6 - Vampires in Weimar: Shades of History

Summary

There is good reason, Siegfried Kracauer argued in his classic study From Caligari to Hitler (1947), why Weimar Germany provided the crucible for horror cinema. The social, historical, and political conditions of the country between the First and Second World Wars created a style in the new mass medium that exalted elemental passions and turbulent states of mind. Lotte Eisner, another authority on the period, entitled her influential book L'écran démoniaque (The Haunted Screen, 1952). The visual language of Weimar cinema, Eisner observes, is characterized by a stunning use of light and darkness. The signature chiaroscuro of these films gives shape to themes of doubles, fantasies of revenge, and passion. Eisner's formal analysis complements Kracauer's psycho-historical approach by articulating the imagery of socially and politically determined unease in post-Armistice and pre-rearmament Germany.

When Germany surrendered in 1918, the country had not yet been defeated militarily. For the brief life span of the Weimar Republic, the right wing felt grave resentment that the newly established government had agreed to what it called the Schandfrieden (shameful peace) at Versailles. At the same time, the far left viewed the political moderates who now headed the state with contempt for retaining the superannuated bureaucratic and institutional structures of the collapsed empire. The loss of territory, the burden of reparations, and the lingering sting of war formed an unhappy constellation: Weimar Germany faced almost as many enemies within as the imperial state had faced from without.