526
PARTISAN REVIEW
cannot escape: the Olympian image of Goethe, the Prince of Life, is
revealed in the dream of the last pages as the Knight of Lions, the War–
rior of the doleful countenance, the eternal glory of self-deceit.
LESLIE
A.
FIEDLER
THROUGH THE LENS DARKLY
FROM CALIGARI To HITLER:
A
PsYCHOLOGICAL HrsTORY OF THE GER-
MAN FILM.
By Siegfried Kracauer. Princeton University
Pres~.
$5.00.
A
s ONE MIGHT EXPEC'I: from the author's previous writings on films–
one of which, "Propaganda and the Nazi War Film," is reprinted
here as an appendix-there are many fine perceptions in this elaborate
study of the 1918-1933 German film. Mr. Kracauer, who was an editor
of the
Frankfurter ,(eitung
from 1920 to 1933, knows his subject inti–
mately; he saw most of the films when they originally appeared, and he
has covered the literature thoroughly. Nevertheless, the book is satis–
factory neither as history nor as sociological interpretation. It is a
"thesis book" of the most crude and naive kind, using special pleading
and far-fetched interpretations to wrench the data into a simplistic pat–
tern.
"Through an analysis of the German films," writes Mr. Kracauer,
"deep psychological dispositions predominant in Germany can be ex–
posed"; these dispositions he sees as, without exception, leading away
from democracy and toward authoritarianism; in a word, he looks for
(and finds) in the German films only one thing: hidden, advance in–
dications of a fascist mentality on the part of the German people. That
such indications did exist is obvious. But this
mod~st
truth the author
inflates beyond all proportion: his method is, in fact, totalitarian itself,
since reality is permitted only one direction, all those films which at–
tacked authoritarian ideas-and there were many-being elaborately
explained away as only superficially antifascist; their "real," "deep,"
"inner" meaning, one gathers, was profascist.
The devices by which this is accomplished are varied and wonderful.
Films showing individual rebellion-such as
Maedchen in Uniform–
are criticized because "their sole concern was the individual" and be–
cause "they ignored the suffering masses and ... shunned any solution
that recalled humanization, progress, and democracy" (whatever those
last three terms may mean-they are nowhere defined). It is admitted
that
Emil and the Detective
is democratic in spirit, but the objection is
raised that "this spirit evades definition; instead of crystallizing in some
tangible conviction, it remains a mood. . . . Since this mood is rather
indistinct-it also results from the tender concern with politically ambi–
guous childhood events-the conclusion that the democratic attitudes
