Looking for the German Revolution in Weimar Films

Abstract

“O Gott, o Gott—ist das Revolution?” a wide-eyed Frau Dreissiger asks her husband, her pearl necklaces rising and falling with her heaving bosom, as chants of the angry crowd of weavers penetrate the sequestered drawing room. In this scene in Friedrich Zelnik's 1927 film Die Weber, Frau Dreissiger's question is far less naive than the impatient look of her nervous husband suggests. It resounds, rather, with the fears and expectations of Germans of the 1920s, convinced they were living in an era of revolutionary transformation, yet besieged by a cacophony of arguments as to whether or how an actual German revolution would come about. Historians of the Weimar era have posed comparable questions about which upheavals and ideas constituted a German revolution. Spurred by debates over whether an authoritarian GermanSonderwegbypassed a bourgeois revolution, invigorated since unification by new perspectives on German democratization, and enriched by new approaches, they have considered an extraordinarily wide range of phenomena. The resulting studies have revealed myriad interactions between political ideologies, social groupings, economic practices, and external pressures.