Abstract
Jewish modernization in Germany, and its influence on both German and Jewish thought, politics, and culture, has fascinated generations of scholars.1 In depicting the nature of Jewish integration in modern Germany, scholars have traditionally oscillated between portrayals of “symbiotic” and “submissive” relationships, differing primarily in their answer to the question whether Jews contributed qua Jews to the German public discourse, or rather relinquished their particularities in the process of assimilation.2 Current studies have pointed out, however, that both of these paradigms presuppose a “wrong and ahistorical” notion of authentic and recognizably different Jewish and German cultural identities.3 Recent scholarship on Jewish experience in modern Germany has therefore advocated a shift of emphasis from its national and religious tensions to its social practices. Consequently, these studies accentuate the roles of non-national —or transnational—contexts in shaping the modern German Jewish experience. Rather than searching for the influences of the autochthonous Jewish culture and the transformation it underwent as a result of Jewish assimilation in Germany, scholars have shifted their focus to the process of Jewish integration within the educated middle class in the German cities.4 Underscoring its bourgeois context, many scholars have come to regard the absorption of bourgeois values and norms as a key component of the modern Jewish experience.
Jewry fulfills its contemporary assignment to reestablish the provisional [by being] the best critic, the funniest satirist, the most radical Communist, the most competent journalist, the most hilarious literary improviser, glossator, Frondeur, a master of Aperçu.
—Willy Haas, “Juden in der Deutschen Literatur”
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Notes
Jacob Katz famously asserted that it was a subject of “unique fascination,” which has “elicited an almost morbid curiosity” among historians. See Jacob Katz, “The Unique Fascination of German-Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 9:2 (1989): 141–150, here 142.
See also survey in Shulamit Volkov, The Magic Circle: Germans, Jews and Antisemites (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002), 11–73.
For discussion of “symbiosis” vis-à-vis assimilation, see, for instance, Gershom Scholem, “Against the Myth of German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Shocken Books, 1976), 61–64;
Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiosis: Germans and Jews after Auschwitz,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 251–261, here 251–252;
Enzo Traverso, The Jews & Germany (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995);
Manfred Voigt, Die deutsch-jüdische Symbiose. Zwischen deutschem Sonderweg und Idee Europa (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006);
Jack Zipes, “The Negative German Jewish Symbiosis,” in Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, ed. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 144–154;
Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialectic of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies 1:2 (Winter 1995): 1–14, here 10;
Steven E. Aschheim, “German History and German Jewry: Boundaries, Junctions and Interdependence,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLIII (1998): 315–323, here 320–321;
Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity,” LBI Yearbook XLI (1996): 292–308, here 295.
Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007);
Marion A. Kaplan (ed.), Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 173–269. Notably, scholars’ emphasis on the experiences of Jewish integration within the bourgeoisie does not imply an unambiguous process of assimilation. The encounter with the urban bourgeoisie also instigated a revival of Jewish national culture and attempts at dissimilation.
For instance: Shulamit Volkov, “The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985), 195–211;
Jacob Borut, New Spirit among our Brothers in Ashkenaz (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999);
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2004).
George Mosse indicated the fundamental role of Bildung as a leading ethos in the process of Jewish modernization. Simone Lässig notes that in practice the ethos of Bildung implied a certain behavior, appearance, and aesthetic preferences, which had little to do with a homogeneous “German” national culture. George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985);
Simone Lässig, “Bildung als kulturelles Kapital? Jüdische Schulprojekte in der Frühphase der Emanzipation,” in Juden—Bürger—Deutsche, ed. Andreas Gotzmann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 263–298, here 264. The concept of Bildung itself, as well as the notion of German liberalism, comprised various layers, dualities, and even contradictions. Jewish participation in this cultural and intellectual development encapsulated its multifaceted nature.
See, for instance, Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and bourgeois culture in Germany, 1800–1870 (Bloomington: IU Press, 2006), 19–73;
Nils H. Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-century Germany (Madison: UW Press, 2005), 3–14.
Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1948–1933 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), especially 324–237;
Jost Hermand, Judentum und deutsche Kultur. Beispiele einer smerzhaften Symbiose (Köln: Böhlau, 1996); Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism, 17.
David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 107ff.
The term Bildungsbürgertum has been in use since the early years of the Weimar Republic. For a nuanced definition, see: Jonathan Sperber, “Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and its Sociocultural World,” Journal of Modern History 69:2 (1997): 271–297.
The dominant role of Jews in the modern performing arts in the Western world has fascinated numerous critics who reflected on the “essential” link between Judaism and acting. James L. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 74–75;
Ahuva Belkin, “The ‘Low’ Culture of the Purimshpil,” in Yiddish Theater: New Approaches, ed. Joel Berkowitz (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003), 29–43;
Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 7–8. As the discussion in chapter two demonstrates, in modern Germany such a link had been related mostly to the particular experience of Jewish urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Steven E. Aschheim, “Reflections on Theatricality, Identity and the Modern Jewish Experience,” in Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, ed. Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem (University of Iowa Press, 2010), 21–38;
Galili Shahar, Theatrum judaicum (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007);
Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, “Schrittmacher der Moderne? Der Beitrag des Judentums zum deutschen Theater zwischen 1848 und 1933,” in Deutsche Juden und die Moderne, ed. Shulamit Volkov (München: Oldenburg Verlag, 1994), 39–56.
The association of theater and the Bildung tradition has been underlined by early scholars of the German theater. For instance, Max Martersteig, Das deutsche Theater im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1904), 95–104.
This label indicated the nonproportionately high amount of Jews in theater-related professions (as actors, playwright, stage-designers, and directors), especially in realms such as the revue theater and the cabaret, as well as in groundbreaking modernist genres. Anat Feinberg, “Stagestruck: Jewish Attitudes to the Theatre in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, 59–76; Galili Shahar, “The Jewish Actor and the Theatre of Modernism in Germany,” Theatre Research International 29:3 (2004): 216–231.
Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 125–280.
My definition if “Jewish” filmmakers and critics relates to their (ethnic/religious) Jewish ancestry and family history, regardless of the varying importance they attached to it (a similar definition was suggested by Gustav Krojanker in 1922, when he addressed the problematic definition of “Jews” as authors of “German” literature: Gustav Krojanker, Juden in der deutschen Literatur (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1922), 10–11. Of course, such a reference to “German-Jews” has an artificial dimension. Jewish identity in modern Germany had various different meanings for different social groups and in different time periods. The exclusive opposition of “Jews” and (“Aryan”) “Germans,” which had been resonated in modern anti-Semitic (and some nationalist Jewish) circles, was hardly self-evident in pre-1933 Germany.
See, for instance, Marion A. Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5–6;
Moshe Zimmermann, Deutsche gegen Deutsche (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2008).
Peter Gay has famously labeled Weimar culture as a realm where social “outsiders” became part of mainstream culture: Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968. Indeed, the role of Jewish individuals in Weimar film industry can be seen as a radical case of this general phenomenon. But, beyond this participation of “outsiders” in the mainstream culture, the following chapters suggest that Jewish filmmakers transformed the desires, hopes, and anxieties of the “outsiders” into popular tropes, associated with the sentiments of the (bourgeois) spectators in general.
A good indication of the extensive role played by Jews in Weimar cinema is found in Helmut Asper’s estimation that some 20 percent of the employees in the local film industry had to leave Germany after the Nazi takeover (many of whom, but not all, were forced out to escape racial persecution): Helmut G. Asper, “Film,” in Handbuch der deutschsprachige Emigration 1933–1945, ed. Claus Dieter Krohn, Patrick von zur Mühlen, Gerhard Paul, and Lutz Winckler (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998), 957–970, here 957. More important than the numbers, of course, is the prominent positions held by Jewish filmmakers, producers, and critics between 1918 and 1933.
Prawer’s Between Two Worlds provides us with the richest and most intriguing survey of Jewish participation in Central European filmmaking up to date: Siegbert S. Prawer, Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).
See also, Frank Stern, “The Two way Ticket to Hollywood and the Master Image of 20th Century Modernism,” in Placeless Topographies: Jewish Perspectives on the Literature of Exile, ed. Bernhard Greiner (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003), 203–225. The numbers and prominence of Jews in Weimar cinema were never fully documented. The incomplete lists of names that have been gathered by Weimar contemporaries appear to substantiate the incomparable role of Jews in the German film industry.
See, for instance: Rudolf Arnheim, “Film,” in Juden im deutschen Kulturbereich, ed. Siegmund Kaznelson (Berlin: Max Lichtwitz, 1962), 220–241;
Hans Feld, “Jews in the Development of the German Film Industry: Note from the Recollections of a Berlin Film Critic,” LBI Year Book XXVII (1982): 337–368. Jews’ contribution to the German film industry started even before World War I, with prominent figures such as the producer Paul Davidson and the director Max Mack (born Moritz Myrthenzweig).
See Michael Wedel, “Haltung und Unterhaltung,” in Pioniere in Celluloid: Juden in der frühen Filmwelt, ed. Irene Stratenwerth and Hermann Simon (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004), 27–35;
Thomas Elsaesser, “Introduction,” in A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decade, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 24–25.
See, for instance, the choices for the defining “national” films of the Weimar years in Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 26–58;
Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After (New York: Routledge, 2000).
Walter Kaul, “Richard Oswald, die Aufklärungswelle vor 50 Jahren—und mehr,” in Richard Oswald, ed. Walter Kaul and Robert G. Scheuer (Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek, 1970), 7–17; Prawer, Between Two Worlds, 209;
Richard W. McCormick, “Coming out of the Uniform: Political and Sexual Emancipation in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform,” in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Noah W. Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 271–290. See discussion in chapter four.
These films were also favorably compared with the contemporary grand productions of Hollywood. Sabine Hake, Passion and Deception: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 114–138.
Karen Phela, “Joe May und seine Detektive. Der Serienfilm als Kinoerlebnis,” in Joe May. Regisseur und Produzent, ed. Hans-Michael Bock and Claudia Lanssen (München: Text+Kritik, 1991), 61–72, here 68–69. See discussion in chapter five.
We still lack a comprehensive study on this inventive cameraman and his influence on the visual imagery of many acclaimed films of the Weimar era. Karl Freund’s role is documented in studies dedicated to distinguished filmmakers who exploited his expertise and to distinguished films he shot. For instance, Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann (eds.), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear (Rochester: Camden House, 2000);
Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 59–88.
Lerski’s works as a cinematographer complemented and extended his powerful photography. See discussion in: Helmar Lerski, Ute Eskildsen, and Jan-Christopher Horak, Helmar Lerski, Lichtbildner. Fotografien und Filme, 1910–1947 (Essen: Museum Folkwang, 1982). After 1933 he directed a couple of Zionist films in Palestine: Awoda (1935) and Adamah (1948).
Ursula Hardt, From Caligari to California (New York: Berghahn Books, 1996), 31–93;
Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 29–202.
For instance, Erika Wottrich, M wie Nebenzahl: Nero-Filmproduktion zwischen Europa und Hollywood (München: Text+Kritik, 2002). With one exception, all the films discussed in Noah Isenberg’s recently published collection of the “classic” films of the Weimar Republic had Jewish producers, such as Erich Pommer, Seymour Nebenzahl, and Paul Davidson (the exception, Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, was written by three scriptwriters, two of whom were ethnically Jewish).
See discussion in Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 107–129.
On Balázs’s thought and contribution to film theory, see Erica Carter, Béla Balázs’ Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film (New York: Berghahn, 2010);
and Jack Zipes, “Béla Balázs, the Homeless Wanderer, or, The Man Who Sought to Become One with the World,” in The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales, ed. Béla Balázs and Jack Zipes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–57.
Abraham Myerson and Isaac Goldberg, The German Jew: His Share in Modern Culture (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1933), 158.
Urban Gad, Der Film. Seine Mittel—seine Ziele (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1921), 274.
Helmut Prinzler reports that in 1926 more than 330 million tickets were sold in Germany. See Helmut Prinzler, Chronik des deutschen Films, 1895–1994 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 73.
As Christian Rogowski notes, in the mid-1920s “Germans were four or five times more likely to go to the cinema [each year] than in 2007.” Christian Rogowski, “Introduction: Images and Imaginaries,” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, ed. Christian Rogowski (Woodbridge: Camden House, 2010), 1–12, here 11, footnote 2.
Curt Wesse, Grossmacht Film. Das Geschöpf von Kunst und Technik (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1928), 14–17.
Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 20–24.
On the audience of the early German film, see Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino. Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Jena: Diederich, 1914), 58–88; and Martin Loiperdinger, “The Kaiser’s Cinema: An Archeology of Attitudes and Audiences,” A Second Life, 44.
On the easy infiltration of German Jews into the popular entertainment industry, as opposed to the “legitimate” traditional theater, see: Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 7–9; Hans-Joachim Neubauer, Judenfiguren: Drama und Theater im fruhhen 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1994). Brooks McNamara has suggested that the evident Jewish presence in American popular culture had its origins in a similar cultural phenomenon, namely, the channeling of newcomer artists to the “lowbrow” realms: Jewish immigration to the United States coincided with the emergence of popular culture, in the same way that Jewish participation in German popular culture went hand in hand with the rise of urban entertainment.
Brooks McNamara and Shubert Archive, The Shuberts of Broadway (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
See, for instance, Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 48–49;
George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 22–23;
Hillel J. Kieval, “Anti-Semitism and the City: A Beginner’s Guide,” in People of the City, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–18.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–252, here 222, 250.
According to Benjamin, film was “the art form that reacts to the profound changes in people’s perception.” A similar point was made by Kurt Pinthus in 1914. Kurt Pinthus, “Das Kinostück. Ernste Einleitung für Vor- und Nachdenkliche,” in Das Kinobuch, ed. Kurt Pinthus and Richard Bermann (Leipzig: Schifferli, 1914), 9.
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1991): 56–62;
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
Several critics commented in the early twentieth century that the heterogeneous audience assembled in dark movie theaters seemed to annul the conventional dichotomy between high and low culture, and to efface customary social hierarchies and segregations. Sabine Hake, “Girls and Crisis—The Other Side of Diversion,” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 147–164;
Miriam Hansen, “Early Silent Cinema—Whose Public Sphere?” New German Critique 29 (Spring–Summer 1983): 147–184, here 174.
For numerous examples of the consideration of film as a modern adaptation of the bourgeois arts, see: Anton Kaes (ed.), Kino-Debatte. Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909–1929 (Tübingen: Tage-Buch Verlag, 1978); Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine, esp. 61–88, 107–129.
Ludwig Brauner, for instance, described the German film industry in terms of emancipation from the “international taste” and manifestations of the “German spirit.” Ludwig Brauner, “Die ersten deutschen Kunstfilms,” Der Kinematograph 122 (1909), cited in Reinhold Keiner, Thea von Harbou und der deutsche Film bis 1933 (Hildesheim: Olms G., 1984), 24.
Oskar Kalbus, Der deutsche Lehrfilm in der Wissenschaft und im Unterricht (Berlin: C. Heymann, 1922), 48.
Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin; Bruce A. Murray, Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic: From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 33–64.
Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6:2 (1999): 39–77, here 70.
Franz P. Liesegang, Handbuch der praktischen Kinematographie (Düsseldorf: Liesegang, 1918), 3; Karl Lügte, “Die Landschaft im Film,” Film-Kurier, June 1920.
Béla Balázs, “Der Film arbeitet für Uns!” Film und Volk 1:2–3 (1928): 7–8.
On the merit of “realism” in films that sought to influence spectators’ political views, see also: Garth Montgomery, “‘Realistic’ War Films in Weimar Germany: Entertainment as Education,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 9:2 (1989): 115–133.
Cited in Hans Ostwald and Hans Zille, Zilles Vermächtnis (Berlin: P. Franke, 1930), 242. Gerhard Lamprecht, who directed a couple of films based on Zille’s ideas, recalled that realism was the major objective of his productions (SDK-SGA, folder 465).
This “truthfulness” was often emphasized in the publicity materials that were handed out to the spectators of the premiered film. Ufa’s description of Karl Grune’s Brüder Schellenberg (The Schellenberg Brothers, 1925) stated that it was a film that showed “the essence of our times” (SDK-SGA, folder 2794). The critic Fritz Olimsky, who often proclaimed the realism of the images as an indication of the film’s quality, cited Otto Groth’s statement: “newspapers and the film have the same task [Aufgabe].” Fritz Olimsky, “Zehn Jahre Film,” in 75 Jahre Berliner-Börsen-Zeitung, ed. Arnold Killisch von Horn (Berlin: Berlin-Börsen-Zeitung, 1930), 115. Critics and advertisements often emphasized that particular films were based on “real documents,” the “personal experience” of the filmmakers, or had been made with the help of experts; even expressionist or futurist film that presented nonrealist imagery were advertised and reviewed as a representation of “our dreadful times” or as a “satire on our time.” For instance: Anonymous, “Welt ohne Krieg,” Film-Kurier, February 18, 1920; Paul Morgan, “Mein Kubelkasten,” Film-Kurier, February 28, 1920; advertisement for Lang’s Spione, Film-Kurier, March 25, 1928. German filmmakers highlighted the “scientific research” that preceded the production, as well as the employment of academic experts (anthropologists, ethnographers, etc.). The fascination with the “realist” quality of the film invoked some ironical comments: the reviewer of the satirical journal Das Stachelschwein commented sarcastically that “a man sits and gawks at pictures he could have seen everyday out in the street and calls it art. What an astonishing experience!”
Anonymous, “Der Zille Film,” Das Stachelschwein 19 (1925): 49.
According to the critic Egon Jabonson, for instance, only film could represent in a realistic manner [Lebenswahrheit] the mental disposition of a person under the influence of hallucinating narcotics: “here film […] celebrates its victory” over “literature and theater.” Egon Jacobson, “Neuheit auf den Berliner Film Markte,” Der Kinematograph, February 5, 1919. Like Jacobson, who regarded the mixture of fantastic and realistic images as the essence of the film’s realism, Heinz Michaelis wrote that the rhythm of the changing images in Karl Grune’s Eifersucht (Jealousy, 1925) perfectly matches the psychological state of the protagonist. Heinz Michaelis, Film-Kurier, September 18, 1925. Siegfried Kracauer famously wrote in the late 1920s that in the film “the audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions.” According to Kracauer, this quality (the superficiality of popular films) mirrors the essence of reality for the viewers, and hence, it has “moral significance.” Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” in The Mass Ornament, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 323–330, here 326.
For a lengthy discussion of Weimar film realism, see Ofer Ashkenazi, The Walk into the Night: Reason and Subjectivity in Weimar Film (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2010).
For a comprehensive survey of the politics of film reception and the awareness of the political power of film, see Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine, 27–60, 185–211. Politicians on both the Left and the Right issued numerous cautions during the 1920s regarding films that they perceived as posing threats to their causes, and sought to prevent their distribution. It was no accident that censorship of films was retained even after the republic had abolished all other forms of censorship. The fear of films that portray “twisted reality,” and the call for a mechanism of censorship was widespread among right- and left-wing activists alike. See S. Alher, “Revolution von unten,” Film und Volk, August 1928: 6–7; Murray, Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic, 43; Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 25–32; Garth N. Montgomery Jr., Learning from War Films: The German Viewer as Historical Subject in Theories of “Bildung,” Mass Communication and Propaganda (1918–1945), PhD dissertation, Buffalo, New York, 1992, 40–42; Elsaesser, A Second Life, 34–35; Linda Williams’s introduction to her (ed.) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Films (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 1–16.
For instance: “Rational,” Film und Volk, 1, February-March, 1928: 4; Willi Münzenberg, Erobert den Film! Winke aus der Praxis für die proletarischer Filmpropaganda (1925) reprinted in Willi Lüdecke, Der Film in Agitation und Propaganda der revolutionären deutschen Arbeitbewegung (1919–1933) (Berlin: Oberbaum, 1973), 75–106. See also Marc Silberman, “Whose Revolution? The Subject of Kuhle Wampe” in Weimar Cinema, 311–330;
Bernadette Kester, Film Front Weimar: Representation of the First World War in German Films of the Weimar Period (1919–1933) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 24; Montgomery, Learning from War Films, 29, 116–117.
See also Gary B. Stark, “Cinema, Society, and the State,” in Essays on Culture and Society in Modern Germany, ed. David B. King, Gary B. Stark, and Bede K. Lackner (Arlington: A&M University Press, 1982), 122–129.
The following chapters illustrate a Jewish approach to Weimar experience, not the (only, unequivocal) Jewish approach. As Myerson and Goldberg noted in 1933, German Jews demonstrated various different reactions to Weimar reality and its challenges. Abraham Myerson and Isaac Goldberg, The German Jew: His Share in Modern Culture (Berlin: A.A. Knopf, 1933), 151.
Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 43–81.
In 1914, Jews comprised 0.95 percent of the German population and similar numbers were reported in the early 1920s, despite steady immigration from Eastern Europe since 1830. See, for instance, Keith H. Pickus, Constructing Modern Identities: Jewish University Students in Germany, 1815–1914 (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1999), 64–65.
As Anton Kaes justly asserted, while many “assimilated Jews” held positions that allowed them to disregard popular anti-Semitism, the war and postwar era’s accusations could not go unnoticed. Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 110.
Jeffrey Verhey, “Der Mythos des ‘Geistes von 1914’ in der Weimarer Republik,” in Die Weimarer Republik zwischen Metropole und Provinz: Intellektuelendiskurse zur politischen Kultur, ed. Wolfgang Bialas and Burkhardt Stenzel (Köln: Böhlau, 1996), 85–96;
Wilhelm Deist, “The Military Collapse of the German Empire: The Reality Behind the Stab-in-the-Back Myth,” War in History 3:2 (1996): 186–207.
Yakov Rosenthal calls the Judenzählung a “crisis of German-Jewish symbiosis,” from which German Jewry have “never recovered.” Yakov Rosenthal, Episoda Shel Rishut?: Sfirat Ha’Chayalim Ha’Yehudim Be’Germania Be’Milchemet Ha’Olam Ha’Rishona (An Episode of Cruelty? The Census of the Jewish Soldiers in WWI Germany) (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad, 2005), 199.
Donald L. Niewyk, “The German Jews in Revolution and Revolt, 1918–1919,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 4 (1988): 41–66. Paul Mendes-Flohr notes that Jews and non-Jews alike perceived the post-World War I revolution as a “preeminently Jewish affair.” Paul Mendes-Flohr, “In the Shadow of the World War,” in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 4, ed. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Columbia University Press), 7–126, here 21.
Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Kriegserlebnis and Jewish Consciousness,” in Judisches Leben in Der Weimarer Republik/Jews in the Weimar Republic, ed. Wolfgang Benz, Arnold Paucker, and Peter G. J. Pulzer (London: Leo Baeck Institute, 1998), 225–238;
George L. Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 284–315.
Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: UW Press, 1982);
Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933 (New York: Norton and Co., 2003), 31–51.
Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 [1952]);
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947).
Dietrich Scheunemann, Expressionist film (Rochester: Camden House, 2006), ix.
A few recently published volumes of collected essays dedicated (or partly dedicated) to Weimar film demonstrate the new avenues taken by scholars of the last two decades. For instance: Rogowski, The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema; Isenberg, Weimar Cinema; Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, Light Motives (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003).
Patrice Petro, for instance, has suggested a reading that highlights the female spectator’s perspective, thus turning Kracauer’s emphasis on its head. Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets (Princeton University Press, 1989). This perspective has since been elaborated and complicated in several studies (e.g., Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). More recently, in his Shell Shock Cinema Anton Kaes has suggested a reading that linked Weimar cinema to the traumas of the trench war.
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© 2012 Ofer Ashkenazi
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Ashkenazi, O. (2012). Weimar Film and Jewish Acculturation. In: Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010841_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010841_1
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