Content area
Full Text
Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. By Anton Kaes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 326. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-0691008509.
Anton Kaes's Shell Shock Cinema presents readings of Weimar film in the context of the ravages of World War I. Kaes argues that Weimar film is best understood as a means of psychologically working through the emotional turmoil of German defeat that included two million dead and four million disabled, as well as the tumultuous social and cultural changes brought on by modernity. Kaes brings his psychoanalytic analysis of trauma and mourning in the Weimar collective unconscious to readings of film protagonists from many of the period's canonic works (Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920], F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror [1922], and Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen [1924] and Metropolis [1927]). Rather than directly confronting the soldier's predicament, Kaes describes the common tension of the battlefield as these characters are struggling with "unspeakable events" through incidents of crime and horror offthe battlefield (3).
For Kaes, postwar cinema translates "military aggression and defeat" on the battlefield into the betrayal, sacrifice, and injury of the characters in the filmic landscape (3). These character analyses draw...