Until recently the student seeking to understand Weimar cinema would begin by reading the classic texts, namely Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen. The former put forward the theory that Weimar film prefigured the Third Reich while the latter posited that German Romanticism and Expressionism were the keys necessary for understanding the genre. Shell Shock Cinema will take its place beside these works, if indeed it does not displace them. In this brilliant new study, Anton Kaes argues that the horrors of World War I provide the red thread that runs through films as diverse as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Nibelungen, and Metropolis.
This five-chapter book begins with a discussion of now-obscure World War I films. In presenting Toward the Light, a propaganda film about a soldier's hysterical blindness, Kaes launches into a discussion of then contemporary theories of traumatic neurosis. He concludes with the idea that because modern war was so disjointed an experience, realistic film would have to collapse in its face. This idea segues into the next chapter, in which he argues that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is, with its abandonment of realism and emphasis on neurosis and psychiatry, perhaps the ultimate war film.
The second chapter, essentially an extended analysis of Caligari, starts by presenting a trial—in which Sigmund Freud was called as a witness—that centered on whether certain psychiatric treatments were criminal. What were acceptable treatment norms? Who, indeed, was mad? Caligari rehearsed the same issues. Kaes discusses Caligari in reference to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which argued that trauma was a “violent rupture that breaks the protective shield normally insulating a subject from excessive excitation” (p. 51). In his argument, Kaes posits that Caligari did not show war, but rather, “the conditions under which it functions” (p. 75). Rather than engaging in the old debate of whether Caligari sought to support or undermine authority, Kaes concludes that its aesthetic rupture was the consequence of the war itself.
Chapter three moves to a discussion of Nosferatu, which Kaes sees as an allegory for the generation of 1914. A young, naïve man sent east by his elders returns thoroughly traumatized. At the meta-level, the experiences rehearsed in the film (sleeping in dirt, burial of the living, rat infestation) mirror those of the front generation. In his view, the mass death (both in the film and in the war) demanded mass mourning. Toward the chapter's conclusion, Kaes asks whether Ellen's fate was an allegory of the home front and its exorcising the shadow of the war, or whether the undead represented the “war's enduring power to haunt the living” (p. 127). This question moves nicely into the next two chapters, which focus on two films by Fritz Lang, The Nibelungen and Metropolis. Kaes views the former as focusing on the recovery of a traumatic past and the latter as representing a right-wing quest for organic wholeness in a culturally industrial world.
These two chapters look at films that on the face of it could not be more different in scope. The Nibelungen, in Kaes's estimation, reinterprets the war as the ultimate national myth. Perhaps this is in spite of its problematic ending, which seems to be predicated on the idea of a nation doomed to a catastrophic ending; perhaps it is because of it. Metropolis, on the other hand, seemed to rework the right-wing belief that the newly emergent industrial society and culture caused or at least prefigured the war. Once again to paraphrase Kaes, The Nibelungen questioned the nature of diplomacy and mass murder while Metropolis looked at the dangers inherent in modernity. Although they are set in radically different eras, they were both quite contemporary.
Anton Kaes has given readers a radically different, and quite convincing, way to think about Weimar-era film. Few if any scholars will approach the subject the same way again. If this were not enough, the book contains a list of Weimar cinema available for purchase on DVD. This will be a boon for anybody seeking to build their university's film collection. The book's production values are also of the highest order. In short, this work is a model of its kind.
