Prof. Lisabeth During: “Who will Change the World? Labor, Politics, and Movies in the Weimar Republic.” Critical and Visual Studies Symposium

Work, as it might be in a dystopian future and as it is in the desperate, hungry present of 1929-1932, dominates two movies from Germany in that critical period between the  First World War and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.  Metropolis (Fritz Lang and Theo von Harbou, 1927) tries to stun us; Kuhle Wampe (Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Ottwald) tries to make us think. Visual spectacle is Lang’s forte: allegory, eroticism, futuristic fantasy, paranoia, sentimental redemption - nothing is spared. More is definitely more. In Lang’s science fiction blockbuster, which bankrupted the national film company Ufa, the aesthetic principles are counter-Bauhaus. It is an art director’s blank check,  borrowing recklessly from every art and cult movement of the Weimar period, from Expressionism to the Neue Sachlichkeit, the occult, Fordism, drugs and decadence, from Modernist flirtations with the medieval past to Nietzschean dreams of post-humanism and Ernst Jünger’s protocols for a mechanical man with a cold heart.  Kuhle Wampe is the world as it is right now, minute by minute,  everyday image to everyday image, the tedious search for a badly-paying job that knocks you back into depression, only alleviated by drink, sex, the buzz of mass media: until you find solidarity with your comrades. Metropolis asks: Can brain and hands, capital and labor, be reconciled through the ‘heart’, their common humanity? We may conclude that Lang, an artist of intelligence, wasn’t serious. But the kitschy message had an afterlife, after 1933.  Kuhle Wampe asks: Could there be a proletarian cinema that is formally innovative as well as programmatically effective? To whom does the world belong?