From Caligari to Hitler

One of the main monographs on German cinema and the most famous book by Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) was written during his emigration and published in the USA in 1947. The author, a sociologist and theorist of cinema and culture, analyzes the internal attitudes and patterns of German society, objects of collective repression, reflected in the classic films of the pre-Hitler era. For Kracauer, cinema is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon; he wrote about its different aspects ("Weimar Essays," "Theory of Film," etc.). In this book, cinema is primarily a manifestation of mass culture, an art that is a priori collective, which, being the result of joint efforts, satisfies and simultaneously provokes the hidden desires of a broad audience.