Weimar Culture by Peter Gay

Author:Peter Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

V / THE REVOLT OF THE SON:

Expressionist Years

I

Next to the Bauhaus, probably the most celebrated artifact of the Weimar Republic was a film released in Berlin in February 1920, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. “There it was,” Willy Haas wrote later, “that uncanny, demonic, cruel, ‘Gothic’ Germany.”1 With its nightmarish plot, its Expressionist sets, its murky atmosphere, Caligari continues to embody the Weimar spirit to posterity as palpably as Gropius’ buildings, Kandinsky’s abstractions, Grosz’s cartoons, and Marlene Dietrich’s legs. It is a film that fully deserves its immortality, an experiment that fathered a rash of other experiments. But Caligari, decisive for the history of the film, is also instructive for the history of Weimar, especially in its early, Expressionist years. There was more at stake here than a strange script or novelties in lighting.

Later, in American exile, the German writer and film critic Siegfried Kracauer reported the history of Caligari in authoritative detail. This is what happened: shortly after the war, two young men, the Czech Hans Janowitz and the Austrian Carl Mayer met, naturally enough in Berlin, and became close friends. They were both talented, fascinated with Expressionism, filled with horror at the war that had just ended, and eager to persuade others of their pacifist views. They wrote a story compounded of their own nocturnal experiences, their despair at the war, and their imagination, the story of the mad, powerful Dr. Caligari, who exhibits his somnambulist, Cesare, at fairs. Wherever Caligari goes, death follows: an official who has snubbed him is found dead, and when one of two young students questions Cesare about the future, Cesare predicts, correctly, that he will die at dawn. Francis, the surviving student, seeks to solve the mystery; he creeps to Caligari’s wagon and is relieved to see what seems to be Cesare asleep in a box. But while Francis is at the fairground, Cesare has actually gone to kidnap Jane, Francis’ girl, and carried her off. Pursued across steep hills and eerie viaducts, Cesare drops the girl and dies. Now the police examine Cesare’s box and discover that it contains a dummy. The truth is becoming obvious: the hypnotized Cesare had been committing crimes at his master’s bidding, walking the streets while a dummy takes his place at night. Caligari eludes arrest and takes refuge in an insane asylum. Here, where Francis has followed him, another revelation awaits the pursuer: the mad hypnotist and the director of the asylum are the same man. While Caligari sleeps, Francis and the police study his records and discover the inner connection of things: the director had become fascinated by the account of an eighteenth-century mountebank named Dr. Caligari who had induced his medium, Cesare, to commit murder; fascination had turned to obsession, and so he experimented with a somnambulist in the asylum in the Caligari manner. When Francis tries to wring a confession from the director by showing him Cesare’s corpse, the modern Caligari loses all control, and is restrained only by being put into a strait jacket—the very emblem of the institution he had headed and so insanely betrayed.

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