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German History

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Book Review: The Cinema's Third Machine. Writing on Film in

Germany, 1907-1933

Erica Carter

German History

1998; 16; 104

DOI: 10.1177/026635549801600130

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104

Book Reviews

Germany, on the other hand, was 'the youngest, strongest and hungriest wolf among

the great powers', and Serbia was 'even hungrier and more ravenous' (p. 394).

Rolf Steininger analyses the ill-fated project of a German-Austrian Customs Union

which was prepared by secret negotiations in Vienna in March 1931. Fierce opposition,

especially from Czechoslovakia, was anticipated, for it would view the plan as an attack

on its existence, a step towards the dreaded Anschiuss. The forecast proved entirely

correct. The French government too did everything to torpedo the project and it 'failed

miserably' (p. 474): a clear defeat for the German Foreign Minister Julius Curtius and

his Austrian counterpart Johann Schober. Franz Mathis investigates the 'economic'

motives in favour of a union prior to 1938 and finds that the attitude of the economic

associations was by no means uniform on account of the economic backwardness of

Austria and that German industrialists were not very keen to invest in Austria; this only

changed because of the rapid rearmament of Germany. Dieter Binder writes on German-

Austrian relations in 1933-8 and claims that the vicious propaganda of the Austrian

Nazis presented no danger to the Schuschnigg govemment; but this had a very weak

basis, the Third Reich and its full employment attracted. large numbers of Austrians,

and the grossdeutsch ideology was all-pervasive. Franz Muller looking at the same years

stresses the important part played by Papen as Hitler's special envoy in Vienna. Papen

tried to divide the Heimwehr and the Christian Social supporters of the govemment and

worked for 'evolution' in the relations between the two countries, a slow absorption of

Austria in a Greater Germany.

Evan Burr Bukey looks at the slowly changing attitudes of the Austrians to the

Ostmark of 1938-45. Large sections of the strongly Catholic rural population remained

aloof and suspicious' and 'impervious to Nazi ideology' (p. 520), and in Vienna the

socialist subculture was preserved. He claims that 'most Austrians saw eye to eye on

the Jewish Question, holding both Jews and Jewry accountable for the suffering and

distress of the past half century' (p. 514), He forgets that before 1933 well over a third

ofthe people constantly voted for the SPO, a party in which Jews occupied many leading

positions, and that the party was particularly strong in Vienna, in spite of all local anti-

Semitism. The volume concludes with two interesting essays by Michael Gehler on the

close relations between Austria and the German Federal Republic in the years 1945-

60. It can be recommended to all interested in the ever-changing pattem of Austro-

German history.

London

The Cinema's Third Machine. Writing on Film in Germany, 1907-1933. By

Sabine Hake. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 1993. xvii

+ 353 pp. £35.

It was until recently something of a commonplace in Anglo-American film studies to

identify film history-in contrast to film theory or textual criticism-as a poor relation

withi n this young, but nonetheless well-established academic discipline. Born out of

interdisciplinary encounters between literary studies, cultural theory and the visual disci-

plines, film studies in the institutional form it has taken in Britain and the US since the

1970s has tended to foreground the textuality of film-and this at the expense, arguably,

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Book Reviews

in recent years of various introductory textbooks in the field can be read as indicating

a re-centring of disciplinary attention on film history, then this must be attributed in

part at least to the work ofhistorians ofGerman cinema. The status of film in a German

context is of course that of a medium tamished by its mid-century associations with

National Socialism; and it is this above all that produces the preoccupation in German

film history with relationships between the audio-visual text, and the political, social

and cultural context in which it is embedded.

In recent film histories of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, this concem with an

historicizing of film-textual meaning has often been articulated through an investigation

of film in its relation to implied as well as actual spectators. Exemplary.here are studies

of the female audience for early cinema by Miriam Hansen, Heide Schlupmann, Patrice

Petro and others; influential, too, are Thomas Elsaesser's psychoanalytic explorations

ofvisual pleasure in Weimar cinema. It is, furthermore, within this new reception history

that Sabine Hake's The Cinema's Third Machine finds its place-as does, incidentally,

her other work on such issues as Chaplin reception in Weimar, or on Ermst Lubitsch

comedies and female spectatorship. A critical history of writings on film between 1907

and 1933, Hake's book sets out in the first instance to assemble, digest and present a

mass of hitherto inaccessible primary material, from articles in the pre-war trade press,

through the polemical tracts of the Kinoreformbewegung, to early film sociology, as

well as literary, psychological and philosophical writings on the cinema. The monumen-

tal scope of this enterprise might have produced rather unwieldy results, were the book

not held together by an argument that is lucidly and persuasively pursued throughout.

Hake's aim is to reconstruct the critical discourses that surrounded the film medium

from its earliest days; and her central point is that 'the cinema' is as much a product

of the discursive practice of writing, as it is of film in its manifestation as celluloid

artifact and audio-visual text. That argument gathers weight as we move through the

book. What begins as a rather turgid account of apparently minor writings from the

trade press is revealed in later chapters as the necessary context for a reevaluation of

canonical writings on Wilhelmine and Weimar cinema. Emilie Altenloh's 1914 study

of contemporary film audiences loses none of its status as a pioneering work of film

sociology in Hake's study; but it does acquire new meanings as part of a wider contem-

porary debate on the filmgoing masses and the threats or benefits they represented for the

nation. Similarly, the book's concluding chapters on three classical theorists of Weimar

cinema-Bela Balazs, Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Amheim-are significantly

enriched by insights from preceding chapters into contributions to the same debate by

figures of rather lesser cultural cachet: such popular writers as Vicki Baum or Hedwig

Courths-Mahler, for instance, or newspaper reviewers whose names have long since

passed out of official film history.

This historicizing of film theory, its presentation as the collective cultural production

of a specific place and time, is perhaps the most significant achievement ofHake's book.

There are, however, other reasons to laud The Cinema's Third Machine. Despite the

specialist nature of Hake's interest in cinema, her book provides vivid insights into the

broader cultural struggle between aficionados of 'high' and popular culture in the period.

Witne ss for example Hake's account of the cinema reformers' disdain for narrative film,

their promotion of the documentary form per se as a privileged vehicle of Bildung, or

her foregrounding, in a discussion of literary responses to film, of the anxiety with which

the literary world responded to its marginalization by this new mass medium. For film

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106

Book Reviews

rethink the canon of Weimar cinema in response to a reception history that establishes

not film movements (Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit) but such diverse objects as cin-

ema architecture (in Kracauer's work for instance) or film stars from Asta Nielsen to

Harry Liedtke as the primary focus of interest for Weimar writers on film?

Inevitably, given its ambition, there are points when Hake's book founders. There is

sometimes an unwieldy feel to her juxtaposition of cultural theory with minute presen-

tations ofprimary material. At times, the minutiae dominate; at times, theoretical reflec-

tion loses its historical referent. There is a problem, too, with the lack of illustrations.

Hake's writing is punchy enough to be described as visceral at points, and of course

her reference throughout is to the visual medium of film. The modemist graphics of the

cover suggest the publishers' awareness of the book's visual associations: but it remains

a shame that a book with such strong sensual appeal should be so entirely devoid of

visual illustration. Nonetheless, this book deserves acclaim, not only as an impressive

work of scholarship, but as a model for future histories that set out to study film; not

as a handful of discrete and historically disconnected texts, but as the proliferation of

cultural discourses that constitute the object 'cinema' in history.

University of Warwick

ERICA CARTER

The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. By Hans Mommsen. Translated by

Elborg Forstef and Larry Eugene Jones. Chapel Hill and London: University

of North Carolina Press. 1996. xv + 604 pp. US$65.

Hans Mommsen's monumental history of the Weimar Republic, Verspielte Freiheit,

deserves a wide readership in its English translation, and it will be very useful to gener-

ations ofstudents. It is very detailed, especially on financial affairs and the machinations

of the industrialists, but does not include the flourishing arts and literature of the time.

The book clearly discusses the many crises and weaknesses of the Weimar Republic,

the fragmentation ofthe political parties, the 'erosion of parliamentary control' (p. 185),

even during the best years, and the slow road to dictatorship. In Mommsen's opinion

Weimar was 'fundamentally flawed' in 'its broader implications' (p. 88). Yet, rather

surprisingly, in the Preface he finds that it showed 'a remarkable degree of political

stability' (p. vii): a claim not even bome out for the so-called 'good years' after 1923.

As to 1923, the 'crisis ofthe parliamentary system' was overcome with the stabilization

of the mark, but 'severe wounds' remained (p. 170). The rise of the NSDAP is analysed

in detail and very convincingly, except on one point: according to recent research the

party's success among the working class was not 'almost exclusively limited to perma-

nently unemployed younger workers' (p. 354) but it was also quite successful among

industrial workers proper, although less so than among other social groups.

The translation reads on the whole quite well, but unfortunately many small errors

have crept in, only some of which can be listed here. The para-military youth organiza-

tion of the KPD was not called Rote Jugendfront but Rote Jungfront, and the 'Red

Falco ns' were the c hildren's organization of the SPD, not of the KPD (pp. 233, 307).

The Third Intemational was the Comintem, not a Socialist one (p. 96). The Truppenamt

was not an 'office of general military personnel' (p. 82) but the camouflaged general

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