PART ONE

THE BIRTH OF GERMAN CINEMA AND ITS DEVELOPMENT DURING THE POSTWAR CRISIS: 1919–1923

During the last half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, Germany experienced an industrial revolution and emerged as a world power. German scientists invented the electric dynamo, improved various liquid fuel engines, and contributed to other technical innovations, including those in cinema. By 1895, at about the time the Colonial Union, Pan-German League, and Navy League were conducting imperialist propaganda campaigns, cinematic technology had developed sufficiently so that the Skladanowsky brothers could demonstrate their “Bioscop” in the Berlin Wintergarten.¹

While commercial cinema slowly established its institutional foundation during the initial decades of the twentieth century, religious, educational, political, and even military organizations recognized film’s mass appeal and began using it for ideological purposes. When members of the German left began to formulate their policy toward the medium following World War I, they referred to cinematic practice before 1919. At least initially, they borrowed from that heritage what they could use in building their own film programs.