Cross-Media Exchange in Weimar Culture: Von morgens bis mitternachts

Abstract

The Kinodebatte, the debate over the emergence of film in the first decade of the 20th century, fostered a rhetoric of competition between theatre and film that belied the extensive crossover activity between established and new media in Germany both before the 1920s and throughout the Weimar period. This article focuses on the history of Von morgens bis mitternachts, Georg Kaiser's play of 1912 and its later film adaptation by Karl Heinz Martin (1920), as an exemplary case of intermediality in Weimar culture. Filmic connections in the play—incorporating the urban milieu, formal conventions, and exhibition practice of early German cinema, as well as the persona of its first international star, Asta Nielsen—are extended and updated in the film through the collaboration of veteran cameraman Carl Hoffmann, whose innovative editing and special effects cinematography adapt the dramatic scenario to postwar issues and standards. (CW)