fluid. Fritz Lang was a master of the potboiler, sometimes disguised as art; Henny Porten played in everything from serious chamber drama to sentimental family comedies; Erich Pommer produced a kaleidoscopic array of pretentious and unsophisticated entertainment. In the final analysis it is misleading to designate any one variant of domestic production normative.

Under these circumstances it is no surprise that contemporary opinion on the cinema exhibited multiple purposes and levels of seriousness. In the broadest sense of the term, the film press encompassed everything from advertising to philosophy. Closest to the former were illustrated theater programs, fan magazines, and company papers maintained by larger concerns such as UFA or Südfilm. At one remove, trade papers served the industry with news, film criticism and a forum for representation and debate of issues affecting the industry. Daily newspapers, both national and local, offered commercial news, criticism and feuilleton meditations on the medium. Select journals of art and culture included the motion picture within their purview as both an artistic and commercial phenomenon. In addition, miscellaneous publications ranging from dissertations to technical reports treated the economic, legal or political dimensions of the movies.

All of this material is relevant for what follows, but the most important category for evaluating Hollywood’s place in postwar Germany is motion picture criticism. Concentrated in Berlin, where it had the broadest audience and the greatest potential for impacting the production process, criticism became a small industry in its own right.^[42] Since it served multiple purposes and assumed diverse forms, and since it belongs to the larger complex of the relationship between film and the press, no brief survey can do it full justice. Institutionalized in the context of the industrialization and embourgeoisement of the cinema outlined above, it inevitably became caught between competing agendas for the cinema. The often bitter struggle to define legitimate criticism paralleled conflict over the balance of commercial and creative impulses appropriate to the medium.

Critical judgment on motion pictures juxtaposed the dominant public voice of the nineteenth century—the press—and the dominant public medium of the twentieth century—the moving picture.^[43] By the turn of the century the press served as the forum in which clerics and pedagogues catalogued film’s baneful influence on youth and the lower classes. Thereafter, apart from notices announcing movie programs, press treatment of the cinema remained spotty until the establishment of permanent theaters (1905) and the flowering of the film reform movement in the last years before the outbreak of war. Beginning in 1907 the first of the trade papers appeared, giving the branches of the industry a vehicle with which to present their views and counter the publishing crusade of the reformers. At the same time movie ads became part of the growing tie between film and newspapers. Shortly before 1914 film began to receive serious though selective treatment in the daily press and some magazines of art and culture.^[44] The apogee of the film reform movement, the appearance of the first Autorenfilme and the intense literary confrontation with the cinema documented by Anton Kaes and Heinz Heller placed the movies increasingly in the public eye as entertainment and as art.^[45]

Despite the deepening and inevitable tie between cinema and the press, relations were not altogether harmonious. As the upstart, the motion picture quickly recognized that the press had the power to do it great harm or great good. Film interests knew that without capturing press attention and sympathy there existed little chance of winning a broader audience. As a seminal prewar trade article put it, the press was the field upon which the battle between friends and foes of cinema would be decided.^[46] During the war, trade journals continued to invite informed, unprejudiced reportage of motion picture affairs in the German press and to exhort the industry to exploit opportunities for greater coverage. They recommended systematic cooperation in order to enhance the cinema’s prestige among the better public, to defend it against malicious attack from unbending opponents, including government, and to refine it as a national resource. Since public recognition represented the first priority of the industry, and since the key to that lay in the hands of the press, close collaboration was highly desirable. To encourage benevolent exposure on the widest possible front film companies began to establish news services and appoint press representatives to improve their public profile.^[47]

In the unfolding relationship between the cinema and the press film criticism came to occupy a pivotal role. The motion picture industry welcomed the attention which reviews provided and especially the dignity conferred by critical appraisal. To be ignored meant relegation to casual amusement; serious reviews lent motion pictures status comparable to opera or theater. However, the possibility of unsympathetic or uninformed reviews which masqueraded as earnest commentary created considerable ambivalence.^[48] Particularly troublesome was the inability of trade circles to pick and choose critical coverage. The right of unfettered criticism, to which even the industry had to pay lip service to maintain its pretensions to cultural worth, boomeranged all too frequently. Unlike statements about the cinema’s growing economic significance as an exporter or employer, critical commentary opened the field to rival opinions of culture and entertainment.

Although film circles could not monopolize opinion, trade journals provided an inherently friendly and prolific source of film reviews. By the 1920s a handful of trade papers had become firmly established. The oldest, Kinematograph, originated in Düsseldorf and was published there until May 1923 when it passed into the hands of Alfred Hugenberg’s Scherl Publishers and moved to the capital. The others all were native to Berlin, Lichtbildbühne appearing before the war, Der Film in the midst of it and Film-Kurier and Reichsfilmblatt immediately thereafter. Outside Berlin the Süddeutsche Filmzeitung (later Deutsche Filmzeitung) in Munich and Film-Journal of Hamburg enjoyed similar stability, though the latter of these eventually moved to Berlin. Apart from providing commentary on economic, political and artistic issues, technical news, and copious advertising space, they all published film reviews.^[49]

Trade reviews varied greatly in nature and quality depending on the specific clientele to which a journal was directed, the commercial ties between the paper and the industry, and, of course, the individuals responsible. While most trade papers professed to serve the entire film business, rather than one of its branches, differences still existed. For most of the decade Reichsfilmblatt represented independent cinema owners. Film-Kurier, at least in the 1920s, had pretensions to elevated status as a national newspaper serving the public as well as the specialist. Kinematograph, part of the Scherl concern from 1923, and after 1927 married through Hugenberg to UFA, had specific economic as well as political interests to defend. Lichtbildbühne was published by Karl Wolffsohn, an entrepreneur of enormous energies with wide-ranging film interests and financial ties to Ullstein publishers. It devoted considerable attention to the economic potential and international connections of the German cinema.^[50]

Despite their differences, trade papers ostensibly reviewed motion pictures to provide exhibitors a basis for determining which films to book. To this end Reichsfilmblatt and, in less systematic ways, other papers included box-office estimates with their critiques of plot, cinematography and acting. While this approach respected the commercial realities of filmmaking, it also betrayed proximity to the industry which was widely held to infringe critical objectivity. The nontrade critics often branded trade reviewers the servants of commercial interests and refused to take them seriously.^[51] These outsiders, concentrated in the second and even more voluminous source of critical opinion on the motion picture, the daily press, were, however, anything but uniformly disinterested.

Many newspapers treated motion pictures casually before the Weimar period, but it was in the course of the first half of the 1920s that they institutionalized film criticism. Numerous dailies introduced weekly film sections with general news and reviews. Even the stuffier bourgeois press deigned to make some space for film affairs. Nonetheless, variations in coverage and perspective were considerable. Some attempted to provide reviews of all new releases; others operated very selectively. A major premiere which merited a feuilleton article in one could elicit only a few lines in another. Since two large publishers, Scherl and Ullstein, had investments in cinema, it is also fanciful to assume newspaper critics necessarily enjoyed fewer commercial entanglements than their trade colleagues. To the third group of critics, those who published in independent journals of art and culture, newspaper reviewers were generally no less compromised.^[52]

This last source of critical opinion, much more select than the first two, includes the well-known left-wing weeklies, Das Tagebuch and Die Weltbühne, as well as more mainstream cultural journals such as Freie Deutsche Bühne (Das blaue Heft), Der Kunstwart, Die literarische Welt and Der Kritiker. Other literary or theatrical journals contributed to one or other aspect of the debate about cinema, but did not publish regular film reviews. Independent journals devoted to the motion picture—Der Bildwart, which served pedagogues and communal cinema organizations, Film und Volk, the mouthpiece of the socialist Volksverband für Filmkunst, and the nationalist Filmkünstler und Filmkunst—were few and generally short-lived.^[53] This has made the journals of art and culture which treated film systematically especially attractive as critical sources.

Paralleling the hierarchy of sources which reviewed motion pictures was a hierarchy of critics. At its top stood a handful of persons whose reputations have persisted—Herbert Ihering, Siegfried Kracauer, Willy Haas, Kurt Pinthus, Rudolf Arnheim, Lotte Eisner and Béla Balázs.^[54] Next to them can be ranged a group of prolific critics which includes Axel Eggebrecht, Hans Siemsen, Hans Sahl, Roland Schacht and Hans Pander, as well as the feuilleton scribes of the leading dailies, such as Fred Hildenbrandt (Berliner Tageblatt) or Curt Emmerich (Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung), who occasionally pontificated on the most important film releases. Taken together, the majority of these published either in the independent political-cultural journals (Pinthus in Das Tagebuch, Eggebrecht and Siemsen in Die Weltbühne, Schacht in Der Kunstwart and Das blaue Heft, Pander in Der Bildwart) or in newspapers of national stature (Kracauer in Frankfurter Zeitung, Ihering in Berliner Börsen-Courier), or freqently in both. There is therefore meaningful correlation between the quality usually assigned the source and the eminence of the individual responsible for reviews.

Within this select group persona and perspective can be related on the basis of substantial collections of critical material.^[55] Nonetheless, most of these writers are remembered less for their film reviews than for other pursuits. Herbert Ihering was first and foremost a theater critic; Kracauer was a sociologist and cultural critic of very catholic interests and only much later famous as a film historian and theorist; Willy Haas launched his journalistic career as a critic for Film-Kurier, became a screenwriter and then graduated to the editorial chair of the prestigious Literarische Welt; Balázs’s reputation hinges mainly on his work as a theorist and script writer; Pinthus is remembered as frequently for his association with literary Expressionism as with film. In sum, even the outstanding names of Weimar film criticism rarely derived their incomes and reputations exclusively or predominantly from this pursuit.^[56]

Beyond a score of prominent figures, most of whom could afford to treat film criticism as only one facet of their careers, there existed a large pool of critics for whom film was a way of life. Numbering dozens in Berlin alone, these ranged from the trade critics to the regular reviewers for newspapers and popular film magazines. Since keeping pace with the half-dozen or more releases which appeared each week during the premiere season strained the capacity of a single reviewer, trade journals and newspapers alike frequently had a lead critic who handled the most important premieres and a number of assistants to cope with the rest. According to the trade press, newspaper criticism suffered from this state of affairs because the individuals entrusted with reviews often proved woefully ignorant of film basics. Young, bottom-ranking or part-time reporters were assigned to cover premieres regardless of their knowledge of or interest in motion pictures. Fritz Olimsky, principal critic for the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, argued that early in the Weimar period no qualifications were demanded of the film journalist.^[57]

At a distance of six decades the more salient problem is that sheer numbers and rapid turnover blur personalities and approaches. Moreover, it is not always possible even to identify reviewers: some hid behind initials or pseudonyms and others provided no identification whatsoever for their work.^[58] Any investigation which penetrates beyond the circle of well-known critics therefore encounters either outright anonymity or a host of names whose only historical significance lies in their attachment to specific reviews. It also encounters an endless mass of criticism distinguished only by its lack of distinction. Small wonder that historians have generally ignored this material, considering it worthless except perhaps as testimony to the endless repetition which characterizes movie entertainment. Their indifference is doubly justified if one accepts the view that much of the film criticism from this period was tainted by financial pressure. Yet if the lack of personal profiles for many critics is frustrating, it is not sufficient reason to disregard a large body of opinion whose importance lies as much in its uniformity as in its peculiarities. For the purpose of establishing broad patterns of opinion, anonymity presents no insuperable obstacle.

Although generalizations about the majority of critics must be somewhat tentative, three fairly obvious ones can be ventured. The first is that critics belonged to the same generation as cinematography itself. As a rule they were born in the 1880s or 1890s and grew up alongside, if not in close association with, the movies. The reason for this is not hard to find. As a boom business in the troubled years right after the war, film attracted an assorted band of young employment seekers—writers as well as actors, technicians, extras and theater attendants. Film criticism provided an outlet for an educated stratum unable to find positions in traditional areas. A surprising number of doctorates turned up in a field which enjoyed almost no academic respectability at this point except on the fringes of economics and law.^[59] Conversely, for those without academic credentials, writing about motion pictures offered otherwise unobtainable opportunities. Entering a tight job market as the cinema expanded, they found a new avenue by which to enjoy status, however dubious, as writers or journalists.

The second generic feature one may identify follows directly from the first. By affiliating themselves with the movies, even if only in a critical capacity, these persons demonstrated allegiance to a cultural upstart. Certainly their interest in the cinema was mercenary, but there is ample evidence of broader commitment to a novel medium, one not yet encrusted by convention. This youthful, forward-looking dimension of the motion picture made it attractive to a generation in search of new cultural models.^[60]

The third point of note is that many critics served the motion picture industry in other capacities. Three prominent ones—Willy Haas, Béla Balázs and Axel Eggebrecht—simultaneously made names for themselves as screen authors. Also active in this dual respect were Bobby Lüthge, Julius Sternheim, Fritz Podehl, Hans Brennert, Ludwig Brauner and Erwin Gepard. Yet another group of critics functioned as press agents for leading firms, among them Fritz Olimsky, Hans Tintner, Kurt Mühsam and Axel Eggebrecht. This overlap of function has the historical advantage that critics were insiders or spokespersons for the industry, a fact of major importance when evaluating critical perceptions of Hollywood. It also, however, raises serious questions about the integrity of the critical process.

The contemporary controversy about film criticism revolved around two basic questions—evaluative paradigms and professional ethics. Both arose in the context of the motion picture’s uneasy balance between big business and cultural pretensions, between maximization of profit and pursuit of cultural respectability. Its practice necessarily reflected the tension between these goals. Film criticism had to justify itself against middle-class notions of art as autonomous, individual creation divorced from commerce and profit. To those deeply suspicious of cinema’s manipulation by financial interests and alienated by its plebeian roots, serious film criticism dignified the medium with a status it did not deserve.^[61] Their cynicism did not prevent the growing professionalization of film criticism, but it did contribute to its aims and principles. Some disagreement about emphasis and purpose was certainly inevitable. Whether reviews should focus on theme, acting and directing, or be preoccupied with cinematography, or address questions of public resonance, commercial prospects and political overtones: these are questions of approach which in any era allow room for debate. However, in Weimar Germany these issues became matters of principle which generated much acrimony. Trade critics charged their counterparts in the daily press and cultural journals with ignorance of the medium, application of lofty and irrelevant criteria and disregard for the commercial risks and responsibilities of the industry. The latter replied with accusations of inconsistency, whitewashing and outright corruption. At the heart of this feud lay not only differences of opinion but also confusion about the nature of the medium and unfair generalization. Although reviews in trade papers, the daily press and independent journals showed significant variations, these did not correspond neatly to stereotype. Trade critics did focus heavily on technical questions and box-office appeal, but they also systematically evaluated acting and directing with the artistic criteria they complained dominated newspaper criticism. The prominent theater critic, Herbert Ihering, identified in this the uncertainty of the industry about its cultural role. Wanting acceptance of cinema as a unique form of expression rather than a poor cousin to literature or theater, film experts demanded recognition of the industrial character of the medium, resisting measurement by critical standards from other media. Wanting simultaneously to impress with the motion picture’s sophistication they borrowed, for want of language of their own, categories pertinent to literature, art and live drama. Questions of psychological depth, plot development and dramatic conflict crowded out specifically filmic concerns such as pictorial rhythm or lighting effects. In short, the film industry welcomed the use of literary or theatrical paradigms when these flattered its productions; otherwise it demanded treatment as a commercial and technical medium.^[62]

Although the principle that cinema was a case sui generis would have received virtually universal assent, in critical practice, no party applied it consistently. No critic could escape the language and categories of other art forms in attempting to give the motion picture its aesthetic due. Trade critics were by no means the only ones to interchange critical standards to suit their purposes. Ihering himself tried to preserve a traditional understanding of the critical process while infusing it with paradigms appropriate to the motion picture. Just as in commercial concerns the trade press reached outside itself for recognized standards, nontrade critics had to appreciate the industrial character of cinema to write meaningful reviews. Consequently, distinctions between criticism in the trade press, dailies and journals of art and culture were anything but tidy.

Tension between the industrial, public and artistic dimensions of the medium plagued attempts to establish the parameters of motion picture criticism, but it also generated bitter polemics about professional ethics. Confrontation occurred at two levels, corporate and personal. The first of these involved the intimate relationship between publishers and the film industry, especially in the matter of advertising. The trade papers included extensive advertising sections, usually in excess of editorial information. They also received a variety of complimentary promotional material—photos, film synopses, premiere notices or articles on popular performers—from the film companies. Their reliance on income from advertising and the convenience of prepackaged news pressured them to trim reviews to avoid offending major producers and theater chains. Trade reviews therefore tended to be lame or bland, loaded with euphemisms to cover flaws, or indiscriminately effusive in a fashion better suited to advertising than criticism. Neither served the best interests of the industry in the long run, as the trade papers themselves repeatedly warned, but the pressure to temper criticism to safeguard their financial lifeline remained.^[63]

Trade papers relied most directly on industrial benevolence, but they were not alone in their commercial entanglements. Newspapers too had more than casual associations with the industry. As noted above, leading publishers had investments in film. More pervasively, movie advertising became a prime source of revenue for the daily press. There can be no doubt that the industry felt it paid for a certain measure of goodwill. For the marks it invested in advertising it expected critical respect. To what extent this colored the critical process became a subject of rancorous debate.

Although it is difficult to pinpoint editorial pressure on critics, the evidence for conflict and reprisals against the press when reviews failed to meet the expected standard of kindness is incontrovertible. Complaints to publishers from producers disturbed by the treatment of their products occasionally became public issues in which critics had the opportunity to make their opinions heard.^[64] Early in the decade critics in Berlin and Munich created professional associations, one of whose purposes was defense against the conflicting pressures of the industry and publishers.^[65] The extant UFA documents clearly demonstrate that their complaints were not unfounded. Under Hugenberg’s management UFA on several occasions threatened and acted to withdraw advertising contracts from both the trade press (Lichtbildbühne) and major newspapers (Ullstein and Mosse dailies) when its films or management came under attack.^[66] In early 1928 UFA’s board of directors approached the publisher of Der Film, Max Mathisson, over a review of Fritz Lang’s Spione which it believed employed inflated artistic criteria. Later that year, disgruntled with the state of film criticism, UFA decided to publish comparisons of public responses and critical practice in the United States and Germany to expose the subjective, unhelpful character of German film reviews.^[67]

Conflict between the industry and the press spilled over into feuds between the trade journals and between critics from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy. Disputes essentially concerned the charge of conflict of interest. Chief culprits were those who mixed critical functions with personal enrichment from the industry, principally trade journalists who wrote reviews with one hand and sold advertising contracts with the other. The most notorious of these was the motion picture mouthpiece of Scherl Publishers, Alfred Rosenthal (Aros), press agent, ad man and critic with outlets in Kinematograph and in the Hugenberg dailies. In 1927 he and Max Feige, editor of Der Film, were involved in a libel suit with the former editor-in-chief of Lichtbildbühne, Kurt Mühsam, over their practice of combining editorial and advertising work. For outsiders this case reinforced the conviction that corruption was rampant in the trade press.^[68]

Personal vendettas in the trade press highlighted a search for workable ethical norms which reached to the very top of the critical pyramid and bore directly on the ability of American companies to purchase benevolent treatment with advertising space and gratis promotional information. The nub of the controversy was the propriety of contributing in any fashion to the business of film while continuing to pursue critical activity. The association of critics in Berlin expressly excluded from membership those entertaining financial ties with any branch of the industry. But practice deviated substantially from principle. As already noted, some critics served the industry as press or advertising agents; some combined writing of reviews and editing of foreign films; others mixed authorship of reviews and screenplays.^[69] In the last instance, high personal profiles gave disagreements considerable prominence. The prime case in point involved two of Berlin’s outstanding critical voices, Willy Haas and Hans Siemsen. Haas, well known as a script writer for Die freudlose Gasse (1925), had early in his critical career articulated formal objections to reviews penned by nonexperts with general literary backgrounds. Only those with experience in the industry possessed the know-how to criticize effectively. To illustrate his point he chose the work of Hans Siemsen, an itinerant essayist and sometime film critic for Die Weltbühne. In his opinion Siemsen had a brilliant eye for the effects and impact of movies, but little sense for the possibilities of the medium because he lacked familiarity with the craft. His criticism was stillborn rather than creative or productive.^[70]

Haas’ plea for trained and informed reviewers represented the views of trade circles. But Haas was also vulnerable to charges of conflict of interest. As early as 1923 Ihering took him to task for combining critical work and screen writing.^[71] At middecade Siemsen touched off a sharp polemic by laying charges of corruption against the majority of film critics, maintaining that very few escaped compromise caused by overt or covert financial pressure.^[72] Siemsen insisted that reputable criticism had to maintain distance from the commercial interests of the cinema; Haas retorted that despite the dangers involved, critics had to be conversant with the technical and commercial interests of film. Failure to reconcile these positions was symptomatic of contemporary disputes about the boundaries of cinema as art, entertainment and big business.^[73]

Given undeniable conflicts of interest and possibilities for abuse it is not surprising that historians tend to adopt Siemsen’s position that the vast bulk of film criticism was tainted by proximity to the industry and turn to the independent journals as the repositories of disinterested commentary. None of these had advertising commitments which infringed on the freedom of expression allowed reviewers. Some of them printed film reviews despite indifference or antagonism toward the cinema on the part of their editors. Thus quite apart from their accessibility and commitment to film as art, they offer the promise of impartiality.^[74] It is not the case, however, that only a handful of financially unaffiliated periodicals in Berlin published serious film commentary. Generally speaking, the criticism of trade papers was conciliatory and not terribly discriminating, but exceptions were frequent and cannot be ignored. It is even more difficult to generalize about criticism in the daily press. It too was susceptible to commercial pressures and blended concern for profit, popular appeal and artistry. Hard evidence for reprisals against publications not sufficiently accommodating in their film reviews must be considered, but it should not lead to wholesale dismissal of criticism in publications which carried advertising. It is noteworthy that some companies continued to advertise even when their products received withering reviews, clear evidence that editorial policy retained its independence.^[75] Therefore, although the relationship between economic obligations and critical freedom was a troubled one, no tidy formula separates so-called independent critics, distinct and important as they were, from those subject to fear of editorial reprisal.

Varieties of cinema culture and controversy over film criticism inevitably raise one final consideration—the relationship between film and politics. Germany’s first republic is notorious for the acerbity of its political divisions in spheres as diverse as literature, architecture and theater. Evidence for politicization of Weimar cinema is also abundant from several perspectives. The Republic experienced a flood of patriotic military feature films and newsreels, plus nostalgic recreations of prewar German life which were at least implicitly anti-Republican.^[76] These were countered by several domestically produced features which pilloried the Republic from the other side, foremost among them Bert Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe and Piel Jutzi’s Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück, as well as by release of the outstanding Soviet revolutionary films. Government investments in the motion picture industry were controversial with UFA and provoked major scandal in the later case of Phoebus Film Company. Notorious censorship cases over such releases as Battleship Potemkin and All Quiet on the Western Front embroiled government and political parties in lengthy battles to control the political influence of the medium.^[77]

While the cinema certainly participated in Weimar’s political passions, it is crucial to delimit the precise nature of that participation. The takeover of UFA by Alfred Hugenberg and associates in 1927, probably the most notorious example of political infiltration in this period, provides some guidance in this regard. Control of UFA, the country’s largest production, distribution and exhibition company, promised the nationalist right a forum from which to lead the anti-Republican campaign in the last years of Weimar. The takeover also coincided with what the most thorough study to date of politics and Weimar film argues was the onset of polarization in the cinema.^[78] Whether Hugenberg’s production policies can be blamed for these developments remains debatable. The Republican and left-wing press cried foul when the nationalists took over, but UFA had not, of course, been a paragon of Republican virtue, not to mention a friend of socialism, before Hugenberg assumed control. Moreover, anyone with the slightest familiarity with motion picture affairs knew that Hugenberg rescued a company mired in financial woes since 1925. In 1926, after American subventions had been accepted to keep the company afloat, UFA appeared about to become a branch operation of Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn. One did not have to appreciate Hugenberg’s politics to gain some satisfaction from seeing the company kept in German hands. The cognoscenti also realized that as the pilot of a salvage operation, Hugenberg had immediate economic concerns to address. He enjoyed little freedom of maneuver to push a political program. None of this meant that Hugenberg could be absolved of political intentions, but it did signify that other considerations intruded.^[79]

The economic imperative faced by Alfred Hugenberg confronted the industry as a whole and indicates the principal reason it handled politics very gingerly. The film industry repeatedly proclaimed its political neutrality, insisting that because the movies provided mass entertainment they had no business (literally) taking sides.^[80] Although one can scarcely take these protestations at face value, they honestly reflect the commercial pressure to maintain a “neutral” position likely to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Weimar’s deep political antagonisms reinforced rather than eroded this pressure. An enterprise devoted to the maximization of profit could not afford to alienate large segments of the population.^[81] Walter Laqueur’s generalization that film was funded from right of center but made by those left of center, and that films themselves consistently endorsed the socioeconomic status quo, is a roundabout way of saying that the industry generally minimized or camouflaged politics. Incentive to avoid themes or treatments which would limit in advance the audience to which they spoke was reinforced by censorship, the instrument of status quo par excellence. It is possible to identify several dozen feature films with express partisan intent and many more with political overtones. It is also possible to agree with Hans Siemsen’s judgment that all motion pictures, indeed all art, are political in the broad sense of assuming positions on fundamental human questions, even if only by refusing to face them. Yet this is a truism, rather than a guide to analysis. Weimar filmmakers were under economic and legal obligation to find that elusive middle ground where shared values camouflaged ever-present class and ideological differences.^[82]

What can be said about the production and marketing of motion pictures applies in broad terms to critical opinion. Weimar had a rich and politically diverse press. Although depth of cinema coverage varied somewhat according to political affiliation, publications of all political persuasions—communist, socialist, democratic, catholic and nationalist—treated film to some extent. Political preferences did play a role in determining which movies were reviewed and which ignored, particularly on the extremes of left and right where coverage thinned noticeably. These preferences emerged clearly in collisions over specific motion pictures, nationalist or socially progressive. Moreover, what passed as harmless amusement on the right or among democratic reviewers not infrequently roused the ire of the left for its refusal to deal honestly with socioeconomic reality. Thus reactions to motion pictures from conflicting political sources offer noteworthy and hardly surprising contrasts.^[83]

Those looking for political polemics in Weimar film criticism can readily find them. The question is whether political allegiance provides the key to the bulk of critical commentary. The practice of treating film in its technical and aesthetic rather than social-economic or political dimensions predominated in the bourgeois press but did not stop there. Socialist and communist sources also indulged in it. Critics did not shed their political preferences, but nor did they always follow them. Open opponents of the Soviet system acknowledged the provocative power of its motion picture production, while outspoken enemies of capitalism confessed admiration for some works which made romantic lies out of the social question. Anyone seeking hard and fast correspondence between political affiliation and the judgment passed on the broad mass of entertainment films is bound to be disappointed. What can be discerned are patterns of response which characterized political extremes, especially toward select types of films. Therefore while it is certainly impossible to understand the Weimar cinema with the party politics left out, these were not normally the point of departure for critical opinion, at least not until the latter years of the Republic when the cinema became increasingly politicized.^[84]

This brief survey of motion picture expansion and film criticism suggests some of the complexities of Weimar cinema. Just to list its generic characteristics is to indicate the paradoxes and tensions which it embodied. It was at once the child of modern technology, the first mode of entertainment to acquire mass appeal, a portentous means of public persuasion, a novel art form, and last, but certainly not least, big business. To this congeries of meanings must be added the paradox that although rooted in a national context, cinema was decidedly international in distribution and impact.

Controversies surrounding motion picture criticism were deeply rooted in contemporary uncertainty about how to accommodate the new medium. Although neither peculiar to Germany nor to that period, they were acute in a society fragmented by cultural differences. Critics belonged to one segment of this society and acted as mediators between the industry and its consumers. In this respect they sat at the center of the Weimar debate over the relationship between art, technology, commerce and society. How they settled accounts with Hollywood was inextricably linked to the broader problem of their cultural role.

Notes