Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany

Steve Choe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441145208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Weimar cultural critics and intellectuals have repeatedly linked the dynamic movement of the cinema to discourses of life and animation. Correspondingly, recent film historians and theorists have taken up these discourses to theorize the moving image, both in analog and digital. But, many important issues are overlooked. Combining close readings of individual films with detailed interpretations of philosophical texts, all produced in Weimar Germany immediately following the Great War, Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany shows how these films teach viewers about living and dying within a modern, mass mediated context. Choe places relatively underanalyzed films such as F. W. Murnau's The Haunted Castle and Arthur Robison's Warning Shadows alongside Martin Heidegger's early seminars on phenomenology, Sigmund Freud's Reflections upon War and Death and Max Scheler's critique of ressentiment. It is the experience of war trauma that underpins these correspondences, and Choe foregrounds life and death in the films by highlighting how they allegorize this opposition through the thematics of animation and stasis.

1

Two Postwar Masculinities

Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919)

Defeat and delusion

The end of the war left Germany with many lives lost. Approximately 2,037,000 soldiers fell on the battlefield throughout the four years of the conflict. Most men born after 1871 joined the German Army as it was considered a family’s greatest honor to have a father, uncle, or son serve the empire. Young males born between 1892 and 1895—who were between nineteen and twenty-two when the war began—experienced the greatest losses: about 35 percent of this generation was reduced. In addition to war casualties, civilian casualties numbered 760,000, largely due to the influenza pandemic and mass famine that devastated the Weimar population following the armistice in 1918.¹

Of the 4.3 million German soldiers who returned from the front, many came back severely maimed, physically disabled, shell shocked, psychically scarred, and unable to reintegrate into civilian life. Weimar’s tumultuous postwar politics only exacerbated their sense of bewilderment and futility. The economic and political disorder of the early years of the Republic reminded returned soldiers of their failure to bring honor to the Fatherland and of the pointlessness of their military sacrifices. Forced to confront the empty vanity of their wartime patriotism, some veterans were filled with feelings of pessimistic contempt and exaggerated nationalism in response to their shattered self-importance. Like the infantile ego, described in Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny, that retreats into a shell when confronted with a hostile external world, some returned soldiers reverted to hyperbolic versions of their prewar selves in defiance of the armistice, whose terms the international community largely dictated.

Moreover, those who remained in the home front reacted with incomprehension at the end of the war, their worst fears having been realized. Historian Ernst Troeltsch, writing in 1924, famously called the Weimar Republic in its early years a “dreamland,” referring to the panoply of defensive fantasies concocted by the shamed ego, unable to accept military defeat.² SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) leader Friedrich Ebert, who lost his two sons in the war, was supposedly “seized with sobbing,” so devastating was the initial broadcast of Germany’s loss.³ News of military defeat suddenly put the nation’s destiny into question, propagating many cynical discourses of crisis.⁴ Troeltsch observed that desperation gave way to wild speculation about what will be, so that “everyone, without grasping the conditions and real consequences, could portray the future in fantastic, pessimistic or heroic terms.”⁵ Visions of imagined utopias or cynical apocalypse proliferated: both revealed more about the confusion of the postwar present than of anything concrete about the future. Traditional ways of understanding German nationhood lost their capacity to idealize and consolidate the people.

The cost of Germany’s postwar reparations compounded the emotional toll of defeat. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, forced Germany to cede 13 percent of its prewar territory to Poland and France, and demanded recompense for all damage done to civilian property during wartime. During the armistice negotiations, France and Britain were particularly intent on placing full fault on the German nation. Reflecting their desire to place blame, article 231 of the Treaty obligated Germany to accept full responsibility for initiating the war, and “for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”⁶ The total sum called for by the Allied Reparations Commission was set at 226 billion Reichsmarks, locking Germany into making long-term payments until the end of the century.

At the end of the war, in the midst of increasing poverty, the polity splintered into a variety of political factions. Prewar solidarities within both the political left and right were broken up, giving rise to the consolidation of extreme political views. While pro-peace and pacifist coalitions were formed, other organizations advocated martial law and audaciously recapitulated grandiose annexationist claims in support of the military regime. Perhaps the most notorious example of the latter was the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (German Fatherland Party), founded in 1917. At the end of the war, when it was becoming increasingly clear that Germany’s loss would be imminent, this extreme right-wing group stubbornly rejected defeat and promoted desperate measures, insisting that winning more territories abroad would solve Germany’s domestic crises.

Historian George Mosse, in Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World War, writes of the reverberation of wartime attitudes into civilian politics, the “brutalization of German politics, a heightened indifference to human life” that pervaded public life.⁷ For many after the war, militarism and authoritarianism retained their revered status. Nothing less than a return to Prussian discipline could rein in the postwar chaos that threated to break apart national unity and German identity.⁸ As Mosse observes, it is this unquestioned regard for authority and the culture of submission that gave way to the uncompromising and callous treatment of political adversaries. “The process of the brutalization of politics is most easily followed in Germany with its cycle of revolution and counterrevolution after the war, and the years of political uncertainty under the Weimar Republic which followed.”⁹ The partisan politics of civilian political life was a direct transposition of the friend–enemy distinction operative in wartime.¹⁰

In what follows I will connect the postwar experience of loss and the brutalization of politics to a reactionary understanding of the cinema in the Weimar Republic. Toward the end of my reading of Wiene’s Caligari in the introduction, I connected Cesare’s awakening to questions of life and mortality. While the cinematic reanimation of the dead unconsciously confirmed the viewer’s fantasy of her own immortality, we saw how Cesare’s awakening also uncannily reminded the viewer of her own futural death. In the following reading of Robert Reinert’s frenetic 1919 film Nerven (Nerves), I will show how the fantasy of immortality, aligned with the experience of the moving image, is linked to two distinct, but related symptoms of trauma: hallucination and defiant triumphalism.

Nerves is an exemplary film for connecting contemporaneous discourses concerning the “nerves” and nervousness to postwar male hysteria. Through its main male protagonists, Roloff and Teacher Johannes, Reinert’s film depicts two reaction-formations that seem unable to mourn and remain incapable of working through the past. Their etiologies coalesce around a key psycho-philosophical idea: the narcissistic metaphysics of the “cool,” distanced spectator.¹¹ It is this metaphysics that underpins both the brutalization of politics and the withdrawal of human mortality from considerations of film ontology. By depicting how the postwar ego disavows that which threatens its fantasy of self-reliant wholeness—through the denial of shame, vulnerability, defeat, and empathy for the other—Reinert’s film allegorizes an ontology of film inseparable from the disavowal of death. Both the male protagonists of the film, living survivors of the war, adopt the dispassionate technics of the nonliving camera, reiterating the fantasy of having conquered time and mortality while shoring up the fantasy of the pretraumatized self.

Indeed, life in Reinert’s film becomes a principal matter of concern for the postwar subject, reduced through its biopolitical understanding as either healthy or unhealthy, productive or unproductive, for the defeated nation. Though I will argue that Nerves implicates the representation of nervous exhaustion and its relationship to concerns around postwar masculinity, this relationship implicates psycho-philosophical stakes for the cinema spectator who disavows as well, whose look allows the cinema to “live.” Film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry has written that film “lives on the denial of difference: difference is necessary for it to live, but it lives on its negation.”¹² Baudry was speaking about the impression of continuity produced through the succession of discrete images on a filmstrip projected onto a screen. The difference between each image must be disavowed so that the illusion of movement may be sustained—notably, this is an illusion that for Bergson corresponds to the fallacies of metaphysical thought. We shall see that this act of negation, performed by the spectator, is self-reflexively and allegorically signaled in Nerves. Through Roloff and Johannes, Reinert’s film illuminates how disavowal enables a postwar, solipsistic form of thinking that claims sovereignty over life and its vicissitudes.

Nerves (1919) and the Great War

That the powers of death might be matched against life in one supreme combat, destiny had gathered them all at a single point. And behold how death was conquered; how humanity was saved by material suffering from the moral downfall which would have been its end; while the peoples joyful in their desolation, raised on high the song of deliverance form the depths of ruin and grief!

Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War (1915)¹³

In Shell Shock Cinema, Anton Kaes argues that Robert Reinert’s Nerves must be read through the experience of trauma that permeated all cultural production following the war. While the film does not show scenes of military combat, it nevertheless depicts the signs of the war’s aftermath registered in the bodies of returned soldiers—uncontrollable shakes, physical and psychic tremors, and visual and auditory delusions. The language of the nerves and nervousness, utilized to explain these symptoms of shell shock, pre-dated the war by decades, however. Throughout the nineteenth century, these diagnostic categories assessed the psychosomatic effects of life in modernity and the effects of industrialization on the collective nation. “Seen from this angle,” Kaes writes, “war and revolution were symptoms of a larger malaise: a collective neurasthenia in response to belated but frenzied modernization and urbanization. The discourse on nerves also allowed the filmmaker to create a nexus between the battlefield and the home front.”¹⁴ Through the discourse of the nerves, Reinert’s film links the symptoms of shell shock to an already existing knowledge about the shock of modernization on the human body.

It also links the language of nerves with the biopolitics of the nation and the need for healthy, productive citizens after wartime. Nerves should be contextualized within Weimar’s brutalizing politics, not only because it expresses anxieties associated with the traumatized subject, but also because it explicitly prescribes images of healthy, self-sufficient postwar masculinities, set over against the abjected, unhealthy, and dependent other. In her essay, “Unsettling Nerves: Investigating War Trauma in Robert Reinert’s Nerven (1919),” Barbara Hales considers Nerves within postwar understandings of male hysteria and the highly politicized discourse surrounding the war malingerer.¹⁵ “In contrast to the neurasthenic, who has the will but not the stamina, the hysteric possesses a faulty genetic make-up, resulting in the rejection of the will to fight.”¹⁶ At a time when the interpretation of war neurosis was thought to be a condition of a weak individual will and faulty nerves, traumatized soldiers were vilified for expressing their inability and refusal to reenter the battlefield. This vilification is illustrated in the first half of Nerves, in a scene where a female character brutally chastises a love-struck man who refuses to take part in the emerging revolutionary movements. He is terrified of the gunfights taking place in the streets and in defiance of her emasculating reprimands, which exacerbates his frail nerves, he randomly murders a stranger on the street. Soldiers who expressed resistance to returning to the front were correspondingly belittled for requesting pensions and psychiatric treatment for their ailments, and criticized for becoming burdens on the already struggling postwar state.¹⁷ In her article, Hales concludes that the vilification of the war neurotic is indicative of a larger denial, that is “of Germany’s overall inability to accept defeat.”¹⁸ Both Kaes and Hales account for the way in which Nerves reflects the inability to accept loss in Weimar culture, but the film’s depiction of the nerves, as a diagnostic language, carries further reaching implications that call for additional philosophical and cinematic scrutiny. Reinert’s fervid film not only connects pre- and postwar notions of the human subject while linking home and war fronts through the depiction of male hysteria, it also allegorizes the encounter between the cinema and the nervous spectator.

Nerves begins with a tumultuous prologue that dramatizes a mother on the home front and her soldier son, “thousands of miles from his Heimat.” The home and the war fronts are interrelated through parallel editing. Nerves alternates a shot of the mother, sensing impending danger, with a shot of a wounded young man gasping for life, crawling among dead bodies strewn about underneath a gnarled tree. Smoke floats in the background, suggesting the presence of gunfire (Figure 1.1). An intertitle indicates the existence of an unseen, telepathic connection between these different locations: “Mother, mother! And you feel it, thousands of miles away, at the same moment. What does it mean?” As the dying son cries out and slumps down, lifeless, the film cuts back to the horrified mother with her arms raised in exasperation. This episode seems to anticipate a sequence depicting Hutter and Ellen in Act Two of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922, where a similar telepathic connection between the husband and wife is forged through montage. As in this opening sequence from Reinert’s film, Ellen also reaches out when she senses Hutter in danger many miles away. Despite the great distance, the mother senses the life draining from her beloved offspring through the power of filmic editing.

Figure 1.1 Nerves, 1919

In the second episode of the prologue, a nervous man approaches a sleeping woman. With his shadow projected on the wall, as in the depiction of Alan’s death in Caligari, he violently strangles the vulnerable woman with his bare hands. The tense murderer then looks up and sees a small bird in a birdcage hanging near the woman’s bed. Suddenly feeling sympathy for the small creature, he remarks, “Poor little thing without any water: it is dying, dying.” He fills its small water silo and runs away from the scene of the crime. The relationship between these two episodes is not immediately apparent, but an intertitle that concludes the introduction suggests that both may be linked through the malady of troubled nerves: “Beware you peoples, shaken by nervous epidemics [Nervenepidemien], and terror and panic, or by wild, unbridled lust.” If Nerves reflects how an existing language of nervousness was connected to the symptoms of war trauma, the juxtaposition of these episodes utilizes the nerves to secure further connections between home and war fronts, and by coextension, the symptoms assoc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Two Postwar Masculinities: Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919)
• 2. Melancholy Specters: F. W. Murnau’s The Haunted Castle (1921) and Phantom (1922)
• 3. The Temporality of Destiny: Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921)
• 4. The Cinematic Other: Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920)
• 5. Technologies of Revenge: Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen (1924) and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Imprint