In the ongoing cataract of cultural history retrospection, ebbing and waning as it does, the silent German films of the Weimar era have come to be solely represented by the famous screaming-mimis of German Expressionist genre-film hyperbole—the in extremis launch of Caligari, the waxworks and Faustian pacts and horror stories, the Langian cellar-dwellers, the Murnauvian careenings, the midnight Pabstian hands of fate. This proto-Gothic sensationalism dominated then just as it does now, employing the darkling Ufa house style to outrageous and lurid effect, and so it’s easy to see how it left other trends, like the “street film” to relative obscurity.
The so-called street film, of which Karl Grune’s The Street was the inaugural example, is hardly anti-Expressionistic—as with so many American films noir decades later, the movie’s ostensibly realistic settings are beset by the style’s plague of shadows and handmade faux-ness, the psychosocial angst implied by Expressionism positively infecting what could otherwise be ordinarily built and lit urban locales. (The point is made deftly by two stills printed side by side in Lotte Eisner’s famous book on silent German film, The Haunted Screen: a crowded and sunlit city sidewalk in D.W. Griffith’s odd 1924 film about post-WWI Germany, Isn’t Life Wonderful?, and a similar composition from Grune’s film, which is architecturally arch and swathed in menacing darkness.) Expressionism, for the Germans in the interbella, was a vibrantly flexible aesthetic tool, and “the street,” as opposed to a more traditional rural road, became a locus for modern pessimism and doom—so much so that, as Siegfried Kracauer points out in his famous history of the era, From Caligari to Hitler, a rash of films followed that could hardly resist using the word or its synonyms in their titles: The Joyless Street (1925), Street of Forgetting (1926), Tragedy of a Street (1927), The Devious Path (1928), Asphalt (1929), Beyond the Street (1929), and so on. As a ground zero for the era, the street, often visualized as a network of crass, shadowed rat mazes conveniently providing cover for every kind of vice, obviously carried weight in the German psyche, all the way to the black maps of Lang’s M and Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera (both from 1931), and beyond.
Grune’s film could hardly be simpler: a bored middle-class husband (Eugen Klöpfer), tempted paradigmatically by the ceiling shadows pouring into his living room from the city’s nightlife outside, leaves his dutiful wife behind in a petulant huff and ventures outside, determined to taste the illicit thrills of modern urban decadence. In no time he’s lassoed by a cagey prostitute (Aud Egede-Nissen), whom he seems to naïvely think is seducible; he quickly becomes the mark for her pimp (Anton Edthofer) and his slick associate (Hans Trautner), who also then set their machinations upon a geeky, pretentious “man from the provinces” (Leonhard Haskel), a clueless fool arriving on the street flashing wads of cash and believing he’s the master of his fate.
Over a single night, with action often set against a huge Caligari-esque painted cityscape, the crooks’ net tightens, amid much deception and sexual anxiety, until our hero, unsuccessful at adultery and cleaned out by an elaborate and rigged card game (his lost wagers include his own wedding ring), is framed for murder. A parallel story involves the pimp’s five-year-old daughter (Sascha) and her elderly blind grandfather (Max Schreck) who get separated in the bustle of the nightened street, and eventually intersect with our dubious hero and the criminals’ plot.
There’s no missing the movie’s simple moralism, and the extreme dichotomy the plot draws between the underappreciated safety of domestic life and the hazards awaiting you in the city’s spider web of temptation. (A key image early on is the huge eyeglasses-shaped sign over an optician’s shop, which glares with watchful eyes when the hero passes underneath.) And yet the finger-wagging piety is belied, as it so often is, by a zesty fascination with immorality, drunken revelry, the hectic mess of city life as a bedazzling pageant (an early quadruple-exposure urban montage, of dancing woman and fireworks and clowns and speeding cars, was a kaleidoscopic trope copied by both Lang in Metropolis and Murnau in Sunrise), and sex. Seen from the protagonist’s besotted and selfish perspective, the film’s spectacle of decadence virtually cries out, look at how much fun this is! Where do the judgements lie? Is the film really suggesting we should just never leave home, never go into the city at night, hoping for liberation and excitement?
Such was the psychosocial tension of the Weimar era—it’s perhaps important to recall the heady maelstrom in which films like The Street were made and the social climate they struggled to express. Socially and politically, the period between wars in Germany was a crazed, brawling tumult, in which revolutionary Communist and parliamentarian Social Democrat contingents fought it out, often simply proclaiming new governmental formations to the public without agreement being reached; riots became so prevalent in the strassen of Berlin that the new government had to relocate to Weimar. The Allies’ blockade and the Treaty of Versailles applied economic pressure, while rightist and leftist factions battled like street gangs in Germany’s populated areas. Add a major coup, several general strikes, massive Communist uprisings, an additional occupation by Allied troops, and stir.
After the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch was put down and Hitler sent to jail, entropy arrived in another form: a new burst of U.S.-aided assistance fueled a “golden” period lasting to the end of the decade, enduring a big surge in cultural renovation and a huge, generation-upsetting influx of “modern” Americanized styles and attitudes. Modernism arrived like the devil on horseback and with German society, in the very disapproving, very Catholic eyes of anyone over thirty, happily, giddily going to hell—until the stock market crash and the precipitous economic downturn that voted the big-mouthed, law-and-order-promising Nazis into Parliament.
The ‘20s were a sin-scarred party in most industrialized nations and parental-cum-Christian whiplash was ubiquitous, and these are good reasons why the decade is still as notorious for generational battle lines and hedonistic upheaval as the ’60s came to be. But Germany was situated for a singularly potent awakening, identifying itself still with the loftiest achievements in high culture and scholarship for centuries running, coming off the dissolution of an expansive empire and the punishment meted out by the Allies for a war in part initiated by at least three other powers, and being, for a time, without both central authority and the economic chips to propel the nation forward. So, the intoxication of decadence, criminal indulgence, and lawlessness competed on a movie-by-movie, often scene-by-scene, basis with its howlingly horrified reply, a pious call for justice and condemnation. The simple and tidy apologue of The Street harbors an implicit contradiction, as Kracauer points out: that the hero’s ultimate choice, of domestic orthodoxy over anarchic vice, feels more than anything like punishment, a crushing self-flagellation inflicted for wanting to live at all.
It contributes to the poignancy and force of films like The Street to remind ourselves how this fraught cultural contest of modern liberalism vs. fearful Christian conservativism ended up—with fascism. The whole Weimar package, in fact, vibrates with what was latent under the pavement, and what was to come next. It may seem like a lot to pile onto The Street’s simple and tidy tale, but that’s German Expressionism for you—it’s a visual style that gave voice to its nation’s anxieties, and those anxieties became history.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Guenter Buchwald and Frank Bockius