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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Project - Absolute Relativity Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism
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Cinéma & Cie
Nicholas Baer
2013/03/01
University of California, Berkeley
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Ph.D. Thesis Project - Absolute Relativity Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism
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ABSOLUTE RELATIVITY
WEIMAR CINEMA AND THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM
Nicholas Baer / Ph.D. Thesis Project
University of California, Berkeley




   Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate
events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that
is essentially independent of the outward forms – social, spiritual and political – which we see so
clearly?1
   Posed at the outset of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), these ontological
questions gained a particular urgency during a period of acute crisis and change. As German
intellectuals witnessed a cataclysmic and illogical succession of early 20th century events, including
world war, revolution, and the dissolution of empire, they reexamined the philosophical premises
of traditional historiography and historical thought. Whereas German Idealism had upheld a
basic optimism regarding the directionality and purposiveness of the historical process, Weimar
intellectual currents betrayed disillusionment with the course of history, as well as skepticism of
history’s status as the site of logos and meaning.
   Speculations on the ontology of history during the Weimar era were accompanied by
epistemological inquiries into the very foundations of historical understanding. In contradistinction
to natural law theory, with its appeal to the atemporal and universal aspects of human nature, 19th
century German historicism had emphasized the historicity and uniqueness of all sociocultural
phenomena and values. As historicist thinkers considered the conditions of the possibility of
historical knowledge, however, they recognized the threat posed by historicism to objective
cognition. The ensuing “crisis of historicism,” anticipated by figures as early as Friedrich Nietzsche
and Jacob Burckhardt, was first widely diagnosed in the postwar years, when intellectuals
acknowledged the aporia of relativism that entailed from reflexive historical thinking. This
crisis generated significant developments in Weimar intellectual history, including philosophical
anthropology, existential phenomenology, and the sociology of knowledge, and it also induced the
conservative attitudes that plagued the Weimar period and beyond.
   My dissertation contends that the crisis of historical thought provided a key context for pioneering
and influential works of Weimar cinema. I argue that films of the Weimar period registered and
responded to contemporaneous metahistorical debates, offering aesthetic answers to ontological
and epistemological questions of the philosophy of history. In my analysis, the films’ extraordinary
innovations in aesthetic and narrative form are associable not only with technological advances and
sociopolitical ruptures, but also with concurrent efforts to theorize history in an age of “absolute
relativity.” Many of Weimar cinema’s defining formal and stylistic features (e.g. non-linear


Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIII, no. 20, Spring 2013                                                         153
Nicholas Baer

narratives, expressionist mise en scène) can thus be interpreted as figurations of metahistorical
issues, including the structure and teleology of history and the possibility of objective perception.
Furthermore, numerous films of the period developed strategies to break with historicist thinking
altogether, whether in the non-referentiality of avant-garde abstraction or in the alternative
temporal frameworks of nature, religion, and myth.
   More broadly, my dissertation intervenes in the extensive literature within Cinema and Media
Studies on the relationship between film and history. Challenging film theory of the 1970s
and 1980s, which presumed a basic uniformity and historical continuity in cinematic style and
spectatorship, the “historical turn” of the past decades has prompted greater scholarly attention
to variables and changes in modes of technology, perception, and experience. In my view, while
film historiography has henceforth emphasized the historicity of moving images, from their
conditions of production to their contexts of reception, it has all too often left the very concept of
history underexamined and insufficiently historicized. I hope to propose a more reflexive model of
historiography that accounts for shifts and ruptures in conceptions and understandings of history,
from the historical moment of a film’s emergence to that of present-day interpretation. Moreover, I
suggest that filmic texts gain new resonances when placed in constellation with contemporaneous
intellectual debates – debates no less relevant and unresolved today than in the period of their
initiation.
   The Weimar period presents a particularly compelling case not only as the context in which
a specific, distinguished tradition of historical thinking entered a phase of acute, widely
diagnosed crisis. During the Weimar years, theorists also began to explore the nexus of history
and photographic media and to contemplate the status and vocation of film in the historical
process. Whereas philosophical pessimists such as Spengler identified cinema as one among
many symptoms of irrevocable degeneracy in modern civilization, progressive cultural critics
like Siegfried Kracauer attributed to film the singular historic task of gesturing towards the very
provisionality of the current social order. Regardless of theorists’ intellectual orientation toward
cinema and an emergent mass culture, their frequent allusions to film in historical-philosophical
debates reveal the medium’s salient function as an indicator of the course that modernity was
taking, and even as a signal of the paths which could yet be taken.
   When juxtaposed against the actual trajectory of 20th century German history, however, the
utopian possibilities evoked by Weimar intellectuals become overlaid with a strong sense of
pathos. Scholars continue to dispute which historiographical tropes and hermeneutical models are
best suited to the Weimar Republic and its cinema, criticizing the teleological, monolithic, and
reductionist aspects of earlier accounts. Among the aims of my dissertation is to redirect focus to
the Weimar period’s own active, eloquent debates on the course and meaning of history, as well
as to highlight the multiplicity of paths that were in fact later taken. The catastrophic events that
followed the Weimar years are nonetheless indisputable, and – for those whose lives were cut
short – such a project assumes a necessarily anamnestic function. Not least, then, I hope to serve
the memory of those to whom Karl Popper dedicated The Poverty of Historicism (1944–45):
victims of the totalitarian belief in “Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.²


1     Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, C.H. Beck, Münich 1923 (eng. ed. The Decline of the
      West, Vantage Books, New York 2006, p. 3).
2     Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, Taylor & Francis, London 2002.
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