From Caligari to Hitler

Having owned the previous edition of this flawed classic, written by Siegfried Kracauer, the brilliant Weimar era critic, during his American exile in World War II, I hesitated to buy this new edition. Now I am glad I did. The Italian film scholar Leonardo Quaresima is one of the major authorities on Weimar era cinema, but unfortunately little of his work has been translated into English. His "Introduction to the 2004 edition" is more than that--it is a major essay on Kracauer as a film critic, indispensable for anyone with more than a casual interest in the period. Abundantly footnoted, it offers a sober critical assessment of CALIGARI TO HITLER, discussing its gestation, its sources, its relationship to Kracauer's earlier film criticism, and its methodological premises, indebted to fellow German Jewish exile Erwin Panofsky's iconology.

This book shows how the cinema paralleled and sometimes helped form the German psyche. Yet it is more than just a documentary. This brings you from the beginning of the industry to show what Hitler inherited. However the information caries far beyond the political dimension. I use it more for information on the film industry as a whole for that time and the basis of what we inherited today. It is interesting that from the beginning people complained that the film was to long and inclusive or too short and excluded characters form history or books. Two good parallel and overlapping timeline books for the era are "Cagliari's Children: The Film As Tale of Terror" ISBN: 030680347X which is a different view on the same subject and "The UFA Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 23)" They tried to capture the feel of the time and of the German actors' attitude toward film, in the movie "Shadow of the Vampire" (2001) The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 23)

Not that any book can be impartial, but Kracauer's generally socialist reading of films should not be viewed as definitive.With this point taken into account, this book does offer an imcomparable survey of early German film, its symbolism, and also, the early careers of such actors as Peter Lorre and Marlene Dietrich.This book is a very entertaining study of these films, and a must for any student of modern Germany, or early film. It does perhaps reflect generally on the modern German society, and WWII in particular.

Here it is: probably the most insightful, psychologically brilliant and well researched study of the great early German films (1910-1940) ever written. The author's thesis is this: popular films are popular because they are the dreams shared by a people at any given time. If we study films as if they were keys to the subconscious of the audience, we gain tremendous insight into the culture and mass psychology of the time. The author builds a very convincing case for his thesis that the whole build up to Hitler can be found in the fims that preceded him. I am convinced. This book is also an excellent history of German film as the author is a very good film scholar. Now, if only we had someone around who could interpret the current films of the USA so that we could find out what the future holds in store for us! I loved this book. It was stimulating and I had seen most of the films that he writes about. One advantage todays readers have is that many of these films are no! w out on video.