New Europe: A history of German cinema

From the invention of horror under the Weimar republic to recent re-examinations of the second world war, German cinema has an amazingly creative history

Andrew Pulver

German cinema got off to a fantastic start straight after the first world war, as the liberal atmosphere of the Weimar republic triggered an explosion across all creative disciplines. Film-makers responded by appropriating the techniques of expressionist painting and theatre, incorporating them into twisted tales of madness and terror – thereby virtually inventing what would become known as the horror film. With its angled, distorted set designs, tortured eye-rolling, and layers of dreams and visions, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) is generally acknowledged as a landmark of international cinema, not just Germany's own. Two years later came an equally groundbreaking film, Nosferatu – an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula that enshrined some of the creepiest cinema images ever recorded.

They also marked the beginning of the careers of two great silent-movie directors, Robert Wiene and FW Murnau – the latter turned in more authentic masterpieces in the shape of The Last Laugh and Faust. But both were outdone by Fritz Lang, whose monumental Metropolis became the most ambitious, most expensive, and most influential silent film ever made. It had a chequered subsequent career, being savaged from its original 210-minute running time: various restorations have been released, with the most complete version running at 149 minutes after being discovered in 2008 in a Buenos Aires archive. And the "new objectivity" was represented by GW Pabst'sPandora's Box, starring a glowing, charismatic Louise Brooks, and the remarkable "documentary" People on Sunday.

The latter's credit list – which includes Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann – indicates the disaster that was to befall German cinema after the rise of the Nazis: all were to head west and find varying degrees of fame and fortune in Hollywood. As were the two German film-makers who most successfully grappled with the early sound era. Josef von Sternberg cast Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, andher rendition of Falling in Love Again not only captivated professor Emil Jannings, but a worldwide audience (helped by the English language version that was filmed alongside the German). Dietrich, like von Strenberg, immediately found themselves a fixture in Hollywood – then considerably more open to non-native-English speakers, a legacy of the words-free silent days. And Lang made a successful switch to sound withM, which incorporated expressionist visuals into a finely nuanced story of the hunt for a child killer. Lang's wife, Thea von Harbous, joined the Nazi party in 1932, and by 1934 Lang was on the train to Paris.

The flight of intellectuals after Hitler came to power in 1933 virtually cleared out evey major name in German cinema: along with all the names above, Ernst Lubitsch, Michael Curtiz and Douglas Sirk also left. The only director to emerge from the Nazi period of any consequence is of course the infamous Leni Riefenstahl, whose documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia eulogised the Third Reich while harnessing her considerable film-making abilities. In the rubble of the post war decades, little of international consequence emerged; while the new waves were stirring across Europe in the late 50s and early 1960s, a divided Germany struggled along in Nazism's long shadow. Only occasional films, like Bernhard Wicki's Oscar-nominatedThe Bridge (1959), poked their head above the parapet.

The drought was finally broken as the social and political ferment in West Germany reached a crescendo in the early 1970s. The explosion of radical politics was matched by an explosion of radical cinema: Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Schlondorff, von Trotta, Kluge and Syberberg were the key names here. Alexander Kluge's Abschied von Gesternwas the harbinger of New German Cinema in 1966, but it was Werner Herzog's extraordinary Conradian saga Aguirre, Wrath of God in 1972 that saw the movement have a serious and lasting international impact. Fassbinder's astoundingly moving Fear Eats the Soul soon followed; in the same year, 1974, as Wenders's Alice in the Cities, the first in his road-movie trilogy.

The fervid atmosphere of the early 70s evolved into a period of fantastic cinematic maturity: arguably the high point of German cinema, which conjured up major critical and commercial success in the international arena. Fassbinder continued to produce film after film until his death in 1982; arguably his masterpiece was 1979's The Marriage of Maria Braun, which suggest the moral turmoil of the 70s had its roots in the breakdown of the social fabric after the war. Gunther Grass's 1959 novel The Tin Drum became a Palme d'Or winning film for Volker Schlondorff. Wolfgang Pedersen followed in the footsteps of the prewar émigrés after the commercial success of Das Boot – he's since made In the Line of Fire, The Perfect Storm and Troy in Hollywood. And Berlin's cold war creepiness inspired films as varied as teen-junkie Christiane Fand Wenders's own masterpiece, Wings of Desire in 1987.

The collapse of communism and the end of the cold war prompted a period of rethink and reorientation – and perhaps a crisis of confidence in German film-making. The logjam was broken in 2004 by newly populist examinations of the war and its aftermath. Even though it's been spoofed a thousand times, Oliver Hirschbiegel'sDownfall is a still-lacerating account of Hitler's final days, while The Lives of Otherstook a hard look at the compromises entailed in the grinding state spy system in the former-GDR. But the greatest, arguably, came only two years ago – Austrian director Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which brilliantly diagnosed the roots of Nazism in a study of a small German village just before the first world war.

Source : theguardian.com