Social Drama and Jewish Question in 1920s and Early 1930s German Cinema

Kammerspielfilm

The definitive trend for the 1920s German cinema was Expressionism. However, social issues weren't solely addressed using scary creatures or abstract backdrops. The cinema also turned to the streets and the flats of modern cities. The screens saw a flourishing of social dramas of all sorts. Their primary subject for these films was poverty due to post-war hyperinflation, and one of the favorite sub-genres that emerged was Kammerspielfilm, or chamber drama.

In chamber drama, the plot would usually unfold in only a few settings and inside one family. The social backdrop served as the ultimate trigger: even if the characters' actions and feelings were not directly determined by their social status, it was still the environment they lived in that exacerbated all conflict. Simply put, unlike in Expressionist films, the characters were driven to their death not by some abstract Expressionist shadows but by the crumbling walls of their cramped, unwelcoming homes, where they had nowhere to escape from their problems and pain.

As was also the case with expressionist cinema, many important films, exemplary of the genre, were authored by Jewish screenwriters and directors. The most famous of them was probably Lupu Pick.

Born in Romania, his family moved to Germany when he was still a child, and in the mid-1910s, Pick embarked on his career in film, initially as an actor. In 1921, he made his first Kammerspielfilm Shattered, which garnered his considerable success. The simple plot told the story of a track cheker’s family: an inspector seduces the daughter; the devastated mother heads off to church on a very cold night and freezes to death; the father decides to have his revenge and kills the inspector.

The script for the film was written by Karl Mayer, who had worked on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a year earlier. Obviously, Shattered was still a long way away from social facts, and yet it was gradually becoming attuned to portraying everyday life. You wouldn't find any Jewish motives in this film. In fact, social drama was generally ill at ease with Jewish issues. Jews could write scripts and direct films, but whenever a Jewish character was introduced into a poignant social drama, the story heated up instantly - any conflict in the movie could escalate into an anti-Semitic outburst, and the film itself risked being disfavoured by the producers, who preferred to focus on less controversial themes.

Joyless Street 

In Georg Wilhelm Pabst's 1925 film Joyless Street, all things Jewish were left out of the picture, particularly explicitly. The film's plot was again a drama, except that now it involved not one but several families and, according to conventions of the social theme, was set in the squalid rooms to be found in one joyless street in Vienna. Rather than chamber, the film aspired more towards a novel form, as it was an adaptation of Hugo Bettauer's novel of the same name.

The original text was adapted for the screen by Willy Haas. Haas came from a family of Prague Jews. Following in his father’s footsteps, he went to law school but became increasingly passionate about literature. In the 1910s, he edited and contributed to local magazines. Later, after the First World War, he moved to Berlin and began working as a screenwriter. Taking on Joyless Street, Haas aimed to maximally reduce the novel's romantic sentiment and bring it closer to real life in the streets. He succeeded splendidly, and not just in that.

While working on the script, Haas removed some of the Jewish characteristics that certain characters had in the novel. Instead of reassigning these characteristics to other characters, he made amendments to the script itself. In this way, in the script, a wealthy woman killed by her rival out of jealousy was no longer Jewish, which removed any possible anti-Semitic connotations of the murder in the film. As for a fairly neutral married couple in the novel, Haas turned them into charitable, generous Jews with a difficult past (immigrants). In this case, Haas offered the audience a chance to relate to the characters' Jewishness. Moreover, a Jewish journalist in the novel was replaced by an American soldier.

Once the script got into the hands of the director, Jewish themes disappeared altogether. As Mark Sorkin, the film's editor, a Jew of Russian descent, remembers: "Pabst felt that if he toned down the Jewish thing, the film would prove more profitable and therefore more desirable to his Russian-Jewish investors". Thus, the issue of "visibility" proved pivotal not so much to the film (it turned out great, albeit without Jews), but to the social context of its making. And most importantly, this issue did more than exist - it demanded active action by directors and screenwriters. 

City without Jews

The issue of visibility was not limited to fictional characters. Many Jewish immigrants chose not only to conceal their heritage but also to actively assimilate. For example, the renowned German filmmaker Fritz Lang was brought up as a Catholic by his Jewish mother. Robert Wiene, the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, converted to Protestantism. Similarly, the journalist and writer Hugo Bettauer, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Lviv moved to Baden, where Hugo was born, converted to Protestantism.  Such choices regarding the shaping of one's identity, reflected on the specifics of the assimilation process, but certainly did not solve the overarching issues, in this case, the general anti-Semitic sentiment and intolerance rampant in German society of the time. What was needed was a different position - one not of hiding but one of speaking out. This outspokenness came with another screen adaptation of Battauer’s novel- The City Without Jews. There, one could not simply leave the Jews out.

Ida Jenbach, a Jewish woman from Miskolc, was in charge of the screenplay. She did not greatly alter the satirical dystopia on how, in one German town, the Christian-Socialist party expels the Jews, after which the town falls into total decay.  What she did was merely smoothing it down by making the politician characters more fictional instead of being recognisable (as they were in the novel). The film came out in 1924, two years after the novel's publication. But regardless of Jenbach's efforts to tone the screenplay down, the film still made the NSDAP officials angry. On March 10, 1925, in his magazine's editorial office, Bettauer was shot multiple times by a Nazi party member. By the end of the month, the writer passed away.

Nathan the Wise

There were some more conventional screen adaptations, too. For example, in 1922, one of the pacifist play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise.  The story revolves aroundlove and hate between Jews, Templars and Muslims. It was set in twelfth-century Jerusalem. The film kept the original timeline, characters, and messages, except that German screenwriter Hans Kaiser rearranged the order of the scenes and added some battle scenes to enhance the film's comprehensibility. Nevertheless,  after the film's premiere in Munich, even this cinematic expression sparked outrage among local Nazi party officials. Although the movie was quite successful, to avoid any unrest, it was pulled off the Bavarian film screens.

The main character, Nathan, a Jew, was played by Werner Kraus, a German actor and an absolute film star. In the 1920s, he starred with all the top directors: he played in Shattered (father) and Joyless Street (heartless butcher). When Hitler came to power, Kraus did not leave Germany and, in 1940, once again played a prominent Jew. This time, it was the lead role in the propaganda movie Jud Süß.

No Man’s Land

Like Nathan the Wise, No Man’s Land was a pacifist movie. It was directed by Viktor Trivas, a Jew from St. Petersburg. Trivas moved to Germany with his parents in 1925 and worked as a set designer and screenwriter. No Man’s Land was his second work as a director, and it was this work that earned Trivas his fame. It was released in 1931 and was not the only anti-war film of the early 1930s: Pabst had two (the 1930 Westfront, 1918 and the 1931 Comradeship). And while the plot clearly alluded to World War I, one can already sense an anxiety about a new war. And no one knew yet if it would be another World War.

No Man's Land was also significant for its cinematography, as it was highly inventive in its treatment of space (everything, except for a few flashbacks, was shot in one location) and for its treatment of sound. In 1931, sound cinema was only beginning to gain momentum, and one can find numerous experimentations with sound in films of the time. Trivas had such experiments, too, involving languages in the movie - there was more than one. There were five main characters in the film in total. A Frenchman, a German and an Englishman - each spoke his language and could not understand the others; an African man who seemed to understand them all a little, and a Jew from Russia, who was either shell-shocked or deaf-mute and couldn't understand anyone. They all found themselves in the basement of a half-ruined building, somewhere in no man's land, on the neutral strip.

The Jew was not wearing any uniform, so no one knew which army he's from (but the viewers knew that he was a Jew, as we were shown a Jewish wedding in a flashback). In a way, he himself symbolized the no man’s land: the film begins with the Frenchman and the German trying to help him. These soldiers set up their everyday routine, cooked, and slowly got to know each other. But then, a shelling happened because the smoke was coming out of the chimney, forcing them to leave this peaceful place. The movie concludes with an open ending.

The Ancient Law

Of all the films mentioned above, The Ancient Law (directed by Ewald André Dupont, 1923) touched most closely on the issue of urgent importance for Jewish immigrants. This film tells the story of assimilation and the laws of society (remarkably, of any society). It told the story of a young Jew from Galicia named Baruch Mayer (played by Ernst Deutsch, a young Jew from Prague). The boy dreamt of becoming an actor, but his rabbi father could not accept this whim and insisted that his son continue his studies and dare not leave the shtetl. Baruch ran away, naturally.

He traveled to Vienna, got a job as a handyman in a theater company, and one day, he got lucky - he was given the role of Shakespeare's Romeo. The company performed before the nobles, and even though Baruch was shown in a comic light, with Payot sticking out from under Romeo's hat, he still got noticed by Archduchess Elisabeth Theresia. She did everything she could to promote his future, getting him a place in Vienna's Burgtheater and clearly had feelings for him. But this situation could not continue, and she was commanded to drop her protégé. In her last conversation with Baruch, Elizabeth Theresia sais: "You once told me about your father's ancient law. We, too, are slaves to one ancient law - etiquette."

With that, the film ended rather reassuringly. The father arrived in Vienna, watched his son perform on stage, and forgave him. In contrast to the tragic endings of expressionist films, where society was not ready to accept the other (Golem or Nosferatu), even though he was capable of love, the subject of assimilation transposed into urban settings was given a rather interesting twist. For a Jew, especially an Eastern European Jew, someone who cherished the traditions and often left behind their family or beloved, what was far more important was not to be accepted but to be let go. For a Jew, it was hard to give up the “Ancient law", but the moment he accepted the New Law, things worked out. This idea was reinforced by The Ancient Law and East and West, a comedy directed in neighboring Austria in 1923 by Sidney Goldin, a Jew from Odessa.

Goldin also told an assimilation story of a Polish Jew in Vienna, except that he also drew on his own experience as a Jew coming to the United States. He played one of the roles in the film - a businessman father who had moved to the States. Now, with his daughter (a “modern woman" who was into boxing and had no intention of giving up her pleasures and submitting to patriarchy), he traveled to Poland to attend his niece's wedding. In Poland, an orphaned Talmudic student fell in love with the businessman's daughter, but he's no match for this modern lady, so he had stay behind in the "shtetl" for the time being. But later, he traveled on to Vienna, where he went through a striking transformation - so there could be a happy ending.

Girls in Uniform

In many ways, Girls in Uniform (1931) summed up the decade. It had it all: flawless framing, expressive editing, exceptionally skillful use of sound, but most importantly, it was deeply involved with social issues. The film's director was a Jew, or a Jewess, to be more precise. Leontine Sagan started her career and made a name for herself in the theater. She moved from her native Budapest, studied under Max Reinhardt, and went on to become a theater director. It was at the theater that she first directed Christa Winsloe's play Yesterday and Today, which she would later take to the film screen as Girls in Uniform.

Like Trivas’s film, the film is set during the First World War, but the heroines were far from the battlefront - they were at an officers' daughters boarding school. There, they were being trained for their future as mothers and wives of officers. At school, the discipline was severe, and there was no room for affection. Were it not for the teacher, Fräulein Bernburg, the girls' lives would be unbearable. And that was why, when a new student, Manuella, arrived at the school, she immediately fell in love with her empathetic teacher.

Along with Different from the Others (released in 1919, also in Germany), the film was among the first to address the issue of homosexual love while, of course, speaking of love in general. It also spoke of being misunderstood, alienation, and violence in a totalitarian system (exemplified by the school). Moreover, it was also one of the first, if not the first, school dramas, a model that would be repeatedly used in world cinema (especially similar to it is the style of Soviet school dramas). However, the film's greatest significance lay in Sagan's ability to address pressing issues, all within the backdrop of World War I and the confined, oppressive, and harsh environment of a boarding school. She spoke of herself and of her time. She did not need to be a lesbian to be “different from the others." Merely being a woman in her profession and being Jewish in Germany was hard enough as it was.