Germany's fragmented urban, architecture and spatial character during Post WWII has been depicted as that of a dream-like chaotic and negative disordered feature.
Modernism....& Urban Dystopia
Pre-World War I Berlin was a city craving for international recognition – a potential rivalry to London’s imperialist stature and Paris’s cultural boom. The “Elektropolis”, as what Berliners themselves called it, was a hub of technological advancement and scientific innovation.
Prior to the 1896 great industrial exposition of Berlin, Max Ludwig Goldberger, then chairman of the Verein Berliner Kaufleute und Industrieller (Association of Merchants and Industrialists), had written a book called Land der unbegrenzten Moglichkeiten (country of boundless possibilities) which was an equivalent catchphrase to USA’s land of opportunities. It was a call for the world to shift attention towards what Kaiser Wilhem II’s ambitioned for the city to be a Weltstadt (World City).
Alongside the rapid spread of the machinery aesthetics, the descriptive writings of Friedrich Otto about Berlin’s golden twenties encompassed colorful insights of Brecht and Zuckmayer’s theatrical plays, Grosz and Kollwitz’s drawings, Weill and Schoenberg’s music, as well as the diverse productions of UFA film studio – also mentioning its intention to defy the foreign propaganda. Speculators flocked to the clubs and bars and revolutionized the city’s cultural scenery. This creative phase was presented to the public in the form of street theatres, cabaret and jazz atmospheres.
By December 1925, a year following the stabilization of the currency, a sense of ultra-modernism surrounded Berlin’s Theater De Westens when American cabaret performer Josephine Baker, being declared an “erotic goddess”, brought her show from Paris. The following year, German-American cabaret conferencier Erich Lowinsky organized a “Berlin’s Got Talent” show where young talents were given the opportunity to perform before the public. On the first round, 187 applications were received and all accepted – named under Kabarett der Namenlosen (Cabaret of the Nameless), as boasting “one of the city’s typical instances of tastelessness”.
Despite Berlin’s roaring atmosphere, there existed a reputation for decadence. Prostitution and homosexual behavior became part of the city’s underground economy and culture, or how Mel Gordon puts it as a ‘Voluptuous Panic’. So, on one side of the street, Pianist Ernst Engel was performing at the Jockey Bar – where it received a stellar guest-list comprising of Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, and Marlene Dietrich – while on another side, Artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s prostitutes were roaming in their colorful outfits giving provocative glances to the men.
Berlin’s partial population were nothing more than a mere clone of Circe’s curse that turned Odysseus’s shipmates into pigs – “and when they had drunk she turned them into pigs by a stroke of her wand, and shut them up in her pigsties” – quite an inspiration for George Grosz’s 1927 artwork.
The Expressionist Cinematic City: Symphonzing Metonymic Space
Spatially opposing both the Impressionist appreciation of nature and the majesty of the human form and the well-mannered Baroque, the expressionist city sought to depict the inner harsh reality of modern-paced movement and not shun the violently unpleasant effect.
With the beginnings of German Expressionism cinema in the 1920s, this specific period coincided with the time of the Weimar Republic, hence called Weimar Cinema. Two major branches marked expressionist films at the time, the ‘romantic’ and the ‘modern’.
The romantic is mostly referred to be as highly influenced by the works of German Romantic Painter Casper David Friedrich – specifically ‘The Abbey in the Oakwood’ painting – with long shots of landscape dissolving within absurd geometrical images of buildings, plays of light and shadow, and magnified doors and windows. While on the other hand, the modern gave rise to a new genre of film known as the ‘city film’ which “created urbanity as the modern space, and during the 1920s in Europe, this modern city par excellence was Berlin”.
THE PAST COULD BE UNROLLED, DISTANCES ANNIHILATED […] IN THE CHAOS OF THE STREETS - VIRGINIA WOOLF
There emerged affinity between expressionism and the city that captured the gaze of several expressionist filmmakers, who “incorporated elements from the other arts in order to distinguish their own work from conventional films”. Their camera was a visual narrative tool that accepted the current fragmented condition while putting so much emphasis on subjective dream-like glimpses of old and new modalities, abstract images of towers, malls, nightclubs and other places where the public encounter on a daily basis.
Films Defining an Era
Within this framework, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari reveals a quite distort human figure who haunts the city – a film about psychosis, sleep and murder. It seeks out to blur the thin line between fiction and reality, with images as contorted doors, black and white spiral staircases, sharp edged crenelations, and tormented sets. The city provides the stage for the collapsing phenomenon of the dreamer into the dream. The story was actually a revolutionary resistance against the omnipotence of a state authority that declared war during World War I. Caligari was the political figure that idolized power to violate all human rights policies and values.
Instead of filming ‘real’ houses, corridors or stairways, it was necessary to produce and expand what Lotte Eisner called ‘Landschaft mit Seele’ (Landscape with Soul). Thus, filmmakers were forced to create films about the soul’s interior life within the pure and abstracted interior space of the studio.
Karl Grune’s Die Straße (1923) is considered among the early street films that address the lure of the metropolitan universe crowded with multiple narratives and complexities of the modern era. The continuous inter-cuts between progression both in the streets and inside the cabaret reveal the state of flux that dominated the city at the time.
The frenzy-like activity of the street is a direct reflection of the nervous exotic energy of city dwellers isolated from one another by refuging themselves to self-escape. On a similar frequency, the behavior of citizens inside the cabaret, despite being an expressionistic stylized manner, mirrors the exterior urban scenery, i.e. human figures who “move ghost-like in and out of the shadows, untouching, unseeing and unknowing".
Other expressionist city symphonies that followed would be F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), G.W. Pabst’s Joyless Street (1925), Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). All of which, produced in the same decade, emphasize on the dangers and pleasures of modern urban life.
Which Expressionist film is your favorite? Is there a specific film you have on your list that you wish to share? Please share your comments, ideas, thoughts, criticism, and/or any sort of information and/or interesting facts.
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