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Looking for the German Revolution in Weimar Films
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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“O Gott, o Gott—ist das Revolution?” a wide-eyed Frau Dreissiger asks her husband, her pearl necklaces rising and falling with her heaving bosom, as chants of the angry crowd of weavers penetrate the sequestered drawing room. In this scene in Friedrich Zelnik's 1927 film Die Weber, Frau Dreissiger's question is far less naive than the impatient look of her nervous husband suggests. It resounds, rather, with the fears and expectations of Germans of the 1920s, convinced they were living in an era of revolutionary transformation, yet besieged by a cacophony of arguments as to whether or how an actual German revolution would come about. Historians of the Weimar era have posed comparable questions about which upheavals and ideas constituted a German revolution. Spurred by debates over whether an authoritarian German Sonderweg bypassed a bourgeois revolution, invigorated since unification by new perspectives on German democratization, and enriched by new approaches, they have considered an extraordinarily wide range of phenomena. The resulting studies have revealed myriad interactions between political ideologies, social groupings, economic practices, and external pressures.
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References
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44. Critique by “Doorwien,” “Die Weber im Film,” Die Rotte Fahne, 17 May 1927, reprinted in Film und revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung, 1:186.Google Scholar
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71. For a survey of the epochs of Schinderhannes literature, see Franke, Manfred, “Der Räuber, wie er im Buche steht,” in his Schinderhannes: Das kurze wilde Leben des Johannes Bückler, neu erzählt nach alten Protokollen, Briefen und Zeitungsberichten (Düsseldorf, 1984), 307–75.Google Scholar On Schinderhannes as part of the “robber literature” that began with Friedrich von Schiller's drama Die Räuber in 1782, and for Schinderhannes lore of the Weimar era, see ibid., 314–22, 356–68.
72. Viebig, Clara, Unter dem Freiheitsbaum (Stuttgart, 1922), 229.Google Scholar
73. Elwenspoek, Curt, Schinderhannes—der Rheinische Rebell (Stuttgart, 1925), 119, 222–23. On Elwenspoek's interpretation, see Franke, Schinderhannes, 360–61. Schinderhannes gained stature as a German revolutionary when the communist Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung published a series from Elwenspoek's book in the spring of 1926.Google Scholar
74. Ibid., 363. Zuckmayer, Carl, Schinderhannes—Schauspiel in vier Akten (1927; repr. Hamburg, 1956). The play premiered on 14 10 1927 at the Lessing Theater in Berlin.Google Scholar
75. For a complete list of Bernhardt's films and a brief biography, see the entry under his name in CineGraph, vol. 1.Google Scholar
76. For two such critiques, from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, see “Schinderhannes—der erste Prometheus-Grossfilm,” Film Kurier, 2 February 1928, 1; and Alexander Abusch, “Schinderhannes als Film,” Die Rotte Fahne, 3 February 1928, in Film und revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung, ed. Kühn et al., 2:63.Google Scholar
77. As an advertisement for a film version of Rudolf Herzog's popular novel Die vom Niederrhein (1908; repr. Stuttgart, 1922) had blared: “60,000,000 German hearts are beating for the Rhineland!” Film-Kurier, 16 May 1925.Google Scholar
78. All intertitles come from viewings of the film at the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv and the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, and all translations are mine. For contemporary discussion of the intertwining of ideas from the French Revolution and battles over the left bank of the Rhine, see Hans Wollenberg, “Schinderhannes—Prometheus-Film im Tauentzien-Palast,” Lichtbild-Bühne, 2 February 1928 and Belphegor, “Schinderhannes,” Film Kurier, 2 February 1928.Google Scholar
79. Viebig's novel refers to a public flogging that results from Hannes's theft of several animal hides, a far cry from heroic resistance to the occupiers. Viebig, Freiheitsbaum, 81.Google Scholar
80. In a later scene, discussed below, a crowd erupts into a lynch mob. The close-ups of enraged faces in both these crowd scenes are a visual convention that Fritz Lang invokes in the kangaroo-court scene of M (1931).Google Scholar
81. “Schinderhannes,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 2 February 1928.Google Scholar
82. Zuckmayer, Carl, “Schinderhannes,” Illustrierter Film Kurier, no. 806 (1928); reprinted in Film und revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung, ed. Kühn, et al. , 2:61.Google Scholar
83. This interpretation is developed by Murray, Film and the German Left, 131–32.Google Scholar
84. Abusch, , “Schinderhannes als Film,” in Film und revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung, ed. Kühn, et al. , 2:64. On Prometheus' commercial goals, see Murray, Film and the German Left, 121–35.Google Scholar
85. Franke also emphasizes the dangerous implications of such imagery and language in his discussion of performances of Zuckmayer's drama and the enthusiastic applause such allusions raised. Franke, Schinderhannes, 368.Google Scholar
86. Elwenspoek early on alludes to Schinderhannes's supposedly anti-Semitic tendencies. Elwenspoek, Schinderhannes, 13, and Franke shows that even the earliest Schinderhannes literature was already mythologizing his intent to plunder “the Jews, other profiteers, and the enemies of the Fatherland and their agents in Germany.” Franke, Schinderhannes, 321. Mathy argues, however, that the anti-Jewish aura surrounding Schinderhannes's exploits is more evidence of prejudices of the wider society than of his intent. Mathy, Der Schinderhannes, 32–39xs.Google Scholar
87. Wollenberg, “Schinderhannes,” Lichtbild-Bühne, 2 February 1928.Google Scholar
88. Schlageter and Hoelz epitomized the heroic rebel to their respective admirers. See Manfred Franke, Albert Leo Schlageter: Der erste Soldat des 3. Reiches—Die Entmythologisierung eines Helden (Cologne, 1980). On Max Hölz, see Albert Winter, “Gerechtigkeit für Max Hölz!” Die Weltbühne, 16 November 1926, 768–71.Google Scholar
89. Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 2 February 1928.Google Scholar
90. The films support the argument of Detlev Peukert that the republic had lost legitimacy but raise questions about his contention that the republican consensus was being replaced by “glimmerings of a new, totalitarian consensus.” Peukert, Weimar Republic, 241.Google Scholar
91. The films lend credence to Karlheinz Dederke's conclusion that “attempts to legitimate the Weimar Republic by the revolution [of 1918/19], were meager and without resonance,” but this argument needs further examination in light of other concepts of the German revolution prevalent at the end of the 1920s. Dederke, “Sinngebung der Novemberrevolution in den Jahren 1918/1919 and 1928/29,” in Salewski, Die Deutschen und die Revolution, 427.Google Scholar
92. Two subsequent films did refer to revolutionary transformation of institutions and the Communist movement that would carry it out: Piel Jutzi's Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (1929) and Slatan Dodow/Bertolt Brecht's Kuhle Wampe (1932). Each depicts conditions in depression-ridden Germany that raise a host of important issues.Google Scholar