4 - Finance, Liquidity, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Weimar Cinema

Summary

Abstract: Chapter 4 addresses depictions of finance and masculinity in Weimar cinema, addressing the many ‘moments of liquidity’ to be found in key films. Continuing from the previous chapter, it discusses the conflation of women and water in Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City,’ 1927) in order to further develop the conflation of finance, liquidity, and a crisis of gender in Der letzte Mann (‘The Last Laugh,’ 1924) and L’Argent (‘Money,’ 1929). This chapter then turns to Gerhard Lamprecht's film Hanseaten (1925) – an important yet unknown film, which has escaped inclusion in the Weimar film canon altogether, and provides a key image of reactionary stabilization to this study.

Keywords: Masculinity, Liquidity, Gender and Finance, Reactionary Modernism, Klaus Theweleit, New Objectivity

The Threat of Dissolution

Introduction

Cultural representations of finance and speculation in the Weimar Republic cannot be separated from questions surrounding the representation of gender. This chapter builds on the preceding chapter by turning to the question of the fraught construction of masculinity under capitalism and the related ‘ideal’ of a stable industrial capitalism based around the patriarchal family and a fixed notion of national identity. In order to do this, I will begin by fully articulating what I have called ‘moments of liquidity’ – drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's idea of ‘liquid modernity.’ I will discuss this aesthetic gesture in its clearest articulations, which can be found in F. W. Murnau's Der letzte Mann (1924) and Marcel L’Herbier's L’Argent (1929). I will also discuss how representations of liquid and water, in films such as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), invoke the idea of overseas space of international trade and flows of capital. I will then examine the trope of liquidity in its relation to established discourses on the construction of masculinity during the ‘period of stability’ of the Weimar Republic (1924–29), and in terms of the particular construction of masculinity that emerged in the Neue Sachlichkeit (‘new objectivity’) movement.