Introduction

This blog is the final project for the Weimar Republic course. The Weimar Republic is one of the more interesting parts in time within German History, for the better and for the worse. It does, however, harbor some interesting developments in the ways of fine arts such as film which this blog will be primarily focusing on. Film, especially during the period of Weimar in the 1920s, is largely known as the silent era, with films largely using the expressions to tell a story with epic scores in the background to convey the action that was happening on the silver screen, alongside some with "historical dimension"¹ .These films used text frames for dialogue purposes, though a lot of the storytelling was done through character actions. For the time period of the 1920s, which was the height of the Weimar Republic, many films were largely influenced by the tough times during this period of time and this is seen in a variety of ways. Throughout this blog, using examples from a couple of films, namely famous ones like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, I will point out how the Weimar Republic was so influential to filmmakers such as Fritz Lang and how these influences apply to the visuals, the themes, and towards the overall styles that these films produced during the 1920s.

Poster of the 1922 film Nosferatu, by
F.W. Murnau Image link

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1 Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 228.^↩