From Caligari to Hitler

Kracauer was a German film critic in the Weimar years. This classic text, first published in 1947, relates the crisis of German culture in the 1920s and 1930s–which climaxed in Hitler and Nazism–to famous Weimar films, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and M. Kracauer’s effort to track Germany’s cultural zeitgeist in the movies. This relation is not without controversy.

His book remains a fine example of the struggle to see mass psychology in the movies and the movies in the context of mass psychology. 

This is an oldie but a goodie. Written just a few years after World War II, famed sociologist and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer looked to pre-Hitler era cinema for clues about the collective German psyche. Maybe a society obsessed with dark expressionist monsters and fairy tales is just waiting for a real-life monster to take the reins of power. It is a controversial (and flawed) thesis, but it remains one of the most influential pieces of cultural criticism ever written.