Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (review)

Anton Kaes’s Shell Shock Cinema presents readings of Weimar film in the context of the ravages of World War I. Kaes argues that Weimar film is best understood as a means of psychologically working through the emotional turmoil of German defeat that included two million dead and four million disabled, as well as the tumultuous social and cultural changes brought on by modernity. Kaes brings his psychoanalytic analysis of trauma and mourning in the Weimar collective unconscious to readings of film protagonists from many of the period’s canonic works (Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920], F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror [1922], and Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen [1924] and Metropolis [1927]). Rather than directly confronting the soldier’s predicament, Kaes describes the common tension of the battlefield as these characters are struggling with “unspeakable events” through incidents of crime and horror off the battlefield (3).

For Kaes, postwar cinema translates “military aggression and defeat” on the battlefield into the betrayal, sacrifice, and injury of the characters in the filmic landscape (3). These character analyses draw on common postwar themes including the returning shell-shocked veteran, the experience of mourning and the burden of the dead on the living, narratives of honor in defeat, and the anxiety resulting from the tumultuous changes brought on by industrialization and modernity. Although Weimar cinema is largely a response to World War I, it depicts these tensions through the psychological landscape that plays out off the battlefield.

Kaes provides valuable analyses of Weimar’s early cinema, including lesser known works such as Toward the Light (1918) and Nerves (1919). Building on the work of scholars such as Paul Lerner (Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 [2003]), Kaes investigates the medical literature of the period on neurosis, and posits that these films point to the possible treatment of psychosomatic illness. For example, Kaes argues with regard to Robert Reinert’s Nerves that just as the German population is plagued by a “collective neurasthenia,” so too is it able to empathize with the returning soldier “buffeted” by war (43). The analysis of the war neurotic is further developed in a study of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which the inmate of an insane asylum captures the medical community’s attempts to treat the war neurotic as he recounts a disjointed story about a sadistic psychiatrist and a hypnotized patient. Kaes nicely brings out the film’s irony of whether it is the asylum director or the shell-shocked patient who is truly insane. In Kaes’s analysis of Nosferatu, the ravages of war and the veteran’s neurosis are transferred to the entire society as the character Hutter, like millions of World War I soldiers, travels to the East and returns home in a neurotic state to find his town decimated by a plague.

Kaes analyzes the myth of heroism and loss as seen through the Nibelungen saga. As the hero Siegfried is laid out for burial like a fallen soldier, Germany is given a filmic memorial for its dead, signifying a national body and fatherland (148–49). In Nibelungen, Kriemhild’s Revenge (part two), the victim becomes the avenger, as a narrative of violence and defeat is staged in the act of total warfare. Here we have infantrymen in the trenches together with death and mourning, signifying important tropes of shell-shock cinema.

In an analysis of Metropolis, Kaes focuses on the various reactions to modernity. On the narrative level, the film shows a cynicism toward an older generation that has misused technology for profit. The contrast is thus drawn between the use of technology in war, along with the alienation of industrialization, and the potentially liberating possibilities of modernity presented in the context of America (177, 182). The end of the film suggests a return to more humanistic values and a longing for...