The German cinema of the 1920s is generally pigeon-holed as part of the culture of the Weimar Republic (1919-33). And because Weimar culture -- described variously as 'radical', 'lively', and 'decadent' -- is seen, along with the republic's unstable political institutions, as paving the way for the Nazism which followed, it is not surprising that the German silent cinema has been saddled with a dubious reputation. Two famous books, Lotte Eisner's _The Haunted Screen_ and Siegfried Kracauer's _From Caligari to Hitler_, each in different ways explore the connections between German cinema of the 1920s, the culture of the Weimar Republic, and emergent Nazism. Kracauer's was first published in New York in 1947, Eisner's in Paris (under the title …show more content…
Together they have helped to form what Thomas Elsaesser in his long awaited _Weimar Cinema and After_ calls the 'historical imaginary' of German cinema. There are in fact many other ways in which one might conceptualise German cinema of the pre-Nazi period. It was for example industrially the strongest cinema in Europe and the only one with the potential to compete with Hollywood in either the domestic or the international marketplace. It was also an aesthetically distinct cinema which had succumbed less than most to what Tom Gunning has called narrative integration. German films of the 1920s were often in a pure sense spectacular; they defied realist convention even when they aimed at psychological truth; and they preserved many elements of what Gunning saw as characterising cinema prior to the rise to dominance of the integrationist mode, the fairground values of the …show more content…
But easier said than done. Even if we did not already have Kracauer or Eisner to guide our thinking, the brute fact of Nazism, interposed between us and the world of _Caligari_, _Metropolis_ or _Pandora's Box_, makes a virgin vision impossible. We must accept that German cinema lives in the contemporary mind in a historically shaped imaginary form. No critic can write about German cinema, no composer can prepare a new score to accompany a German silent film, without retrospect cutting in to influence how they do it.

The first great merit of Elsaesser's _Weimar Cinema and After_ is that it recognises this fundamental fact. Elsaesser himself wishes to present German cinema differently -- among other things as a canny and self-conscious commercial business. But he knows that in order to make his alternative vision carry conviction he must first explore the conditions that have led to the popular picture of German cinema as precursor of the Nazi