From Caligari to Hitler
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film is a book by film critic and writer Siegfried Kracauer, published in 1947. The book traces the birth of National Socialism from the cinema of the Weimar Republic and is considered one of the first major studies of German film between World War I and World War II. Among other things, it shows that German Expressionism was a premonition of the Nazi period to come.
The book was a survey covering four major periods: The Archaic Period (1895-1918), The Postwar Period (1918-1924), The Stabilized Period (1924-1929) and The Pre-Hitler Period (1930-1933).
The book also includes a critical and psychological analysis of Nazi propaganda film. That particular section was a reprint of a pamphlet of the same name released by the Museum of Modern Art in 1942. As Kracauer was a film critic at the time many of the films he discusses were first released, he melds his theory of trends in the film market with political tendencies within the German social politics. Funded by Museum of Modern Art as well as a Rockefeller Grant, From Caligari to Hitler is considered by many to be one of the most important works on the subject of German cinema, standing with Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) as classic scholarship.