In the Name of the Father: Paul Czinner’s Fräulein Else and the Fate of the Neue Frau

Abstract

The question that the filmmaker Rüdiger Suchsland repeatedly asks in From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses (2014), his incisive documentary about the great films of the Weimar Era, is based on Siegfried Kracauer’s landmark book of 1947: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. In the book, Kracauer does not frame his famous thesis as the question Suchsland poses, but the critic does indeed suggest that during the 1920s German cinema somehow knew something that even the filmmakers who were making that cinema did not, or, at least, something of which they were not fully aware. Why else would they make film after film glorifying the authority of powerful men of obscure origins who were capable of inculcating something like madness in their followers as a means of controlling them? Thus it is with sinister male authority figures such as the title characters of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler [Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler] (1922). For Kracauer, Caligari ‘glorifie[s] authority’ and makes the title character ‘a premonition of Hitler’, while Dr. Mabuse is a ‘tyrant film’ set in a world that ‘has fallen prey to lawlessness and depravity’. And even though the criminal mastermind Mabuse is eventually brought to justice, the agent of the law is not so different from Mabuse himself, ‘a kind of legal gangster [who] is morally so indifferent that his triumph lacks significance’. ‘To be sure’, Kracauer concludes, ‘Mabuse is wrecked; but social depravity continues’.